Future additions

[Rick Johnson]

More features are planned for AxoTools in the near future, after the release of Transformations panel.

• Better shading for projected or extruded objects
• Gradients for extruded objects
• Measure tool to get distances and angles, including the difference between two angles, and copy to the clipboard to make it easier to fill in text fields
• Grouped Transformation objects: e.g., set up three surfaces of a box, then add additional rotations to the box as a group
• Evaluate a shape to determine its projection, in order to rotate other art to match it
• Wider angle support in Projection panel, full 90° tilt and 180° turn.
• Drop-down menu to store and retrieve presets in the Transformations panel.

Do you have other feature requests? Please feel free to suggest them. 🙂

[Ron Kempke]

Rick,

Possibly a live list of commonly-used dimetric and trimetric projections would be helpful to those who have to add to existing artwork.  I can provide tilt/turn, left/right angles for these.

-Ron

[Rick Johnson]

Great idea, Ron. I mean Vector. 😉

I’ve edited the original post to include a drop-down menu for preset rotations. Of course, users need to understand that these rotations would relative to the starting Front view, so then putting this into an Axo orientation may give unexpected results.

[J.B. ❤️]

Feature Suggestions:

– A tool that helps you create the Left view, Right view, Top (of left view), Top (of right view). Currently, we have to measure the dimensions and create them by ourselves. I hope there’s a tool that can save us the calculation and time.

– I’d love to see the Axonometric Grid tool in AxoTools, like the one in Hot Door’s CADtools. I don’t know if they’ve patented this feature, but it would be very useful to have it in AxoTools.

– The ability to move the extruded artworks along a perspective grid.

[Rick Johnson]

Hi J.B.,

Tools for making top and side views match each other has crossed my mind, too! Please give some thought to how such a tool might work. Maybe draw guides at some selected art’s horizontal and vertical extents?

Others have suggested a grid, also, but I really don’t see a lot of value in duplicating CADtools’ features, for a number of reasons. There are a lot of new features to create first! That said, what do you think of the idea of snapping art along an axonometric grid as it’s moved or created?

Applying AxoTools to perspective is a definite possibility, something Ron and I plan to explore in the near future.

[chegr]

I remember I shared this once:
http://sysys.zouri.jp/rittaipoku/
I am unable even to buy it for now (they blocked my card on signing up), but I suspect it is obfuscated anyway. I am mostly interested in shading part though, it looks solid (but eye-popping).

[Rick Johnson]

That text shading is pretty nice, and extruding compound shapes like that and getting all of the parts properly stacked/layered is no simple task.

As you’ve probably seen in the beta builds, I’m working on new shading methods including gradients for curved surfaces. I’ve been working first in implementing the new shading in live object (Transformations panel) extruding, but Illustrator doesn’t have true multithreading so things can go haywire quickly. I’ll likely disable shading in extruded live objects at least for now in order to continue work on the improved shading.

[chegr]

The latest build extrudes art as flatten, both with the tool (while drawing edges just fine) and the panel:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/ceabf6bk9upvi98/axo_extrude_flat.gif
The structure is there, but all is collapsed to a null width.
Does not help if I choose Wireframe or change projection preset 🙁
The document has all units set to millimeters, customized Print profile on creation. Same happens for Web also.
Have no idea how to fix that.

[Rick Johnson]

Thanks, Egor. I’m trying to reproduce the problem but it works here as expected. It’s frustrating for me, and I’m sure much more frustrating for you! I changed the user units from pts to mm, but no surprises. Are there circumstances for you where it extrudes properly? Do you see the same behavior in the current release version?

[chegr]

It extrudes properly for non-compount paths. Every compound (no matter if it is a from text or manually created) extrudes as flat.
And I am not sure I how it behaves in the released version, because the update method you provided seem not to work (shown in the separate branch).

[Rick Johnson]

The beta version uses an all-new extrude function. Previously, it extruded along one of the three axis. Now it can extrude in any direction to support the Transformations panel’s live objects. You make a good observation, though, that the Extrude tool and Extrude panel should continue to use the old Extrude function until the new one works better. I’ll change that in the next update.

[Rick Johnson]

I wonder how many of us are subscribed to this forum and will be notified of this post… There’s a “Subscribe” option in the upper-right corner of the page, which I’d encourage all beta testers to choose. Things have been pretty quiet here, and with AxoTools development in general, for quite a while, but now issues from AI 25.3 are addressed along with support for AI 26. Overdue bug fixes are in progress, and we should see betas again soon with new features.

Here’s the status of planned updates, not necessarily in this order:

• Live extruding in the Transformations panel is a priority. Ron Kempke is testing some new formulas that should give more reliable results for compound rotations.
• Gradients in shaded extruded objects will be revisited. There are some aspects of implementing it that are “challenging” but it looks promising. I’ll go into that in more detail later.
• The axonometric measure tool for projected angles and foreshortened distances will appear soon, in part because there are no technical hurdles to implementing it! It’s also related to calculating the projection of a skewed surface in an existing axonometric view, so it may be combined with a panel for auxiliary projections. I’ll post more on this soon — your input on what approaches are intuitive and easy to use are important!

Thanks — Rick

[chegr]

Subscribed.

[Rick Johnson]

A lot has been added to AxoTools since the last update here, including new tools, extruding in live Transformations panel objects, gradients in shaded extruded surfaces, and user-definable lighting.

The feature wish list has actually pretty much disappeared, so the focus now is on refining (and continued debugging) what’s already there. Some people still find the interface confusing, which may really be more of an issue of training resources than anything else. It’s also been suggested that AxoTools is becoming “bloated” from too many features.

That said, one feature that may be worth considering is creating fasteners at the current axonometric angles. Since the 1990s I’d used clipart to copy and paste them, and wished I had a tool to drop them in at the right scale and angle as needed.

Please share your thoughts on where to go from here.

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