Hi,

I follow the progress of MoI for quite some time now and more and more it becomes indispensable for me.
First I was fascinated by the interface quality and speed, then with the quality and beauty of the polygon-export and now I more and more start to enjoy modeling with it as well, although I am not a NURBS-guy by default, but rather like to build semiorganic objects with Subdivision Surfaces in Softimage XSI.
I tried Rhino several times over the years but never really enjoyed it. I bought SolidThinking once for a job since it has a very userfriendly workflow (at least in theory) and a full history, but it has major quality/functionality and interface problems and the export is nothing to rave about.
But MOI makes NURBS fun. :-)

Michael, this Tool is simply brilliant! Congratulations and Kudos to you.

Inspired by a recent customer request for some illustrations with a "puzzle" or "jigsaw" theme, I came up with this object:



This is about 500,000 polygons rendered in Softimage XSI 6.5/Mental Ray with 6500x4876 pixels, 16bit RGBA. Rendertime was about 8 hours with heavy blurred reflections and ambient occlusion on the floor on my aging P4 3.0 Ghz Laptop with 2 Gig Ram & another machine with the same specs (via satellite rendering).

My only remaining problem with MoI is, that I often have a hard time getting poly exports (obj) without seams between the main surfaces and the (G3-) fillets. With Ngons, I get superb clean meshes but visible seams when rendering, with 3+4 point polygons the seams are less pronounced, but still not perfect, so one always has to clean up in photoshop after rendering. This would be my number-1-topic on the wishlist: The export is almost perfect, but the final 5% would make a big difference for me.
I don't know if this could be a solution, but I often wonder why the number of subdivisions between a surface and a fillet is so different, even for simple transitions where it "should" be possible to have the same pointcount on the fillet and the surface. Michael, if you can come up with some kind of "superclean" mode, even if the subdivision is changing over the model, but seams and changes in pointcount are minimized as much as possible, it would be a really big thing IMO.
I can go into more detail if needed.

But nonetheless: MoI is the most intuitive, userfriendly and fun NURBS tool I've ever encountered! And that without any compromise on quality.

Thank you very much Michael for all your hard work and support!

Thomas Helzle
www.screendream.de