Hi Brian,

> In going through some of the alternative settings in your
> list of the updates there are several where I can not seem
> to see a difference between some of the alternatives---not
> that I needed them I think.

Yup, I suppose that means that it was not an important feature or option for your particular use of MoI.

Different people use MoI to do a lot of different types of things. It's not very surprising that every single feature added will not apply directly to one person's work or preferences. So I think that's just what you're seeing in this case.

It's a pretty normal thing, I would expect for you to run across similar situations for every beta release, probably...


> (Example Perspective/Parallell 3D View Projection)

A perspective view will be what you are most likely used to, where objects that are further away form the eye point get smaller in size on the screen:



A parallel view will look like this instead (this is a parallel view of the exact same objects as above):



Unlike a perspective view, objects in a parallel view are the same size no matter how far they are in depth away from the eye point.


Some people may want to use a paralllel view to get a particular special effect, like for example saving out a different style view to a 2D Illustrator .ai file to get a certain kind of isometric line drawing look. Also a few people may be used to working with other CAD programs that use a parallel view so this will let them set up MoI to behave the same as they are used to.

Probably you do not need to produce 2D isometric drawing in Illustrator and you probably haven't spent a lot of time using a different CAD program with that type of a view, so this won't really be of any particular use to you.


> There is a whole lot of "scripting" stuff in MoI that is outside of
> my experiences with other apps.

A lot of the scripting stuff is for solving very particular problems or automating certain specific tasks, which again probably don't apply to your particular work.


> Is there a need for a refinement of understanding/access for
> these things for us of less ability?

No, probably not - like I mentioned before many of those things apply to particular kinds of work and it is not generally expected that every single script or feature will be equally useful to every single user - many of them are for helping out particular cases.


> This from your list has me completely stumped!

That one is for selecting edges that are "naked" - that is not joined to another edge. If you are trying to create models that will be manufactured or constructed on a rapid prototyping machine, you generally need to have a fully closed solid for those to work properly. If you don't have a fully closed solid it means that there are some edges in your model that are not sealed to other edges, this will let you see where those edges are since when they are selected they are highlighted in yellow.

Again, if you are not having your model built on a rapid prototyping machine then this is probably not as much of a helper for you.


This will just be a very normal occurrence for new features and particularly stuff like scripting notes. Those are new features that someone had requested, so I like to have them in the list so that the people waiting for them know that they are now available.

- Michael