Hi Charles,

> Though a friend of mine uses Rhino and a product called
> T-Splines I think, which seems to be somewhere in between
> from what I can tell.

Yup, that's kind of a hybrid or bridge type mechanism - T-Splines works with a SubD control cage but can produce NURBS surfaces instead of only producing polygons for output.


> Will it have major innovations or more of a refinement
> of what's already there?

Well, kind of a refinement I guess - I mean I want to put in quite a lot of new features, but at the same time it is a major goal to try and keep the basic essence of MoI intact as I add new features instead of it getting a bloated and complex feel to it.

So hopefully if all goes will it should get new tools and new capabilities but the overall feel should be more like a refinement and close resemblance to the current version instead of something hugely different.


> This may come across as a silly question, but how complex
> would it be to add say that T-Spline type functionality? Do
> you know the product I'm referring to?

Yup, I'm familiar with T-Splines. So basically T-Spline modeling _is_ SubD modeling, just that it can produce NURBS surfaces as the output. But all the toolset for how you make T-Spline models and stuff like that is all the same as a SubD modeling toolset. And the thing is, the tools that make up a SubD toolset are fairly different than the tools that make up a regular NURBS modeling toolset, like I mentioned before the overall strategies and how you do things are fairly different between these modeling styles. So adding in "T-Spline" support into MoI is not about adding in just 1 thing, it would be about adding in an entire different toolset and modeling approach containing a whole variety of different tools with it.

So that's quite a large amount of work to implement an entirely different modeling paradigm within the same software especially without adding in UI bloat and complexity. It may be something that's possible in the future at some point, but there is still quite a bit of stuff in the regular NURBS world that I want to add in still, and I don't really want to go off in some completely different direction too early before MoI's current toolset gets further refined.

> And lastly, do you take requests while in beta?

Yes, definitely! In fact the beta is generally guided by requests and feedback and not so much by any exact predefined plan.


> or do you know where your headed from your roadmap?

Well, I do have quite a few ideas that are shaped by all sorts of previous requests and feedback.

Of course combined with feedback I also have things like feasibility and amount of work required for particular things, so for example if some requests would require several years of full time work for me to implement, it will probably will not be able to happen anytime too soon.

Another thing that tends to happen is requests that would require significant new UI design tend to get done more slowly (adding in T-Splines for example would fit in this category), and on the reverse requests that can fit in well and add functionality without adding a lot of UI tend to get the highest priority.

- Michael