Hi blankidea,

> looking forward for the next beta! Did you plan a early
> bird sale (pre sale)

Right now I don't have any plans for that, it's just more simple to only have it for sale when the full release is all ready.


re: technical stuff - yup, that's definitely where MoI is strongest in! For stuff like organic shapes or character models those are usually better done in a poly modeler, but mechanical type shapes where a lot of the design can be driven by 2D curves and boolean operations can be really convenient and quick to do in MoI.


> I have a other question: I was trying different shapes and
> test how fast they can be merged (Union)
> If I "bool" the rips of a tire piece by piece its much faster
> then selecting all together to "bool" them.

This can sometimes happen with boolean union depending on the order of how all the objects actually end up getting processed. If it ends up trying to boolean together many of the pieces that are not actually touching each other that basically makes for a more complex multi-volume intermediate result which is more complex.

In order to try and counteract that boolean union tries to sort the objects and process the biggest one first, but I think in your case here that is getting confused because the underlying surfaces on your tread pieces is fairly large.

The "underlying surface" is the full surface that is underneath all the trim curves, trim curves mark areas of surfaces as cut away regions or holes. If your original surface that you trimmed or booleaned was fairly large then those underlying surfaces can be large too and that may be throwing off the size sorting mechanism.

You can see this "large underlying surface" if you take one of your tread objects and then use Edit > Separate on it to break it into individual surfaces and then turn on surface control points with Edit > Show pts.

You can shrink an object's underlying surfaces down to be right to the size of its trim boundaries by using the ShrinkTrimmedSrf command (either hit tab and then type in ShrinkTrimmedSrf and then press Enter or set it on a shortcut key).

So for your case here try running ShrinkTrimmedSrf on the tread objects - does that then perform better than before?

- Michael