I find that when the opportunity is available, it's better to learn a software package >when it's being developed.<

For example, coming from Rhino v2, I'm familiar with drawing curves and lofting, sweeping etc., but I've never moved to that "advanced level" of using construction planes, construction curves, and other advanced methods of constructing models (with Rhino and now MOI)

For example here, just reading the thread where Michael worked out adding the scaling to the sweep tool was helpful to me creating better sweeps (and finally understanding what that scaling option was about...)

Seeing how the curves were placed beforehand was helpful in understanding what the program is looking for as input.

So it's learning the "next level" of using these NURBS modelers that I need some reading up on.

Video tutorials are very helpful because you get to see and hear what the trainer is doing (Digital Tutors have some of the greatest tutorials for XSI and other packages and training like that can't but help teach you how to successfully use an application...)

It would be great to see tutorials similar to those for these packages as well.

At this point in time, I was interested in upgrading my Rhino v2 to v4 to take advantage of the upgrade pricing but I STILL find problems getting decent meshes out of Rhino, MOI on the other hand, seems to be better (I guess Michael has spent some time tweaking the mesher to make the output more "Poly app friendly"!)

So even though MOI has less features than Rhino at the moment, I'm leaning more towards MOI because the meshes I can get out are more friendly with my Lightwave and XSI apps that I'd like to use for rendering.

I really prefer to get NURBS out of MOI into XSI and the few simple Iges exports I've tried so far were pretty decent (BRAVO, Michael) - with Rhino, Iges exports wouldn't work at all...

So for me I find it is great when you can start at the ground level of an app's development because you can grow with the tool as its features are slowly added in.

Of course, you should be able to use an app from day one of it's official release which mean there should be decent documentation and training materials - hopefully what Michael comes up with, will be able to take a MOI user to a very comfortable level of modeling when using the package...

-Will