Hi Chris,

You wrote: "maybe not as efficent in certain areas"

I think you may be getting a kind of mistaken idea of the degree of difference in efficiency - for mechanical shapes it is not like MoI is just a little bit more efficient, it is more like for shapes that involve one piece cutting another the poly modeling approach can be so extremely less efficient that it can become just not really very feasible to get stuff done without spending a really huge amount of time.

In general the boolean tools in poly modeling programs are just not very reliable, here are a couple of threads discussing this on the silo forum:
http://silo3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=14401
http://silo3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13986

Don't get me wrong - Silo is a really great polygon modeler. But if you need to do mechanical shapes, it is not just slightly less efficient, it is really not the proper tool for that kind of a job at all.


Also I think that you will find that poly modeling actually has a higher learning curve than MoI - one of the nice things about MoI is that you can get a lot of stuff done by working in 2D by drawing curves. In a lot of ways this will probably be more familiar to you coming from a graphic design background, it is generally more similar to stuff like Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop than poly modeling is.

In poly modeling you tend to be working more in a "sculpting" type manner manipulating points in a 3D cage directly, it is kind of a special skill to develop on its own, not really a lot in common with 2D type drawing.


If you only need to model things occasionally and don't really have a whole lot of time to spend refining your skills in a new toolset, then I would actually think that MoI is really the most suitable thing for you.

If you need to do highly organic stuff like human faces, creatures, characters, stuff like that - that stuff is way better to do in a poly modeler than in MoI. However, that doesn't mean that stuff is "easy" to do by any means, if you need to do those kinds of models you should plan to spend quite a bit of time to learn how to do it in the poly modeler as well. This type of modeling is just not an easy task even when you are using the right tools for it.

But certainly a lot of this is subjective as well, different people can feel more comfortable with different things, there really isn't any substitute for trying things out yourself to see what suits your particular needs best.

- Michael