Hi Rob,

> When you click to draw a connected line you get a little
> pet pallet that pops up near your mouse which lets you
> switch between straight and curved lines on the fly as it
> were which makes for speedy drafting.

In MoI you can use a Ctrl+click to place a corner point, which allows you to draw some straight segments mixed in with curved pieces within the same run of the Freeform curve command, here is a quick demo:



Just hold down Ctrl when you click to place those corner points in and if you place 2 corner points in a row it will make a straight line between them.

Does that help to do what you need?


> Also is it possible or will it be possible to adjust tangents
> (handels) as well as just moving a lines points?

Actually when you are moving those points you are adjusting the tangents as well, the start tangent of the curve is formed by the direction between the first 2 points, and the end tangent of the curve is formed by the direction between the last 2 points.

MoI uses a system called NURBS curves which work a little differently than Bezier curves - Bezier curves are limited to kind of small fragments that are kind of pasted together. With NURBS curves you can have that if you want (with each curve segment being made up of 4 points like a bezier), but that tends to create a lack of curvature smoothness between each of the segments.

NURBS curves were basically invented to improve the smoothness of the interior parts of a curve by allowing it to be made up of more than just 4 points for a single curve piece.

So I'm not really planning on going back to that kind of internal handle system, it would kind of mean going back to a more primitive level of technology and running back into some of those smoothness issues.

The lack of smoothness tends to be something that is hard to detect in a purely 2D drawing, but when you start having things punched out into 3D and with shading and especially reflections on them, that lack of smoothness tends to become more noticeable.


> Im assuming different layers will have different colours but will
> it be possible to adjust the transparency of a layer - say for glazing?

No, I'm not planning on having this for v2, just shooting for simple colors to start with.

re: Glazing - do you mean for producing a rendered output or something? For now this kind of colorization in MoI is just going to be oriented towards helping you organize objects into groups, not really for any rendering or presentation type output yet...


> EDIT: Can I bolt on another request for a camera that rotates
> around the camera axis - like standing still and looking round.
> It makes it easier to view internal spaces, which im finding a
> bit of a nightmare just now!

Any ideas on how this would be controlled? Right now the basic mouse operations are sort of pretty well filled up, so I'm not quite sure where I would put the access to this kind of a thing.

You're talking about some kind of control similar to the way one of those "first person shooter" video games works, is that correct?

- Michael