> It tends to be very frustrating to have your object destroyed at the final step! It can really nullify many of the useful parts of NURBS modeling.

> That's one of the reasons why it was not unusual that people in the polygon modeling world were saying "NURBS are dead" for a while there.

Definitely. Like I said in my post, I think Bonzai 3D is a really nice app as well, but drops the ball completely on that last step, making it completely unusable (at least for users like me). I left a note complaining about that fact on their public forum. I even suggested that they try and license your mesher code from you :-)

> Also in MoI version 2.0 mesh export has been tuned up substantially for speed improvement as well, and it now takes advantage of multiple CPU cores. This really helps to make it even more convenient.

Yes, I just installed the June beta today, but it wasn't until I read your statement just now that I realized how the meshing delay had disappeared (on my Quad 4 3.0 GHz Mac Pro running Vista 64). I guess you only notice the things that hurt, not the ones that have stopped hurting :-) Nice job!

> Thanks very much for the feedback,

Sure, you're welcome. I hope to provide more. In fact, now that you mention it...

The only problem I've had with the mesher so far has been in a couple of cases where, with "ngons" turned on, its created an ngon that modo doesn't handle correctly. It seems to have something to do with non-convex ngons, but I'm not completely sure what is causing modo to hiccup. The symptom in modo is usually a missing face where the ngon should be, and some kind of weird poly which is probably what modo thinks the ngon is. Usually the easiest fix is just to remesh it with "ngon" turned off. But since this tends to create lots of "ugly" triangles both on that face, and others in the model, I was wondering if it would be possible to provide some kind of additional option to only output convex ngons, and then drop back to quads and tris for the non-convex ones (or something like that). That way I could still get ngons for some faces. Of course this is probably a useless idea since a lot of ngons come up when you cut holes into flat faces, and those will never be convex. There's probably an algorithm for reducing a non-convex ngon into the smallest spanning set of convex ngons. Or maybe it would be easier to just get Luxology to fix the "bug" in modo :-) But given that they just released modo 401, it will probably be two years before the fix would be available.

Anyway, it's not a big problem since it has a trivial work-around.

Another thing that might be useful for MoI noobs like me would be some kind of message display which explains why an operation can't be performed. More than a couple of times I've set up an operation, then clicked the final "Done" button...and nothing (seems to) happens. Obviously I've violated some essential geometry constraint, but often I don't know what that is (especially since you make so many things "just work" that don't seem like they necessarily ought to :-) ). A message saying what is wrong would probably go a long way toward helping with those problems. Right now I usually back up and try again a couple of times to make sure I did what I thought I was trying to do. Then, if it still doesn't seem to do anything, I shrug and try something else. Of course, this can create a certain amount of "negative reinforcement", since it might lead a user to conclude that some operations are "buggy" or don't work the way they ought to, when in fact it's probably just some simple step the user omitted (e.g. like joining two open curves before doing some other operation that wants a closed curve).

This is probably not new news to you, but would probably be very useful I think.

Anyway, thanks for listening...

Dave Morrill