Hi John, well the control point editing will only work on solids that have what are called "untrimmed" surfaces.
If you have a solid that has been booleaned you will usually have a different structure to it where there is an "underlying surface" that has "trim curves" on it, and the surface control points are not necessarily aligned to the edges.
On that kind of a thing you can't generally turn on control points for it in the same way you can for a box.
There is some description about that in this FAQ item:
http://moi3d.com/wiki/FAQ#Q:_Why_does_show_points_work_for_some_objects_but_not_others.3F
So even though that works in some cases to squish a solid around, it is kind of a special case thing and not really what MoI's main workflow is set up to do.
Instead of squishing an existing thing around, the focus in MoI is much more about constructing surfaces from curves that you have drawn, it's more like a kind of "drawing" method rather than a "sculpting or squishing" type method.
MoI's method works particularly well with objects that incorporate some kinds of 2D profiles to them.
The "point squishing" or sculpting type method works better for shapes that are less mechanical and more fully organic like creatures or faces or stuff like that - for those kinds of shapes it is better to use a polygon modeling program which is focused on that kind of a point squishing workflow.
MoI is more oriented towards semi-mechanical shapes or man made things - you can build those kinds of things much more rapidly and accurately in MoI than in a polygon modeler.
So there isn't just one single method that is the best for every single kind of 3D model - different 3D systems tend to have strengths in particular areas.
But if you like that method of squishing points of a solid around, that's just generally going to apply more to a polygon modeling program's method of working and not so much to how things are done in MoI.
You should definitely watch the video tutorials available here:
http://moi3d.com/1.0/docs/tutorials.htm
Those should give you a good introduction to how MoI's general model construction technique works - you can see there that in each case the model is constructed by first drawing and arranging curves to make profiles for the shape and then surfaces and solids are constructed from those curves.
- Michael
