Hi shokan - all those SketchUp files you are talking about are constructed out of polygon data.

MoI is focused on modeling with a different technology than that, objects in MoI are made out of what are called NURBS surfaces. They're kind of like stretchy pieces of rubber or something like that, they're actually mathematically smooth entities.

Polygon data is a fundamentally different way of structuring a model - instead of having smooth surface sheets a polygon model approximates a smooth surface by using a large number of triangle facets.

So for example a sphere in SKP format is not actually a true sphere, it's a bunch of little triangular faces arranged in a way to approximate a sphere. In MoI a sphere is actually a single sphere spline surface.

This difference in the way that objects are structured means that you cannot directly import polygon data into MoI.

You can produce polygon data to export from MoI - what will happen in that case is that MoI will generate polygons from its NURBS surfaces by dicing the large smooth surface sheets up into smaller facet pieces.

But it is not very easy to start with small facets and then reassemble large surfaces from that automaticaly - it's kind of like how you can start with apples and then smash them up to produce applesauce, but if you start with applesauce it is difficult to turn that back into whole apples again.


> I have not used it yet, but can you give me some ideas
> about its use with moi3d for constructing 3d buildings from
> photos? ie, with basic geometry produced by Photomodeler,
> can moi3d then be used to flesh it out?

Well, what kind of data does Photomodeler produce - does it produce polygon models?

One thing to realize is that "3D" is not just one single technology - there are a variety of different ways to represent 3D models and different programs can use different methods for it.


One thing you can do for bringing in a polygon model scaffolding in MoI is to use the program here: http://moi3d.com/wiki/Resources#Obj23dmWireframe_converter

That can convert a polygon OBJ file into a 3DM file that can be loaded into MoI, where the edges of each face in the polygon data become line segments in the 3DM file. So it will just be a set of wireframe lines when imported into MoI but you can use that to snap on to if you wanted to use the model as a reference point or something like that.

- Michael