Hi Don, your skid loader turned out great!

Re: Circle tangent - it looks like you've got this figured out now thanks to Burr. That command in MoI will let you do a few different variations within in - you first pick points on 2 curves you want to be tangent to. Then with the 3rd pick you can do some variations - if you pick a point somewhere on another curve it will calculate a circle that is simultaneously tangent to all 3 curves. If you pick a point somewhere not snapped on to another curve it will do a circle tangent to those 2 curves and going through that point and if you enter a radius or diameter value for the 3rd step instead of picking a point it will do a circle tangent to the 2 curves with that given radius or diameter. To switch between radius and diameter click on the label that has the little cycle arrow on it.

By the way if you always want to use diameter entry rather than radius, you can switch a setting in moi.ini to make those various radius prompts default to diameter instead, that's in moi.ini under:

[Commands]
UseDiameterDefault=y


> One other thing that I have found when using MoI is that if
> an object is thin, say .5 " or 1", etc., the lines behind bleed
> through (Sreen0015). Has anyone else noticed this?

This is not a problem with your video card, it's actually a normal display artifact from the way MoI's graphics currently work.

When the edge curves of a solid are drawn, they are pulled forward towards the eyepoint so that they don't end up getting submerged in the display mesh of the surface. Right now it kind of errs a bit on pulling too much which can cause bleed through in thin areas.

I do have some ideas that I think will improve this in the future, but for now it's just a display glitch that you just need to ignore. It would be easier for me to avoid this glitch if MoI drew edges only using the surface's display mesh, but that would have a different kind of side effect of making edges look kind of like jagged polylines instead of looking like nice smooth curves. The way MoI currently does it, it refines each edge and curve to be totally smooth looking on the screen but that also means it doesn't quite have an exact match to the shaded surface display mesh, so that's why there is that "pull forward" bias factor added in.

In general there are a lot of tricks and compromises that go into any realtime viewport display using the video hardware that can lead to various kinds of visual artifacts, so that's just something to not focus on all that much. A full rendering is done with much less of that stuff but is also much slower.

- Michael