A new Feb-26-2007 beta release is now available from the download page at http://moi3d.com/download.htm .

The major change for this beta is a big overhaul for Fillet, Chamfer, Booleans, Offset, and Shell. Stability for these commands has been greatly increased - all previously reported crash bugs in these areas should now be fixed with this release. Also a part of the overhaul is that canceling is now supported for these commands. If the command is taking a long time to complete, you can hit cancel or escape to bail out - previously MoI would just lock up until the calculation was complete. You can also change parameters in mid-calculation which will cancel the current calculation and start a new one with the updated parameters.

This should greatly improve the overall stability of MoI since about 95% of reported crashes have been in these commands that perform complex calculations.

But this new mechanism is one of the biggest restructuring changes in MoI for quite a while, so please let me know if you have any stability problems with any of these commands with this new beta.


Other stuff:


Units support - you can now set the unit system that you are using in the Options dialog. The units for the current file are set in the main options dialog, and under additional units options you can set the default units for startup and a couple other options.


Updated Blend command to also work on curves to produce a curve blend. G3 is supported for curve blending.


New shape option for the fillet command lets you choose different blend-style shapes for the fillet surface. These can let you get a more organic style blend instead of the regular mechanical-style exact circular fillet surface. This option also works for curve fillets as well.


New one-directional "Dir" Array under Transform / Array / Dir makes it easier to replicate an object along a single column. You pick 2 points, the spacing between these points becomes the array spacing (use distance constraint in the bottom bar to enter an exact distance for the 2nd point same as drawing a line of a specific length), and the direction between the 2 points defines the direction of the array column.


Background images support rotation now, while inside of the View/Image command. There is a new rotation grip on the image. There are 2 rotation methods - you can click and drag on the rotation grip to do an immediate rotation around the image's plane normal (2D rotate style), or click and release on the rotation grip instead of dragging it to bring up a 3-wheel rotation gizmo. You can click and drag on any of the 3 wheels to rotate around any of the 3 axes, click off of a wheel to exit this rotation mode.


There is now the ability to toggle the light direction through scripting - see this post for how to set up a keyboard shortcut that switches the light to different directions: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=425.9 - this can be helpful if you want to see details in what is currently a darker area.


Fixed a bug in sweep where it would fail when using more than one profile when the rails stuck out past the ends of the profiles instead of ending directly on the profiles.


Various other bug fixes.


Let me know if you have any problems with it or need any additional information!

- Michael