Hi Ypnos, welcome to the forum. I'm glad that you are enjoying the software!

> Anyways - I'm trying to figure out how the units work. I guess what
> confuses me is that the units don't actually read like 3'-6" just inches
> or feet. Am I mistaken?

Nope, you're not mistaken. Right now the coordinate readouts are limited to decimal type notation only, like 3.5 feet instead of 3'-6".

I do want to add an option for foot + inch notation in the future, but it won't be ready for the initial 1.0 version though.

There are quite a few details like this that are a bit rough and not quite mature and finished in the software yet. These will get rounded out as time goes on and new versions come out.


> Also - how can I interface between sketchup? Is .3ds the preferred method and why?

I think that .3ds is the only method that will work right now, and that's just for going from MoI into Sketchup, not the other way around.

There are a couple of reasons why - one big reason is that Sketchup just doesn't support reading in very many file formats, I think they consider more something where you initially create something rather than something that reads in data from other sources. (MoI kind of has a bit of a focus like that too).

One thing that is annoying is that .3ds only supports triangles, not Multi-sided polygons (called N-gons). The .obj file format which MoI can export to does support N-Gons, but for some reason SketchUp has not implemented an OBJ import. I'm not sure why they haven't done that yet, you would have to ask them. OBJ is a better format than .3ds, it would have been better if they skipped .3ds and had done .obj instead.

MoI and Sketchup use quite different systems for creating 3D geometry - Sketchup uses polygons, and MoI uses "NURBS" surfaces.

It is possible to dice up a smooth NURBS surface into polygon facets, which is what MoI does when you export from MoI to .3ds or OBJ file formats. But it isn't very easy to go from polygons back into NURBS again. This is kind of like how it is easy to make apples into applesauce, but it isn't easy to make applesauce back into apples again. So what I'm trying to explain here is that there isn't really a good way to go from Sketchup into MoI, only from MoI into Sketchup.


> Anybody using it for architecture? I've only seen one post that shows it being used for buildings.

Here are a few links:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=558.1
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=176.1
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=178.1
http://moi3d.com/forum/messages.php?webtag=MOI&msg=191.1
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=294.1
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=291.1

But generally MoI is kind of more oriented towards Industrial Design, and sort of "object" modeling. It doesn't have a lot of specialized stuff like an "insert door" or "insert window" type command. Software that is more specialized particularly for architecture kind of handles some of these things more easily.

However, one thing that is cool is that MoI isn't limited to doing only boxy type shapes, you sort of have a lot more freedom to experiment with different forms and shapes. That's kind of the flip side of not having too much automatic "doors" and "windows" type focus.

- Michael