Michael,

I was going to send this privately, but figured it might help others as well. First off, sorry for blowing up the list here with so many questions. I hope it should end soon. :-)

As an Industrial Designer, I've been involved in 3D since the days of Cubicomp on the PC and Super3D on the Mac (1984). My company designed the Lunarbase for NASA Johnson space center 100 years ago and I modeled and did the very first Phong shaded walk through renders shown at NASA. My company built a fullscale mockup of it and then proceeded with the Mars Habitat design-- all done in 3D.

Fast forward 100 years and I've stayed pretty familiar with all the 3D packages. I own copies of Rhino3D, FormZ, Modo, Lightwave, SketchUp Pro, Keyshot, Vue Infinite and dabble in a few others. I enjoy playing around building stuff on my two 3D printers. A couple years ago I was commissioned by e-on software to create the book "Create 3D Like a Superhero" (including all the modeling and rendering) on how to do photorealistic environment rendering in Vue.

As recent as last month, I created the industrial designs, 3d models and renderings for 4 Wearables That Give You Superpowers for Fast Company and used the experience to sharpen my box modeling polyflow skills in Lightwave.



These days I spend much of my time managing creative and developer teams, designing software and writing code, and when possible I'm always up for 3D work if I can squeeze it in. Because of this, I find it very hard to 're-learn' programs like Rhino3D, Modo and others and prefer to use programs which have an easier learning curve and I can remember how to use after 6 months away-- like SketchUp and FormZ (I cut my teeth on Lightwave back in the day so it's sorta friendly to me now).

So, I tell you all this so that anyone reading this knows where I'm coming from. I'm fairly well versed in 3D for someone who doesn't make a living do it 40 hours a week. I know good products from bad ones.

Recently, I became blown away by the amazing work, "10 Days of Mechs" done by Vitaly Bulgarov where he created a robot a day. He used XSI to do this and it was done all hard-surface poly by poly. Very interesting 'speed modeling' technique indeed!

He followed it up with his Black Widow project which was even more spectacular.

I spent quite a bit of time dissecting his technique, and even posted a video imitating it within the confines of Lightwave. I was able to reproduce just about all the objects in a speed modeling fashion EXCEPT for this one:




I sent him a note asking him if he didn't in fact make this with a solids modeler? He replied, "Yes-- MoI3D." That's all I needed to hear. Within 3 hours of FIRST LAUNCHING MoI I was able to create:



I browsed the docs, and then just dived right in. Truly amazing workflow-- and so simple. Since then (4 days ago) I've designed a dozen or so ID projects for clients which are to be presented tomorrow. For me, MoI is so much faster than box modeling. If I was using SubD, I wouldn't be able to add the detail as quickly. The workflow is just AMAZING! And while the GUI is sparse and comfortable, power users can customize it to add all sorts of functionality. I don't remember the last time I was so impressed with a single piece of software. You've done a truly stellar job!