Hi Nick, MoI is a program that tries to focus on ease of use and on making it quick and fluid to do simple things. That's a lot of the reason why it feels more friendly and easier to use than some of the other CAD programs that you've tried.

The problem is, the types of models that you are showing there are some of the most difficult and advanced types of models to generate. So there is some of a disconnect between Moi's primary focus on ease of use and your desired target of highly advanced and difficult stylized types of models that you want to create.

One thing is that the difficulty of those models is rather fundamental, the more that your models contain a lot of stylized swoopy surfaces, the less easy it is to describe those models using just 2D profile curves. If you are not able to use a primarily 2D curve driven workflow it puts your work in a category of working with 3D curves and more advanced surfacing commands like doing sweeps and networks and trying to deal with things more as a patchwork of pieces rather than the solid modeling approach of working with a large piece of stock and carving pieces away from that. It basically puts your work more in the realm of organic shaping and less in the realm of mechanical extruded shapes.

So it's a fundamentally more difficult type of model to target, and it's not a type of model that MoI is specifically oriented to work with.

If you look through the gallery you will find several examples of some pretty sophisticated vehicles so there is some possibility to do similar things, but you should keep in mind that those results represent a signficiant amount of both effort and accumulated modeling skill by those modelers.

May I ask why you have the focus on accuracy? Are you planning on physically manufacturing these designs, or are they going to be used only for animations and renderings? Because if they are for renderings only most likely you should most likely not be so overly concerned with the accuracy and possibly a sub-d modeling program would be a better fit, although again producing models like this in a sub-d modeling program is not going to be what I would term "easy" at all either.


> 1. Is MoI capable of creating complex parts and form-transitions as airplanes and cars have? Or
> to put it differently: Is there anything MoI would struggle with especially?

MoI has some of the tools involved for that such as the Blend tool but is missing a few other tools like it does not have a surface match tool to modify an existing surface to be smooth to an existing one. As I mentioned before those types of tools tend to be for advanced projects which are rather finicky and "high learning curve" in nature and so they have not been a priority for MoI. It's much more of a priority for MoI to not get to be so tremendously complex that you need a math degree in order to understand how to use it as you might get the feeling you need with Alias AutoStudio.


> 2. So far the only thing that worries me slightly about using MoI is the layer-system. When having alot of
> parts things have been getting a little confusing for me.

Maybe you're just trying to put too much stuff in a single file - maybe try working on things in more separate pieces rather than all combined together?


> The ability to "stack groups deeper down in folders and layers" so to speak would be amazing
> (english is not my first language hope you understand what Im trying to say).

Yes, I definitely do want to add some functions in the next version for managing nested hierarchies more easily.

In the meantime stuff in this area is not likely to really be the main problem that you will face, just the difficulty level of learning the most advanced type of NURBS modeling workflow will be more challenging.

- Michael