Hi Ron, I've been undergoing a major rewrite for v4 which involves quite a lot of work and so there is going to be a longer than usual gap between these particular releases. The big rewrite part is getting pretty close to being finished though, so I hope to have a v4 beta in not too much longer maybe a few more months. Unfortunately it's hard to say exactly when it will be ready, anytime I guess at how long it will take it's always wrong.

Once the first v4 beta release is out, the beta period for v4 will begin and I'll be working on new features during the beta period and the final release will only come after that. So the final v4 release is still a ways out, again hard to say when maybe something like 8 months to a year and a half from now. But it's not imminent anyway.


> I'm afraid to buy version 3 close to the release of v4 and then have to pay an
> upgrade soon after having just purchased v3.


Well v4 is not exactly imminent and so there's no reason to be afraid of this right now. Also upgrade licenses are available at a big discount from the regular price. So even if you needed to get the upgrade I don't really understand why it's such a big issue to worry about?


> Instead of doing this alone... why don't you open source this code and work on
> donations or subscriptions?

There are several reasons, one big one is that I can't make the code open source because the geometry library that MoI uses is not open source itself. Other reasons are that I'd have to do a lot more "management" and administrative type of work if there were more people working on it and I don't like that type of work as much as coding and designing stuff myself.

I also don't really like the donation or subscription type models, I like to just keep things simple and having a regular simple permanent non subscription is the most simple for me. It's just a simple decision for a user - if it's useful for you, you can just buy it and I've kept the price to be unusually low as far as CAD programs go to make it affordable.


> I use Rhino 5. I'm not clear that I can import 3dm in/out of Moi3d in 3dm
> format - and that they'll render OK in KeyShot 5.

You would usually use OBJ format (with option for "Output: Quads & Triangles" set) to export from MoI to KeyShot, you can use .3dm to go back and forth between MoI and Rhino (and in fact you can just use Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V copy paste to move things between MoI and Rhino), but if I remember right KeyShot may not be able to read a MoI 3DM in directly itself because it doesn't handle the NURBS objects in the 3DM file and only look for render meshes generated by Rhino. See here for more info on this: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5875.1

Hope this helps explain things!

- Michael