Michael,

I want to share some thoughts on Moi, particularly relating to my day-to-day use:

I am running Moi V2. It used to be a helpful little tool to get some more complex shapes that I could not get with my go-to solid modeller. However in the last six months Moi has become vital to my day to day work, something I would not have been able to do my job without. Some background: I am a design engineer, specializing in mould tool design. I have worked in aerospace, automotive, food packaging and medical sectors. In this role I have been trained to work with Catia, Creo, Solidworks, Geomagic and Powershape. My employer does mostly automotive (Land Rover, Toyota, etc). His preferred software is Powershape and is what the company provides. I also use Geomagic and Moi in this role.

Much of my work involves working on existing mould design and what I have noticed over the years is that the supplied files are in a terrible shape. This stems, in my opinion, from the fact that the article designs are almost always done in Catia and the Catia, despite being incredibly capable can deliver absolutely unusable files (this stems from how Catia joins surfaces when using the generative shape design module but that a whole different story. As the resultant step files of articles and mould tools are comprised of badly joined surfaces the step are not solid and become impossible to work with. In many case I need to reverse engineer the article and from that the cavities or spend several days fixing surfaces.

Powershape is very good at this. It does have automatic healing functions but these are of no use to garbage files. Nevertheless it can import just about anything and will let you manually repair a file. That is where is falls short. It interface is very cumbersome to work with and completely counter-intuitive.

In steps Moi.

Moi is very simple to use. And much quicker than Powershape. I can fly through a model in Moi whereas Powershape, due to its awkward and long-winded processes, takes a whole lot longer. But Moi is not perfect and I would like to list some issues:

1) 32 bit RAM limitation. This is a biggie! You can imagine that some of the assembly step files we get a huge. Generally from 100Mb to 500Mb. Moi is brought to its knees to soon and a 64 bit version would really help it keep up with the big kids.

2) No dimensioning. Yes, I know I can select an item and see it extents in the top right box but it would be nice to actually place real dimensions in a view for screenshots. Rhino did this if I recall (Been about ten years since I used Rhino...). Also reverse engineering something often require taking measurements and something simple like measuring an angle between two line is more work than it needs to be.

3) Drawing creation. Point two, applied on a white background, might eliminate this but it would be a great feature to have. Creating views where one can have a view with its relevant projects, sections, etc.

4) Adding multiple workplanes (C-planes) and switching between them (like in the object panel; double click to select)

5) Background. Not a deal breaker but a gradiated background would be nice. It freshens the UI up considerably (not that Catia or Creo are any fresher).

These are my immediate day to day issues. If anything else crops up over time I will add it here. I know the bulk of your users are more on the artistic side but there some engineers out there that could benefit from the above. V3 Doesn't appear to have much over V2 other than flow and twist but these aren't really beneficial at this point. Do you have an ETA for V4? What will it include?

Looking forward to your response.