Full Version: V4 Wish List

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That thing suxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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Hi Michael,

Appreciate your goal of simplicity but as MOi moves into 64bit with larger memory and part handling instancing ability it will be used more widely from a modeler to handle few forms to an assembly based modeler and when trying to handle many parts at once.

Even though MOI is currently only 32bit it more than handled this project and I was quite surprised with its ability in handling this amount of a parts.

Anyway just food for thought.

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My sincere wish is for Micheal to maintain his militant dedication to keeping things simple, as this (especially in a world as complicated as 3D softs) is probably the hardest thing to achieve. Death to False Gizmos.

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Hi Alex - certainly I do want MoI to work better with larger projects as well but it's definitely a major focus to retain ease of use throughout the entire lifespan of MoI. MoI may just not be the right program to use in cases like you're describing.

But we'll see - I think it will definitely be possible to add things like instancing and grouping to help with larger projects without negatively impacting simple projects at the same time.

Things that would negatively impact simple projects like popping up selection dialogs all the time probably won't be a good fit though. But maybe it could be possible at some point as an optional action.

If your screen is very densely covered with objects that you can't distinguish them from each other for selection, the best way to solve that is to hide things and/or zoom in so you can see stuff better.

- Michael

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Hi Michael,

> "If your screen is very densely covered with objects that you can't distinguish them from each other for selection, the best way to solve that is to hide things and/or zoom in so you can see stuff better."

Aaahhhh.....the "evergreen" Hat Trick !!

Best,

- Marco (mkdm)

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Michael, regarding instancing and grouping a simple request....

PLEASE DON'T MAKE THESE FEATURES LIKE RHINO V5/V6 WIP !!!
ANY OTHER WAY WILL BE BETTER !!!

Thanks,

- Marco (mkdm)

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Hi Marco,

and what do you think about this concept? http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=7607.6

Ciao
Mik

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Michael,

I'd like to make a new proposal. Please include a button in the general properties panel to access the scripts/commands folder of MoI. It would speed up the process of customizing the functions of MoI.

Image Attachments:
newbutton.jpg 

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Hi 3image, you can set that up right now if you want - edit the file GeneralOptions.htm which is in the ui sub-folder, then near the end of the file after the edit ini file button insert a new button, so it looks like this:

		<moi:PushButton onclick="moi.settings.editIniFile();"><moi:Text textid="Edit .ini file button"/></moi:PushButton>
		
		<moi:PushButton style="margin-left:0.5em;" onclick="moi.filesystem.shellExecute( moi.filesystem.getCommandsDir() );">Open commands folder</moi:PushButton>
	</body>
</html>

Hopefully that should work on Mac too, I didn't test it there yet though.

- Michael

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Michael,

Just a note on instancing (when you get to it)

It would be great if you could enter a negative scale factor on any of the axis. This way by using the scale factor: -1,1,1 (x,y,z) you could create a mirror duplicate (mirrored about x) for an instance. And of course then edits on the right half would automatically be mirrored in the left half.

While we're on the subject, it might also be good to be able to 'hide all instances' of a grouped object (I'm assuming you might have to first GROUP an object in order to have it instanced). This way one could focus only on the instance for editing, then toggle between the single instance half and all instances full model.

I would also expect instances to have their own local coordinate system with it's own movable center (pivot) point, so they can be translated, scaled and rotated anywhere and still maintain their link to the parent. And of course one should be able to "Freeze" an instance which would decouple it from it's parent. And of course grouping and instancing with hierarchies would make for great robots!

I suspect an instancing panel would be something like an array panel, with choices between 1D,2D,3D or Rotational array along with the number of total instances, delta offset, delta rotate, delta scale. It might be also nice to do delta "jitter" for randomness as well, though that could probably be added in a plugin.

As you start to think about instancing, I know you'll want to think about memory and display speed. Perhaps there's a way on startup or install to run the video card through some MoI specific tests and time how long they take. That way you can offer to reduce the display curve precision if/when the number of surface patches get's to a certain level. I dunno. Maybe not possible.

I have a funny feeling adding instances to MoI 4, even in 64-bit mode, may create the opportunity for some unstable use cases. Not really sure how to prevent something like that-- though automatic saves might help.

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Message 6925.98 was deleted

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Hi Michael and good morning.

Some days ago you have written somewhere that "MAYBE" there are only 3-4 more months to the first V4 betas releases,
and I want to remind you my "little" wish list for V4.


1) Dimensioning, instancing, and grouping are all absolutely "wanted dead or alive"
2) At least some basic "surface-continuity" tools like "Zebra stripes" and "Environement Map" like Rhino
3) G3 and G4 continuity for blend tool !! At least G3.
4) A revisited API interface with a complete access to Knot points, control points, curvature data.
5) It would be great if it were possible have these Rhino commands : MatchSrf, SelUV, MoveUVN, Cage and CageEdit
6) Better viewport rendering : ghosted mode, better anti-aliasing, line style for the edges
7) Display of IsoCurves
8) Export to AI and PDF with more customizable line styles.

I'm also confident that when you will decide to switch to a newer CAD Kernel, Moi will be more robust in Solid operations (Shelling, Offsetting, Filleting).


Best wishes for your job and have a nice day.

- Marco (mkdm)

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Oh yeah;

Groups, Instancing and Proxies (with simple boxes.)



Pleeeeeeeeeze! :-)

Just saying.
I mean, it was a nice little concept piece when it was one needle, but then it kinda did the whole rabbit thing on me until the save file was half a gig and the viewport slowed to a crawl with the angle set to 25 with on inflection detail.
I'm going to try doing the multiples in Thea except that when it came to stringing lights and adding ornaments I needed some geometry there to know where to put things.... Hmmm, still wrapping my head around it.


You know, some kind of proxy boxes swapped in, only when rotating or changing the view (with the higher geometry filling in when view is stationary) would be a great option to help folks with lesser video cards enjoy a snappy modeling experience.

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Hi Michael and good morning.

...I forgot to mention a couple of important (for me) requests in my previous post,
so I recap all here.

This is my FINAL wish list for V4 :

1) Dimensioning, instancing, and grouping are all absolutely "wanted dead or alive"

2) At least some basic "surface-continuity" tools like "Zebra stripes" and "Environement Map" like Rhino

3) G3 and G4 continuity for blend tool !! At least G3.

4) Command for ContinueCurve and Merge curve (VERY IMPORTANT for me)

5) A revisited API interface with a complete access to Knot points, control points, curvature data.

6) It would be great if it were possible have these Rhino commands : MatchSrf, SelUV, MoveUVN, Cage and CageEdit

7) Better viewport rendering : ghosted mode, better anti-aliasing, line style for the edges

8) Display of IsoCurves

9) Export to AI and PDF with more customizable line styles.

I'm also confident that when you will decide to switch to a newer CAD Kernel, Moi will be more robust in Solid operations (Shelling, Offsetting, Filleting).


Best wishes for your job and have a nice day.

- Marco (mkdm)

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Thanks everyone for posting your wishes here, this will be a good thread for me to revisit when I'm ready to resume working on new features instead of porting.

- Michael

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Hello Michael and good morning.

> "...when I'm ready to resume working on new features instead of porting"

I'm planning to upgrade my laptop with a new one based on latest 7th generation overclocked Intel i7.

Just a technical question (hoping that this isn't too invasive).

This fundamental porting to 64bit environment that you are working on, will give us some SPECIFIC advantage
when running on the new 7th generation Intel i7 ? (more cores, more thread, new gfx subset, new floating point instruction set, larger cache).

Thanks and have a nice day.

- Marco (mkdm)

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Hi Marco,

re:
> This fundamental porting to 64bit environment that you are working on, will
> give us some SPECIFIC advantage when running on the new 7th generation Intel i7 ?
> (more cores, more thread, new gfx subset, new floating point instruction set, larger cache).

Are you asking something like will MoI make use of some special unique function in this CPU that will suddenly make things work 10 times better than before?

No, it's generally not very feasible to do a lot of special case work to target one specific CPU release, because it's time consuming work that isn't able to be used by most people. Also it takes a while for compilers to catch up, so it's not like you can expect a current compiler to do anything special for a specific CPU right when that CPU is released.

But general improvements like larger cache and better integrated graphics would be incremental improvements for MoI as well I would think.

- Michael

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Hello Michael,

First of all I want to thank you your quick reply, as usual.

> "...so it's not like you can expect a current compiler to do anything special for a specific CPU right when that CPU is released..."

You got a point Michael!

When I have written my question the issue of the compiler was exactly what I had in mind.

I hope not to go too off topic or not to bore you with "just out of curiosity" questions, but,
assuming that Moi is developed in C/C++ I was wondering what compiler do you currently use for the developing of Moi,
and if this compiler gets some advantage from newer cpu, that is, 6th and 7th generation Intel i7.

Thanks again and good night!

- Marco (mkdm)

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Hi Marco, on Windows I'm using Visual C++ 2013 and on Mac clang/Apple LLVM version 7.3.0 . As far as I know neither has any special treatment for 6th and 7th generation Intel i7 CPUs, or at least not that I would be able to use without having a special version that would only run just on those CPUs and not on anything else. It would require a lot of extra work to have a special version of MoI for every different kind of CPU so targeting specific CPU models is not really practical for me.

I have seen that just the general switch from x87 floating point code to x64 SSE floating point code seems to give a speed boost but I don't have any numbers on that handy to give to you. Really I'm not sure if the improvement is from using SSE floating point or if it's the additional registers available. It is actually possible in some cases for conversion to 64-bit to actually reduce performance due to doubling the size of data that's being moved around but it doesn't seem like that is going to be the case here. The only thing I'm a little worried about is the 64-bit QtWebKit doesn't have as high of a JavaScript JIT engine enabled for it, I'm not sure yet if that will impact script performance very much or not.

- Michael

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Hi Michael and thanks again for your detailed reply. Much appreciated!

> "I have seen that just the general switch from x87 floating point code to x64 SSE floating point code seems to give a speed boost"

This is a very good thing...

> "It is actually possible in some cases for conversion to 64-bit to actually reduce performance due to doubling the size of data that's being moved around but it doesn't seem like that is going to be the case here."

This is an even better thing! A sigh of relief....
It's true. Especially for application that handle big chunk of data, the "upgrade" to 64bit often reduces the performances, but this is almost true only
for low-level hardware (poor cpu and old video card, and outdated ram/pci bus).

> "The only thing I'm a little worried about is the 64-bit QtWebKit doesn't have as high of a JavaScript JIT engine enabled for it, I'm not sure yet if that will impact script performance very much or not."

I don't know anything about this area of programming but I read this article : https://wiki.qt.io/New_Features_in_Qt_5.1, dated 25 March 2016.
If you search "Qt WebKit" into that page you will find this annotation :

"Qt WebKit :
JavaScript JIT on Windows 64 bit."

What do you think about ?

Best wishes for all your job and good night. (again)

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