Full Version: Moi and Ubuntu

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Hi Michael,

thanks for the Text3D sample, that seems to get further than the previous one and now states: "Could not find required media. Ensure that the DirectX SDK is correctly installed." Perhaps it is just missing a Font...

Maybe I try to install the complete SDK fom MS, though that is 227 MB...

So we don't give up on the GMA X3100 too quickly... ;)
Chyman

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Hi Chyman, yeah that sounds like some kind of supporting materials missing, so maybe not too bad.

It doesn't look like it will take too much longer before I can have a MoI version for you to test with, maybe something like a few more days or possibly a week.

- Michael

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Wow, that would be super kind to have a MoI demo for Wine to test with!

I went ahead and installed the Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK (Summer 2004) in Wine and continued some testing. Starting the Text3D.exe now results in a backtrace:

wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00c66c7c at address 0x430ddf2b (thread 0009), starting debugger...
Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00c66c7c in 32-bit code (0x430ddf2b).
...
Backtrace:
=>0 0x430ddf2b _xrenderdrv_ExtTextOut+0x95b() in winex11 (0x0032f708)
1 0x4282ef38 _ExtTextOutW+0xeb7() in gdi32 (0x0032f958)
2 0x0102ff13 in text3d (+0x2ff12) (0x0032f9bc)
3 0x01030980 in text3d (+0x3097f) (0x0032fa84)
4 0x01031de8 in text3d (+0x31de7) (0x0032faac)
5 0x0101f4e8 in text3d (+0x1f4e7) (0x0032fc30)
6 0x0107e657 in text3d (+0x7e656) (0x0032fd44)
7 0x0107fbc3 in text3d (+0x7fbc2) (0x0032fd78)
8 0x0101fe65 in text3d (+0x1fe64) (0x0032feb0)
9 0x7b84ebbc _call_process_entry+0xb() in kernel32 (0x0032fec8)
10 0x7b851a77 _start_process+0x66() in kernel32 (0x0032ff08)
11 0x7bc65d8c _call_thread_func_wrapper+0xb() in ntdll (0x0032ff28)
12 0x7bc66e8a _call_thread_func+0x89() in ntdll (0x0032ffa8)
13 0x7bc65d52 _call_thread_entry_point+0x11() in ntdll (0x0032ffc8)
14 0x7bc3f39e _start_process+0x1d() in ntdll (0x0032ffe8)
…

But I also tried the SkinnedMesh.exe and the StateManager.exe and both ran fine! I think they are much closer to MoI's needs with displaying meshes. So I think basic 3D functionality via Wine/DX9 is supported on the GMA X3100 hardware. The rest I hope is just tuning registry and dlls…

Will have a closer look at Wineskin today.

Looking forward happily,
Chyman

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I'm not too keen on 11.10. Would MoI also work on an earlier version, say, 10.10 or 10.04? Just use the latest Wine. What about Mint and Puppy? Or even Kubuntu? Would they work?

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Hi Sebastian,

> Would MoI also work on an earlier version, say, 10.10 or
> 10.04? Just use the latest Wine.

Yes, that should work fine, just as long as you can get a good video driver installed.

Getting a reliable and non-buggy video driver running seems to be the biggest barrier to getting things working on Linux.


> What about Mint and Puppy? Or even Kubuntu? Would they work?

I've tested with Mint over here and got it to work.

Again though the major obstacle is getting a good video driver set up.

- Michael

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Michael, thank you!

First, thank you making v3 usable in Linux! I have missed MoI a lot after leaving Windows-world.

Also, thanks for important information about video drivers. I updated my Ubuntu nVidia drivers from (default) 270.x to 290.10, and v3 beta worked!

I understand that you can't possibly support every computer architecture or operating system, but this is wonderful! Many have asked for this.

--MarkkuM

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Finally got round to trying this out for myself. Works beautifully. A huge bonus for Linux.

Running Mint 12.

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Well...finally I changed the graphic card and now MoI runs very fine!
I had a Nvidia 6200 and it was a poor performance, actually.

¡A 10 for MoI again! :-)

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Hi David, that's great news!

Yes, on Linux getting a good video driver seems to be tricky, it seems that some particular cards (specific cards I mean, not necessarily just entire brands) are supported better than others.

- Michael

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This is sounding good news for me. I have been using Rhino since its early days and it's the one app that keeps tied to windows. I have a couple of questions though ...

1. New Ubuntu and Mint flavours of linux have a kernel mod that enables 32bit platforms to take advantage of systems with more than 4gb RAM, does moi see this and use it, or is that something done at kernel level ?

2. Has anyone tried rendering with blender/yafaray combination with an exported mesh from Moi, is it reliable and stable ?

I much prefer Linux to windows, and Linux's ability to address >4gb with 32bit platform is fantastic, this could be the solution i have been searching for for the last 5 years. If it works, then I will definitely spend - I am a landscape garden designer and i love the speed and accuracy i get with NURBs but i also need stability with large models. I would prefer a native linux app with no translation layers at all, but wine will do as long as it can handle the strain. My Rhino3d v4 and Vray cant hack the pressure on a 64bit windows environment which i need with windows to get all my RAM.

As a footnote, as far as i am aware AMD/ATI are now doing their very own Linux drivers for all their recent graphics cards and ATI has a better pedigree with OpenGL if i remember from the old days 3DSmax and Autodesk were supplied drivers with ATI cards, hopefully we will be going back to those days ... NVidia = Games ... ATI = Design

Martin Spencer-Ford
(TpwUK)

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Hi Martin,

> 1. New Ubuntu and Mint flavours of linux have a kernel mod
> that enables 32bit platforms to take advantage of systems
> with more than 4gb RAM, does moi see this and use it, or is
> that something done at kernel level ?

I don't know the specifics of this mod, but most likely it's something at the kernel level, probably allowing the kernel itself to use more than 4GB to divide between all available processes. But any one individual 32-bit process will still be limited itself to a 4GB address space, that's just how much memory can be addressed by a 32-bit number so that per-process limit is fundamental to a 32-bit program.

If you are working with large models, one thing you can do in MoI to help is to adjust the display settings to make a coarser display mesh. By default the settings are fairly high to make for a nice smooth looking surface display but on large models higher density display meshes can consume quite a bit of memory. See here for some information about how to adjust the settings to make a coarser (and a bit more jaggedy appearing) but lower memory consuming display mesh:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4196.2


> 2. Has anyone tried rendering with blender/yafaray combination
> with an exported mesh from Moi, is it reliable and stable ?

Yes, some others have used that combination ok before, here are some gallery images done with that method:
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=142
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=141

But Blender has some problems with importing meshes exported from CAD programs since it does not have the ability to read vertex normals in from the mesh file, which can result in a lower quality shading than with other rendering and modeling programs that are able to read that vertex normal shading data in and use it. As far as I know every other rendering program other than Blender is able to use that information, it seems to be a problem unique to Blender.

See here for some more information on this Blender problem:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4515.3
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4272.1

It will still work to import the mesh into Blender but Blender will ignore the vertex normals stored in the mesh file and instead create its own vertex normals for shading just by averaging the normals of the polygonal data. That will tend to make polygonal artifacts appear in the shading.

It can help if you dice your mesh data up into smaller more evenly sized pieces using the "Divide larger than" setting like this:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2833.5

Basically because it does not import vertex normals Blender is set up to only work with sub-d type mesh structures which are all made up of small evenly shaped quads and not things like big polygons next to small polygons (and polygons at sharp angles to one another) like you will typically get with CAD generated meshes. Other rendering programs can deal with the CAD-generated data much better because they use the vertex normals from the file which come from the original NURBS data instead of being approximated from the polygon structure. When those vertex normals are used it helps to make the shading look exactly the same as the original NURBS CAD structure.

So because of this Blender is not really the best renderer to use for MoI data (or any kind of CAD-generated data), and unfortunately so far the developers have shown no interest in fixing it.

- Michael

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I can speak of that to the Blender gurus, because I know some of ones ;)

Done!
So wait and see :)

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Hi Pilou, well there seems to be several layers to the problem with Blender vertex normals.

The first layer is that the OBJ importer just ignores vertex normals from the OBJ file.

But even if that one particular thing is fixed, there are some more problems like whenever you enter edit mode, vertex normals are discarded and recalculated and even more problematic is that whenever you go to a render the vertex normals are again discarded and recalculated then too.

So just getting them imported is only one of the problems.

Here for example someone opened a bug that any vertex normals that were actually imported are discarded if you just go to edit mode and back out again without actually doing anything, and the bug was rejected:
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?group_id=9&atid=498&func=detail&aid=26405

There was an extensive discussion of this on the forum here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4272.1

- Michael

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Well to be honest i don't mind loosing blender, the new 2.6 release has done me no favours with it's new gui, and it's modelling is not that intuitive to me, it's kinda gone Autodesk on me and just yugh, I am getting on in life and like software I can use without reading 400page manuals and don't require a degree just to find the tools i need. Rhino and MOI fit the bill nicely, but I am starting to see the greed factor developing in Rhino and having to spend money on new windows platforms every 5 years has become tedious, it's OT for this thread i know but i don't really do 3D renderings of garden designs for many clients, but i like to play at car design and rendering so if anyone feels like adding a free or cheap standalone rendering app for Linux into the equation then feel free to do so ... I am really close to grabbing the debit card ;¬)

Martin Spencer-Ford

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Hi Martin,

I used to dabble in Linux for a while, but then made a rule for myself, if it doesn't work out of the box forget it, I can do more interesting and productive stuff with my time instead of trying to work out how to get something running on an un-native platform when it already runs perfectly on another, that's just me.

Anyhow here's a free renderer that runs on Linux, http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/standalone

Cheers

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Thanks Danny, I don't mind tweaking and playing with the guts of OS's - I have been around computers for a long time (Yawn), things might be native to an OS but you generally find you still need to tweak things here and there to get the best from them. But I do expect an artistic tool to be quick and easy to learn. Rhino was like that, but it just feels as if it's loosing its way. Alias is like way too expensive and the learning curve isn't even a curve if you know what I mean. I was trying out MOI but sadly my partner suffered a severe brain injury and I never got to finish my trial period, however the little time I got to play impressed me quiet a lot, a single person development showing a consistent logic to the tools and just being able to play and find things was fun but intuitive.

Thanks for the render engine - I scoured the net last night and found several multi-platform ones so I am going to try some over the next few days and see how they work out.

Many thanks to you all

Martin Spencer-Ford

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Just for fun, I recently revived a 10-year-old PC by installing Linux on it (Ubuntu 13.10 running lxde or xfce depending on how I am feeling at the moment). I had a few display driver shenanigans to sort out early on to get anything to run acceptably, but overall it's been a smooth transition. One of the biggest tests (and a major win, in my opinion) is to see if I can run MoI using WINE. I am happy to report that with my first try, I launched MoI and it runs really well - definitely usable in a production environment.

Performance has been so good, my goal now is to repeat the process on my wife's old Dell laptop which has been gathering cobwebs. It's pretty fun to breathe new life into old hardware and to actually make it useful and productive again.

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Thanks for the report SurlyBird.

I recently installed Linux Mint 13 on a low cost Acer laptop. MoI runs well under Wine on that system too.

- Steve

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I have Xubuntu on a very old PC latop just for the Net and kow absolutly nothing about Linux...
What does I must install for running Moi on this config ?
And this necessary need many memory more? I have just 256 Megas ram !

Moi works very fine on the XP part! :)

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Hi Pilou,

> What does I must install for running Moi on this config ?

You have to install a program called "Wine" which can then let you run Windows programs on your Linux machine.

But if your laptop is very old you may have some difficulty getting OpenGL drivers to work very well on it. Also 256MB is a pretty small amount of system RAM, it's fairly likely that you will run out pretty easily.

So I'd say chances are not too good on a such a very old machine like that.

- Michael

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