Playing around more and decided to make the parts for a Lego Bionicle. I have the head and a couple weapons to make and then I'll be done. The neat thing is now I'll have all the parts to make different versions and such. It's coming out fairly well for just eyeballing the pieces. I need to rework the ball sockets though, there is a funny pinch on centerline that is accentuated by the shader I am using.

Very nice. What app are you using to render these in?

I am using Carrara for the render, exporting from MOI using .obj, the .3dm import in Carrara also works great. I used .3dm for the spark plug, x-box, coffee pot, and headphones. A good renderer for the cost.

Michael - Would it be possible to add a toggle that would flip the lighting in the display. Sometimes the shadows obscure the model at certain angles, it would be nice to be able to hot key and flip the light source to the opposite direction.

Also what would I need to make a shortcut key for "make corner point" toggle when drawing a curve?

Amazing Logo design!

Very cool! These Carrara rendering are really looking nice.

> Michael - Would it be possible to add a toggle that would flip the
> lighting in the display. Sometimes the shadows obscure the model
> at certain angles, it would be nice to be able to hot key and flip the
> light source to the opposite direction.

This should be easy to add for the next beta after today's. But MoI kind of uses a type of double-sided lighting, so it wouldn't have any effect to actually flip it exactly opposite. Maybe flipping it by like 90 degrees so it is coming sort of from the upper-right instead of upper-left?


> Also what would I need to make a shortcut key for "make corner point"
> toggle when drawing a curve?

It's actually already built in - hold the Ctrl key down when you click to make a corner. This works for Curve/Control points, Curve/Through points, and also Edit/Add pt.

- Michael

90deg would work great and thanks for the 'control' tip Michael.

Carrara is a good renderer/all-arounder for the cost. I think you can get Carrara 4 Pro at www.thebest3d.com for $150? It includes the TransCad plugin so you can import .3dm and a bunch of other cad formats(IGES, stl, dxf, dwg.....)

Finished the individual parts and made a little Bionicle guy. Used pivots and a simple hierarchy for the posing, render in Carrara. I'm on a sorry work computer but when I get back to the US I'll probably animate him. A render of a cell version as well.

Made two more parts and used the rest from the claw figure to make a little spider guy. The obj export is working great, with all the pieces made now I can build all sorts of stuff.

Michael has anyone brought up the possibility of a paint or continuous selection of faces? Or is it already in there and I don't know. Maybe by holding a key (shift) to select many faces on an object without having to click each one.

Also the posing/hierachy and everything would be possible in Moi with a scene tree for v1.

> Michael has anyone brought up the possibility of a paint or continuous selection
> of faces? Or is it already in there and I don't know. Maybe by holding a key
> (shift) to select many faces on an object without having to click each one.

Well, you can do window select - if you click off in space you can drag a window to select objects. If you start on the left and drag towards the right, only objects completely contained inside the window will be selected. If you start on the right and drag towards the left, any object that intersects the window will be selected (the window outline shows as dashed when in this mode).

Once you have selected a single face on an object that sets the selection context for that object, and then when you window select on it you will be able to window faces. Same thing for edges - if you select a single edge by a click, then any further window selects on that object will target edges.

Is that the kind of thing that you're thinking about? If it isn't, can you describe a bit more about what you would like shift+select to do?


> Also the posing/hierachy and everything would be possible in Moi with a scene tree for v1.

It will get there eventually... I'm not sure about V1 though. It's such a major piece of UI it will take a bunch of time to make it nice. At some point I've just got to wrap things up and push out V1 and then add more stuff for the next version.

- Michael

It works by either left click and hold and then just sweep the mouse over the faces and it selects everything you pass over or there is a button or hotkey for continuous slection to enbale it rather than a left click. Depends on which app you in. For odd shapes window select seldom targets what I want, especially if I'm zoomed in on a small part.

Grendel, nice work!
I also did Bionicles some months ago (but in Rhino).
I will try to make new in MoI later ...



http://www.3dworks.be/images/bio1-1.jpg
http://www.3dworks.be/images/bio2.jpg

OOOHHH, you got the big kit....hahahaha

Nice job on yours Little, Maxwell looks great.