Hi Michael ...

I have not really been able (due to serious time constraints) to do much playing with the latest beta and have only scanned the forum quickly a few times in the last month.

I see how to assign a style (color) to an object but only the basic colors in the UI ... and I have not figured out how to name an object.

Is there some written material available to give me the basics for this new material? ... I have looked but don't see anything immediately.

I have caught up a little and would like to use MoI for a new project I am about to launch into and it will have multi 'styles' before I get very far with it.

thanks,
eric

Hi Eric, probably the best written description so far is here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2570.18
but that is mostly focused on how the browser works.


> I see how to assign a style (color) to an object but only
> the basic colors in the UI ... and I have not figured out how
> to name an object.

There are 2 different methods you can use for assigning a style.

One is if you have the browser open (there is a button at the bottom of the window next to "Help" that opens or closes the browser) you can left-click on a the swatch of a style, that will assign the selected objects to have that style. Right-click on a swatch to set that one as the "Active style" (which is similar to the "Current layer" in Rhino).

The other method is to use the object properties panel, which is also what you use to set an object's name.

The properties panel will show up in the upper right corner of the screen when you are in selection mode (meaning when you are not running in any command), and give you some information on the selected object.

That information includes the object's name, the style assigned to it, the object type (whether it is a solid, closed curve, etc...), and size (or radius/length).

Here is a screenshot of the properties panel:



Not only does it show the information about the selected object, you can also go there and click on the different parts to edit it. So for instance to assign an object name, move your mouse to the row that displays the object name (by default it will say "unnamed" if you have not assigned a name yet):



Then click to get a dialog to enter the name:



Similarly you can also click on the Style line to get a style picker:



Which is the other way you can assign a style - this method can be used even if the browser is closed.

Also note the 2 buttons at the bottom of the style picker - "Add new style" and "Edit styles". This is currently the place where you need to go to add or remove styles. If you hit "Add new style", a dialog will pop up and let you type in a style name and a color, and then a new style will be created with that info, and the selected object will be assigned to belong to that new style.

If you hit "Edit styles", it brings up a dialog that lets you do some other tasks like Add a style, Delete a style, Edit the name or color of a style, and move them up and down in the list (which will also control the order they are shown in the browser as well):



So currently to edit styles you have to select an object first so you can launch that menu and get to that button.


Then the other part of the properties panel is the size flyout:




That allows you to see and edit size information, like the bounding box size of an object, or also special size values for simple objects, like for a circle, arc, or sphere it will display radius, a line will display length, a cylinder or cone will display radius and length.

Hope this helps explain it, let me know if anything is still not clear!

- Michael

Hi Michael ...

Thanks for the detailed reply ... after a small stumble or two I think I have got it.

With very little practice I think it will work for me beautifully ... The layer color and the layer name transfer directly into Rhino and visa versa. That's exactly what I need.

I hope for MoI to have line types and thicknesses one day but that is not an essential for me at this point. And sometime I hope you will add text and dimensioning, too.

These, however, are not essentials as now I can use the great flexibility MoI offers me for modeling and then switch to Rhino for the other things I need and for rendering.

Note that I hope MoI will be compatible with Rhino 5 eventually.

Thanks for a great job with this ... being part of MoI's evolution is a joy.

cheers,
eric

Hi Michael ...

Even though MoI does not have linetypes and line widths as yet is it possible to save them in the file when bringing in a Rhino drawing including these ... working for awhile in MoI and then going back to Rhino?

At this point it seems that Rhino linetypes are simply lost when the files is saved by MoI.

I'd like to be able to set up a whole list of styles (for different parts of a building) in MoI and then add linetypes and widths in Rhino ... work mostly in MoI and then go back to Rhino when necessary and not lose the line characteristics set up there.

Is this something we might see in the future?

cheers,
eric

Hi Eric, I think that might be possible to round-trip linetypes that were set in Rhino.

Can you please post or e-mail to me (moi@moi3d.com) an example file that has some of the things set up in it that you want to have persist?

- Michael

Probably though I'll only be able to persist them on objects that you have not edited in MoI though.

When you edit an object, that basically puts it into the same category as if the object was created in MoI initially.

- Michael

Hi...

Talking about Styles, below is screen shot from 3dm file that I got from rhino news group.
After open the file in MoI, the arrangement of styles is not good because of long name of style its self.
have you any idea to make this better guys ?
Let give our support and idea in the development of MoI :)

Hi Michael...

Hi Anis,

re:
> How about change this panel to tob e like this -->List

I'm not sure about that - since the picker pops up and then disappears, it is easier for it to take up a large amount of the screen and show more items in it at the same time.

That's why it is able to show such larger sized swatches in there - it is nice to have larger swatches available when it is possible to do so.

Maybe what I can do for the particular case that you are showing there is to truncate long lines of text so that anything longer than about 3 lines or so will be chopped off.


Also I have some other ideas that I'd like to add in the future like possibly render material swatches, that tend to be nice to have larger swatches if possible.


- Michael

Hi Michael...

> truncate long lines of text so that anything longer than about 3 lines or so will be chopped off.
Ya, will make it feel more better.

> Also I have some other ideas that I'd like to add in the future like possibly
> render material swatches, that tend to be nice to have larger swatches if possible.

I agree with you. Usually, rendering application also have large swatch and user can easily see the preview of a material/preset.

Thanks

My 2 cents on the styles part:

it's the only part of MoI that for me does not work according to my intuition..

Here are the issues I'm having - some of them will probably be adressed in the next betas or the 2.0.

1. Hidden geometry.

If a layer has some hidden geometry and you select it, the hidden geometry is unhidden. From then on the eye will let you hide/unhide, but not hide the part that was hidden in the last state. I like to hide some geometry (like some edges were two surfaces meet), but with the styles I have to hide them again everytime i fiddle with the layers. Some issue with the types here: if you click on one of them, all the geometry is unhidden.
A hidden geometry style is part of the solution. The annoying thing there is everytime you change something to a hidden layer the geometry shows up instead of disappearing. Then you have to click the eye twice to unhide all and then hide all.

2. Adding a style

You have to select a style first to be able to go into the styles menu. Then if you create a new style the selection of the existing layer is automatically changing to that new style. If would just like to be able to add another style to create new geometry or paste rhino geometry.

3. Changing a style's color

A lot of steps for a very simple operation - but i think that has been mentioned before. Part of the problem is you lose the selected layer along the way and have to reselect it to assign it's color.

My suggestions:
My ideal styles behaviour would be:
1. objects are hidden if you transfer them to a hidden style
2. you have three states of a style: unhidden, hidden and partly hidden, where the 'partly' in the last option is memorised. Same for the Types
3. a style state does not change when selecting the style. When you click it now, everything is selected, the hidden parts as well. And that can't be undone. So if you have a lot of hidden geometry it get's unhidden very easily. Two solution now: hiding everything manually again or going back to the last saved version..

If the style behaviour as it is now will be maintained, would it be possible to add a hidden layer that remains hidden when you throw geometry at it?


I have tried to get my head around the styles, they are a big plus in comparison to the 1.0. I can see the potential of combining styles, types, objects and groups and being able to combine selections. But as it works now, it also has some big drawbacks.

It's still a beta, so I see why of course. Just trying to help out with getting it streamlined, not meaning to rant!

Oh and one more minor thing: i don't get the name styles. In Sketchup you have styles and they are why different. More different from MoI Styles than MoI styles are from Layers. So I think it's cunfusing as a name.
My proposal: call them Slayers. Special Layers. Hell yeah!

Hi Patrick, thanks very much for your feedback on styles!

Definitely some of the things you mention are going to be tuned up - especially the current method of editing and adding a new style is going to be handled better, I plan to have some UI for that within the browser so that you won't have to use the current workaround for that, that method of needing to select an object first and go in through the properties panel is only temporary.

I haven't quite figured out the exact UI for that yet (I'm pretty close to focusing on that though), but I've thought a bit about 2 different possibilities - one is to have an additional line under the "Styles" header that would contain "Add" and "Edit" buttons.

But I've also thought some about having an drop-down arrow on the Styles header itself which would pop up a menu with those items on it. I'm currently leaning more towards trying this way since it kind of keeps the main browser area a bit more tidy.

So definitely that area is intended to be improved.

But some of the other things that you are mentioning are kind of a consequence of how the browser system works, it is a little different than what you are used to.

In MoI's current system, the entries in the browser (like for example a Style or an item listed under Types) do not contain a value that belongs just to the style as an individual entity separate from the objects.

Instead, what you see there is a reflection of the state of all the objects that belong to that category.

When you turn "off" that category, the category does not all by itself have an "off" state, what happen is all the objects that belong to it get turned off, and then the status (hidden/visible/mixed) is updated to reflect the current state of all those objects.

In other words, the "Layer" in MoI does not have its own on/off, it is only objects that have an on/off and you use the browser to manipulate a batch of object properties at once.

This is fairly different than many layer systems where the "layer" by itself has an on-off property.

But one big advantage of MoI's system is that it allows for more than one kind of organization system, like for example "Types", and "Styles".

Otherwise it would be difficult to offer more than one system simultaneously if each of them had persisting values.

For example, if you went to Curves and set Curves to be "off", then you went to "Style = Red" and set it to "on", if those states were a kind of persistent state that belong to the browser item itself, then you would have a conflicting situation, like with a red curve.

A red curve in that situation would be ambiguous - should it be "off" because you set all curves to be "off" under Types? Or should it be "on" because you set all red things to be "on" under Styles?

MoI avoids this ambiguous situation by only storing the on/off properties on objects and not "persisting" those values for every browser item. Making them persistent is basically incompatible with having multiple categories at the same time (like Types and Styles). Having multiple categories is a pretty significant flexibility gain, so that's why I went with this method even though it may have some differences and possibly some detriments in other areas. Hopefully the benefits will outweigh the detriments.

This flexibility should grow somewhat larger yet with the addition of groups as well.


> If the style behaviour as it is now will be maintained, would
> it be possible to add a hidden layer that remains hidden when
> you throw geometry at it?

What about if you had a keyboard shortcut with a script on it that would handle that for you? I mean hit a key that would then do a combination of throwing things to a style named "hidden", as well as actually hiding them. I'm not sure at the moment if I have enough stuff exposed to make that work, but that would not be difficult to fit within the current system.


I have a couple of other things coming in the next beta, which may be of interest - one is a "Lock" capability so that you can lock an object so that it is displayed and can be snapped on to but is not selectable. This can be done either through a new Edit/Lock button (next to Edit/Hide), or by Ctrl+click on an eye.

Also there is a new "Isolate" function for the old-fashioned Edit/Hide button (the one that you previously had to use for hiding things before the browser was available). This will be available by right-click on the Edit/Hide button and it is a "state-remembering" isolate. By which I mean after you do one isolate, after you are done working on the isolated object, you can go right-click on the button again and the previous hide/show state of all objects at the time of the previous isolate is restored.


> Oh and one more minor thing: i don't get the name styles.

Well, the idea is that it is an organization method that controls the visual display of the object. They're kind of meant to be somewhat similar to layers that others may be used to, but also they're going to play a big role for material assignments when exporting to a poly format as well. Basically style is sort of meant to be short for "Visual style"...


> 3. a style state does not change when selecting the style.
> When you click it now, everything is selected, the hidden
> parts as well. And that can't be undone.

Just to clarify - here you're talking about the selection action, where you click on the name part to select the objects belonging to that browser item slot?

I've got a couple of tune-ups for that for the next beta already - undo will work to revert the selection in this case now, and also if you hold down shift and click, it will only select the currently visible items in that slot and not display them. I'm also going to be adding in an option so you can make the "not show" the default so that the shift+click has the reverse meaning if you want.


Anyway, I've still got a ways to go to finish up this area, and definitely several of the areas that you mention are targeted for tuning!

Some things that you mention though, kind of go along with the flexibility of having multiple kinds of organization methods, like Types in addition to Styles/Layers.

I think the flexibility of having a more unified UI to work with types in addition to "layer-like things" is pretty important though, it lets you have one single consistent UI presented for such things, and one consistent area to go to to work with "all curves" in the same manner as you work with "all red things"...

The feedback is much appreciated!

- Michael

Thanks for a very extensive reply.

It's great to hear that some parts of the styles will get a big upgrade, i thought that was going to happen, just not clear how.

My main concern now is that you can get a lot of things messed up by accident. Selecting geometry and then accidentally changing them to another layer. Or selecting all your hidden geometry in a layer and not being able to hide it again. I have to be really careful for the moment.
So an undo would be great. Although i can imagine that for some users the extra undo steps will be a disadvantage (like zoom and pan operations are included in autocad's undo...) Maybe ctrl-shift-z shortcut for undo with styles operation and ctrl-z for normal undo? Or the other way around?

>What about if you had a keyboard shortcut with a script on it that would handle that for you?
>I mean hit a key that would then do a combination of throwing things to a style named "hidden",
>as well as actually hiding them.
>I'm not sure at the moment if I have enough stuff exposed to make that work,
>but that would not be difficult to fit within the current system.

Would be great! I would use that rather than hiding inside the style itself. H as a shortcut to hide geometry to a construction layer that is turned of by default. And accessible when you need it.

>I've got a couple of tune-ups for that for the next beta already - undo will work to revert the selection in this case now, and also if you hold down shift and click, it will only select the currently visible items in that slot and not display them. I'm also going to be adding in an option so you can make the "not show" the default so that the shift+click has the reverse meaning if you want.

That sounds fabulous!

I think the styles system has got great potential and part of the problem is just that i have to get used to it. I just think it still lacks the straightforwardness of most other MoI features. Default behaviour should probably be a bit more dummy proof with a lot of advanced behaviour implemented with shift clicking - ctrl - alt clicking.

I'll post another remark in the next post, too much information at once otherwise..

The eye icons can also be a bit confusing - and maybe that's actually why i find the system confusing at times.

Say I want to see the faces of style magenta. What i actually see in the browser is half an eye at these tabs: 'surfaces', 'faces', 'all objects' and 'magenta'.

I can see the logic in that, but you really have to think to see what's going on. Also there is no way to see if all the faces of the magenta style are on or not (i think).

If magenta and faces would both have a full eye, there can be no doubt: all the magenta faces are on. Not all the magenta geometry is on for sure, but you know that since you can see that in the types tab. And on the screen as well.
If only part of the faces of the magenta style where visible, you would have a half eye - whereas in the current system there is no way to determine that.

I'm probably neglecting some consequences of this system that might be less favorable.
But on the positive side I think it would be more intuitive and it would contain more information.
The info of the styles and types would be complementary in that way rather than double up.

I would love to hear people's thoughts on this!

cheers,
patrick

Hi Patrick,

I sort of follow what you're saying, but apart from the few tidy up things that Michael has to do, I feel the browser system is quite simple and advanced at the same time, what I mean is, It's simple enough for a novice to use and powerful enough for the advanced user, especially once it's polished up and 'Groups' is up and running.

I know it's not as quick as typing your thoughts, But I think some visuals would help explain better in what you're trying to convey.
No doubt you'll get more feed back from this multicultural forum if you included visuals :)

Cheers

Ok you're right, here are some illustrations.

I have a drawing here with two cubes on two different styles. I only have one style visible.

Goal: showing the faces of the cube in the Red Style

1. Current system - all the faces of style Red visible


4 half eyes showing


2. Current system - some faces of style Red visible


4 half eyes showing - same info in the browser


3. Suggested system - all the faces of style Red visible


2 full eyes: faces and Red => Red Faces are all visible.
1 half eye for All Objects

(If left the solid eye, since as far as i know only solids have faces - uncapped shapes have surfaces instead)


4. Suggested system - some faces of style Red visible


3 half eyes showing - meaning some faces of the red style visible


What you don't see in n°3 is that there is more than just faces in the Red Style - but you probably know that since you are actually isolating geometry.
But I think you have a more logical form of grammar : you see ALL the faces of Style 3. That's not ALL the faces of the file, but you know that since you've hidden the other layers. Also you can now see that only SOME faces of Style red are visible (n°4) whereas currently this is not possible.


That's it. Hope it makes sense, let me know what you think!

Michael, i don't want to disrespect all your work of course. Just thought there might be a chance you like it and actually consider implementing it.
Though i guess this is more complex to program than the current behaviour.

cheers,
patrick

I'm a bit confused. Your scene browser doesnt show "Surfaces" as having antything?

[EDIT] Never mind. With my object "un-named" the surfaces field is populated. Given it a name and it matchs the screenshots.[EDIT]

Hi Patrick,

> My main concern now is that you can get a lot of things
> messed up by accident. Selecting geometry and then
> accidentally changing them to another layer.

I'm not quite sure if I follow this one - the geometry is only changed to another layer/style if you specifically click on the little color swatch rather than on the eye.

I tried to make sure the eye area was not too narrow in size to help prevent mistaken clicks. Also the part that your mouse is over (the eye part, or swatch part, or name label part) will highlight with visual feedback so you know which one of those controls is active before you click.

I think I may need some more specific information on this particular problem, I mean is it happening because you are clicking on the swatch when you were intending to click on something else instead?


> So an undo would be great. Although i can imagine that for
> some users the extra undo steps will be a disadvantage (like
> zoom and pan operations are included in autocad's undo...)
> Maybe ctrl-shift-z shortcut for undo with styles operation and
> ctrl-z for normal undo? Or the other way around?

Actually, this shouldn't be much of a problem, because it uses the special "selection undo" mechanism.

That works currently in other places in MoI - for example if you're just selecting objects normally before running a command and you click somewhere off of an object and accidentally deselect everything, you can right then do a Ctrl+z to recover your previous selection.

But it is a special kind of undo - it won't store a history of all selection actions that you have previously done, otherwise it would be painful and get in the way a lot just like the AutoCAD zooming that you mention. So it only stores just a single "selection undo", and only when it is the "topmost" item in the undo stack. So that lets you recover from a "oops, I just clicked the wrong thing" kind of a problem but not get in your way when going through numerous geometry changes.

However, at the moment it actually doesn't restore the hidden state, just the selection state, so it actually is not 100% correct for solving what you are talking about. But I think it should be possible to extend it to handle hidden/showing state as well.


> Would be great! I would use that rather than hiding inside
> the style itself. H as a shortcut to hide geometry to a
> construction layer that is turned of by default. And
> accessible when you need it.

I think I should be able to cook this script up for you now actually, I will give it a try after posting this.

But here you wrote: "... to a construction layer that is turned of by default." - just remember that in MoI the main difference is that a layer is not "on" or "off" by itself, it is only objects that are on or off. In MoI the "style" just shows what state all the objects that belong to it currently have - either all displayed (full eye shown), all off (nothing shown), or some displayed and some hidden (half eye shown).

But it should not be difficult for a script to hide the objects at the same time that it is assigning a style to them.


> Default behaviour should probably be a bit more dummy
> proof with a lot of advanced behaviour implemented with
> shift clicking - ctrl - alt clicking.

Yup, that's generally the idea for why it is set up as it currently is! :)

For example with selection, if I didn't show all the objects with the default "selection action", it could for example be possible that doing a selection would actually do nothing if all objects were hidden. That's not very straightforward.

Right now the selection action is much more predictable - if you click it, the result will be all objects of that category (like "All curves" if you click on Types/Curves, or "All things with style=red" if you use Styles/Red) will result in being selected. It is the same selection result every time no matter what happens to be currently visible or hidden. That seems to be more simple behavior.

Especially when groups are around, it seems like it would be kind of strange if the default action did not guarantee that the whole group was selected, which is what would happen if it did not also show all the objects that were in that group as well.

But there will be an option in the next beta for you to switch to that other behavior of not showing objects when doing the selection action, if that makes more sense to you.

- Michael

Hi Patrick,

> Would be great! I would use that rather than hiding inside the
> style itself. H as a shortcut to hide geometry to a construction layer
> that is turned of by default. And accessible when you need it.

Here is that script for you:

script: /* Hide selected objects, and assign to style = Hidden */ var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; var styles = gd.getObjectStyles(); var si = -1; for ( var i = 0; i < styles.length; ++i ) { if ( styles.item(i).name.search( /hidden/i ) != -1 ) si = i; } if ( si == -1 ) { var style = gd.addStyle(); style.name = 'Hidden'; si = style.index; } var objects = gd.getSelectedObjects(); objects.setProperty( 'styleIndex', si ); objects.setProperty( 'hidden', true );


To set it up, in MoI go to Options / Shortcut keys, and hit the "Add" button.

That will add in a new entry at the top of the list, type in H for the Key part (or whatever key or key combination you want to trigger it), and then for the Command part copy the above script which is all one long line and paste it in there.

Then after that, if you select objects and type H those objects will get assigned to a style named "Hidden", and also the objects will be set to be hidden so that you won't have to do any other steps for getting them out of your way.

That should make that particular operation go rather more smoothly.

- Michael

does it possible or it is silly question to replace esoteric shortcut by a real name in the first column?
for your above example : Hidden ? (for H )
I am agree that is not more a "short cut" for the speed but sometime that avoid to must re open the Options for see the second column :)
(and sorry I will see the answer on 3 days so some suspense for me :)