Hi Jim, thanks and I'm glad that you like MoI!
Right now MoI v2 is getting close to being wrapped up, and there is a whole bunch of new stuff coming for that, there are some notes on all the new stuff in v2 so far here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/doc/V2releasenotes.html
> Can there be a method where when you intersect a line
> with another that the package would have the option to
> auto-trim that intersection (perhaps holding down a key
> whilst doing this might effect the trim action) - just saves
> a few steps (which get repeated all day in my case).
The current Trim steps also enable a lot of additional functionality, like being able to split objects and keep all the pieces, cutting things at arbitrary points rather than at intersections only, and some stuff for trimming surfaces or solids in addition to curves, etc...
If the Trim command just immediately discarded stuff as soon as you did one click, it would not be possible to have all these additional functions.... Anyway, that's the reason why it is set up as it currently is. Also check here for a longer description of this stuff:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2474.6
But probably for v3 I can experiment with using a modifier key like you are mentioning, that would be a good possibility to have a "quick trim" mode but not lose all the existing functionality that the regular current trim provides.
For the time being, when you are doing your trimming, make sure you are using the shortcut of having right-click work the same as clicking the "Done" button, since that can speed things up quite a bit with the current command.
> Is there a way to widen the 3d view (I was building a small 3d set
> and constantly passing through the back wall - a "zoom" out function
> would be great.
No, there's not currently any way to change the lens angle for changing the field of view, but it is on my todo list.
I'm not sure if that would help a whole lot if you are running through things though - most of the time a good way to handle that kind of a situation is to more explicitly set your pivot point to snap it on to a specific location, which you can do with the "Area" zoom tool at that in the view tools at the bottom of a viewport.
When you pick the center point for the area zoom, snap it on to your specific point of interest and then that will become the rotation pivot, which helps for controlling rotation and also zooming will generally move you towards that point and won't pass it unless you get to a small distance from it.
> If not the zoom then the "hide" function would be a fine alternative
There is quite a lot of stuff for this in version 2 - there is a whole new scene browser mechanism that generally makes handling hiding and showing stuff a lot better.
Also for the next upcoming v2 beta release, I've tweaked the regular hide function to be a bit more simple as well.
The current one can be kind of confusing. What happens is when you push it to show things, it will temporarily switch the display to show you all the hidden objects, and let you pick one of them so that you can show just some objects instead of all of them. If you push "hide" a second time while in that "select which one to show" mode, then it will show all of them. So for the moment, to avoid any confusion here just click the button twice and you show show everything.
> Getting rid of construction curves for export : my model ends
> up as a mildly respectable series of nurbs surfaces and a couple
> of trillion construction lines which seem impossible to separate
> - bar the obvious brute-force 'one-at-a-time' method - am I
> missing something (I assumed alt-select might grab curves
> only - tried all the guessable options but no dice)
This one is another one that is a lot easier in version 2, since there is a section of the scene browser that lets you target all objects of a certain type, like "hide all curves", "select all solids", etc...
For v1 though you can set up some scripts on keyboard shortcuts, to do that go to Options / Shortcut keys and add in a new entry. Then you can paste in a script for the command part.
Marc showed the script above for hiding all curves, also if you want to select all curves (so that you can delete them for example), that would be this script:
script:moi.geometryDatabase.getObjects().getCurves().setProperty( 'selected', true );
Paste in that whole line for the "Command" part of a shortcut key, then when you hit that key you can get curve selected so you can do whatever you want with them.
It tends to be a good idea to kind of clean up your generator curves more as you are going along though, like after you have constructed a surface from your curves, they are usually still selected right then so hide or delete them at that point in time to get them out of your way, that's not a bad habit to get into.
> 1. A jumble of polygons facing in different "normal" directions :
> This is just impossible/laborious to clean up in max - (unify
> normals in max is, frankly, useless).
It's not quite clear to me if you are talking about IGES import here, or a polygon import?
One big thing though is to make sure that you have joined surfaces togehter before you export. If you just have 2 independent surfaces that happen to be sitting next to one another, MoI will not know that they are intended to be together, and they will get meshed independently, with possibly different orientations, and worse yet possibly slightly different mesh structures along what should be their common edge.
When you have joined surfaces together on the other hand - MoI then understands that there should be a cohesive mesh between them and will do extra work to ensure a unified mesh structure and orientation between the pieces.
If that does not solve what you are running into, it would probably be good if you could post an example (it does not look like your previous attachments went through) so that I can check it out and see what is going on there.
Also Max unfortunately tends to be rather finicky with imports in general - one other new thing in version 2 is support for the FBX file format, which can help for getting information into Max.
You also mentioned IGES format - I'm not really very sure that Max's IGES, or NURBS handling just in general is really going to be up to the job. As far as I know, the entire area of NURBS modeling has not really been updated in Max for a really long time now. I think you'll probably be better of with polygon import. I remember hearing something about OBJ import being improved in the very most recently released version of Max. If you have a slightly older version, you may want to check out this alternate import plugin for it:
http://www.guruware.at/main/objio/index.html
> Also lots of double lines which I attribute to the modelling
> curves, Is it my modelling method?
If you're using IGES format, then yeah those will be your original curves you drew that you input into various surfacing commands - you'll want to hide or delete those before exporting. If you're talking about polygons, then probably this means that the pieces were not joined so that they did not get a unified mesh structure where they touch one another.
It's hard to know exactly what is going on with these without seeing an example though...
> 2. Modelling errors which escape detection in moi : Z_fighting
> and weird poly errors once it arrived in Max. Some viewport
> and render errors which look like coplanar polys fighting,
Sounds like you may have some duplicated surfaces in your MoI model - if you can post an example of this I'll take a look and can give you some more details of what is happening.
You can also send models to me through e-mail at
moi@moi3d.com
> I attach pics from moi/max
These didn't seem to come through, can you please re-post them?
Also if you could possibly post the 3DM model files those also help a lot to see what might be happening, it is generally a lot easier to see what is happening by examining the geometry directly rather than only a screenshot. If you can post those it would help me to give you some more specific information on what is going on there.
Thanks for the feedback and for trying MoI!
- Michael
