""""""""""but I would like simple materials like in Sculptris. Its easier to show the curvature of surfaces when you can use a reflective material."""""""""""

Have you tried turning on the "Metallic lighting" option in the options/view/Lighting options dialogue???

Never knew about that option! However in Sculptris you can make an actual environment map for fake glossy reflections like in video games. It's eye catching and easy on the graphics card.

Hi Michael!

Since I'm new to MoI, please allow me to contribute my five cents... or ten.

First off, I'm so enamored with MoI and it's simple but powerful interface, I prefer to model in it exclusively. I'll use Sketchup for basic scene layout and some rendering, but now (for modeling) it seems clunky and scratchy (no anti-aliasing). Not to mention, slow and riddled with problems. ...but I'm preaching to the choir.

With that, my 30-day trial has ended and I'm using the "no-save" version until Christmas.
Yes, MoI has official become (in the immortal words of Jean Shepherd's Ralphie): my "Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thingy which tells time".
At least I'll have time to concentrate on mastering the basics, such as feature tuning and modeling workflow.

Some of the features I really appreciate include: fantastically intuitive construction guides and snaps, the Boolean functions and my favorite - the Mesh tool.
For 17 years, I've used CorelDRAW! for design and layout occupationally, so I have a natural inclination to use NURBS, splines and Béziers. 3D design feels easy now.


For V3, I'll ask for some basic niceties that may be easier to consider:

1) Shearing - The 2D scaling and rotation handles are convenient. But I sure miss the ability to sheer or "skew" the selection vertically or horizontally. Maybe an addition to the Transform tools.
Rectangular objects would take on a parallelogram configuration.
To achieve this now, you can rotate the selection at a certain angle and scale it in one direction then rotate it back, but it is hard to manage the outcome.

2) Components - Active cloning, or the ability to copy a layer or group of objects and by changing any aspect of one, whether it be the content or the proportions the clones would follow suit.
Grouping has been asked for, but the layers feature does almost just as good a job of achieving object management.
But with a component or "clone" you could, for instance, make a bolt or handle like object, clone many copies of them, but be able to tweak them later without having to delete, reposition,
and start all over again. It's a little easier to do if they are compartmentalized.

3) Point Reduction - Primarily for curve paths, but could be applied to mesh surfaces. Often times a path is drawn and it would be nice to reduce the number of points that make it up.
The object here is to reduce the number of points in a curve while maintaining the original curve's basic shape, maybe even improving on it.
Corel does this automatically when you simply delete a selected cluster of points. Currently, when I delete a point on a curve it collapses into something I didn't want, and I have to
re-shape the curve. This point reduction curve integrity interpolation process could be applied to mesh surfaces as well.
The benefit to MoI use would be reduced model complexity.

4) Persistent Surface Editing - I would sure like to be able to go back to any mesh surface and edit the points. Many seem to become un-editable.
I would also like to edit any points on existing lines between two surfaces and alter the adjoining meshes simultaneously.
I believe that this has been brought up many times. And I do understand from reading other posts, that the point meshed become very convoluted and numerous, and there are "clip path" issues.
But it would be nice to go back and further tweak an organic shape.

5) Spiral Along Path - (Here's a fun one) I love the spiral tool. You can make spirals in any pitch and size that taper and even run flat.
So, to choose the dimensions, pick one point and then the second (in a straight line?). Good for making screws and spring.
What about telephone and microphone cords and flexi-tubing? How about cork-screw trajectories?
Could there be a check box or a button in the dialog to apply the spiral along any selected path? [Choose Path] > whole path or choose points on path...
Also. Could there be a logarithmic function or some setting that could change the pitch or exponent along the spiral. Or what I mean is, you could make Golden Mean spirals,
or springs that are closely spaced on one end then stretch out towards the other.

Here are some suggestions for the "just dreaming" list (just for fun and imagination):

1) Soft Selection - Does not have to be to the whole geometry as there are clipping issues and so forth. But, within the mesh itself. Especially if the mesh is a highly populated point grid, like some meshes.
If the soft selection worked inside of the mesh or inside of the curve then it would be easier for MoI to accomplish.
The area and movement of points does not have to be pre-defined by a diminishing radius, but by, either the points you have selected, or simply within the bounds of the mesh itself.
In the case of a soft selection within a curve, it would only effect the point in the curve or the points that have been initially selected. Thus, no effecting anything outside of the bounds
of the curve or mesh, and not the whole object set.
Corel (only as an example) does this with the "Rubber Band Tool". If I grab a selection of twenty points on a curve, the point I grab and move will move with the cursor,
and the remaining points move in lesser degree, with the end points in the selection or within the curve remaining fixed.

2) Piped Surface - Oh yes, like the one done with T-Splines. It may be easier instead, to be able to pick a set of curves, some intersecting or merging, and then an "Axial Extrusion" could be performed,
also blending the connections of the newly extruded axial pipes in a fillet fashion. It could be performed on box structures too - not like Sub-D, but some version of MoI's Shell that leaves
a silky smooth candy coating where you could make all kinds of organic structural framework. I can imagine making a frame out of clothes hangers and dipping them in liquid tape
a few hundred times and ending up with a useful organic shape.

3) Free Form Distortion & Tapering - The clipped surface issue was a problem from what I read. Perhaps there could be some type of surface-re-interpolation. You'd have more lines defining new areas,
but the mesh and it's points would be local enough to stand a chance being pushed around by an "envelope" without too many problems.

4) Surface Projection with Tangential Blending - Hard to describe: you have a circle hole in a curved surface and a smaller circle above it. You could blend the two with the shape blending into the
hole with a tangent. Like a super version of filleting. - NO WAIT - I think the Blend tool is supposed to do this, but all I get are the two line-up points and no blend lovin'... :-(
I wish MoI would tell me when something isn't going to work and nothing happens, like a red X or something... I think I read where you were tweaking the Blend tool.

5) ...and the thing that makes the mesh panels line up with curvature integrity that gets rid of the "panalized" look... though I'd throw that in the wish box. ;-)

But none the less - You've made a great product Michael, your attention to simplicity and detail shows. You're a one-man army.
Keep up the amazing work, and best of success in the V3 development stage.

Mike

Hi Mike, I'm really glad that you're enjoying MoI so much! :)

Thanks for your feedback, and just a couple of notes on a couple of things:

> 3) Point Reduction - Primarily for curve paths, but could
> be applied to mesh surfaces. Often times a path is drawn
> and it would be nice to reduce the number of points that
> make it up.

Check out the Rebuild command for something like this for simplifying a curve:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#rebuild

It basically reconstructs a curve by sampling points from it and building a new curve through those sampled points, and you can control some parameters for how many sampled points are used, and the method for the resampling (whether to use a fixed number of points or to use as many points as needed to achieve a particular distance tolerance between the new curve and the old one).


> 4) Surface Projection with Tangential Blending - Hard to describe:
> you have a circle hole in a curved surface and a smaller circle above it.
> You could blend the two with the shape blending into the
> hole with a tangent. Like a super version of filleting. - NO WAIT - I think
> the Blend tool is supposed to do this, but all I get are the two line-up
> points and no blend lovin'... :-(

It does sound like you want to use the Blend tool to get what you want here, but you need to extrude the smaller circle above out to a surface so you will have 2 edges to blend between.

Also you want to do the extrusion with end caps turned off so that the edges you are blending between are open edges.

So that would look something like this - here's a curved surface with a smaller circle above it:




Extrude the smaller circle upwards to make another surface:



It's also a good idea to either delete or hide the small circle curve at this point so that it does not get in your way for the next step, because you then want to select the surface edge, which is in exactly the same position as the generator circle, and you won't be able to target it when the original circle curve is sitting there.

So then select these 2 edges:



Then you can use Construct > Blend to create a blend surface between those edges.




So basically to construct a surface blend you do that between a selection of 2 surface edges - it was probably not working for you before because you had a selection of 1 surface edge and 1 curve object instead of 2 edges.

- Michael

I LOVE it when I learn something new in MoI!!!!!

Thanks very much Michael!

I'll experiment with the reconstruct script...

So with this insight into the Blend tool, I tried to go for something a little more complex:
Curved edge to curved edge with a cylinder circle edge into an oval that was projected into the first blend...
Oooh yeah... ;-)

Tried one harder - Thought I'd make a vent port like one that would exist on a sport car...

Made a curved mesh surface, then the shape of the port out of one single freeform spline.
It was projected to the surface, trimmed and deleted, leaving the new hole's with it's own native edges.
I copied the projected shape, moved it lower, scaled down, rotated and extruded it.

Then I wanted to blend between the two shapes... Nothing. The shapes had a lot of individual unconnected segments in it,
and Blend only wants to use whole, single curves that reside on surfaces.
I tried to Join these separate pieces into one curve, but since Joining makes it's own separate element, it defeated the purpose and I couldn't use Blend.
I'm not sure where I could've done something different to make two contiguous rings on their surfaces to Blend into a seamless transition.

What I constructed below was done in sections, but there are irregularities in the curvature and even chunks missing.
I take it, that since projecting a curve to a surface does not make a contiguous curve like unto the original shape, then I might not be able to use Blend on these elements.
I can use Network or Sweep to achieve like results, but the Blend tool offers that useful silky-smooth"Tangent" blending ability that is hard to get other ways.

Hi Mike yeah the Blend command is currently limited to only being able to make a blend between 2 edges at a time, so you'll run into a problem if you've got something like one edge trying to map to a fragmented set of multiple edges on the other side.

There are a couple of things you can do about that. If the side that has multiple edges has each small edge touching smoothly to its neighbor, they can be merged together with the Merge command:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#merge

Then once you have merged together the fragmented edges into one long edge you can then use the long edge for making the blend.

The other option is that you can take the long edge and dice it up into smaller edges by using the Trim command - inside the Trim command use the "Add trim points" button which will let you click some points on the edge for the spots to cut it at. For this method you want to dice the long edge up into segments matching the segmentation of the other side.

In v3 I do want to work on improving the Blend command so that it will be able to use a sequence of edges on each side of the blend instead of only one edge on each side.

- Michael

The other thing you can do is to use the rebuild command on curves before you do the surface trims or extrudes, so the new holes have that continuous edge needed for the blend.

Thanks Michael, Burr,

Wouldn't you know, the second time I tried it, I got a perfectly joined curve and the blend worked without a hitch.
But I'll play with those two methods.

Hi Mike, so like Burr mentioned that may mean that the first time you did it you used a curve made up of several segment pieces as part of the construction. Curves made up of several sub segments will generally transmit those segments to things constructed or cut from them.

When you use the Join command, it's really sort of like a kind of grouping where you can still revert to the previous segments by using Separate. The rebuild command can help to merge 2 smooth segments together into a single larger segment if that's what you need.

- Michael

That was very helpful, Michael.

I found two things: 1) The Merge function will cause one curve to be created from many broken adjacent segments - only if they are NOT separated or intersected by the junction of another curve.
2) The Rebuild function does a nice job, but the result does not naturally match the associated edge it resides along side with. I could inset the rebuild curve and Loft the original to the rebuild, but you'd see the un-smooth result.

In the pic below, I went nuts with Blend. Made holes from projections and even learned that projections can be moved and tweaked by moving their parent object!!! Wow!
I ran into a problem where my to-blend edge had intersected curves... hmmm. I had to Trim in new points to blend the edges in bite-sized sections. But they sometimes don't run tangent to each other.
It's better than nothing, and I'm pretty excited about learning how to do more complex modeling. :-)

Hi Mike,

> 1) The Merge function will cause one curve to be created from
> many broken adjacent segments - only if they are NOT
> separated or intersected by the junction of another curve.

Yup, that's correct - it is only possible to merge 2 edges when there are no other edges connected at the spot that they touch. If there are other edges also radiating out from the same connection spot you can't merge them together because the other edges are expecting to be part of a loop along with the ones being merged, and that would not be possible anymore if they did not end in the same spot.


> 2) The Rebuild function does a nice job, but the result does not
> naturally match the associated edge it resides along side with.
> I could inset the rebuild curve and Loft the original to the rebuild,
> but you'd see the un-smooth result.

I'm not sure if I completely understand this part, but the Rebuild command generates a curve as its output. In many cases you can also select an edge as the input to any command that takes curves, but if the command outputs standalone curves you will get a new curve object generated as the result, the edge is not modified in a case like that.

Some commands do work differently if you select edges instead of curves, it depends on the particular command.

- Michael

Yep - Blend is your friend :) IMHO one of the most powerful and under-utilized functions in MoI.

It also works well for lines and arcs.

In my work I create a lot of curved 2D shapes to use as profiles in Sweep operations. I no longer try to draw radiused corners - I just create my main curves, leaving gaps between them, and use Blend to build the radius corners. It's fast and works great.

Ed

Man, if that was a snake it would've bit me...

I've had it happen anytime I grabbed curves what were not edges,
but I've been using freeform splines and guides snapped to tangents.
Yes, versatile.

Circular Selection as mentioned here

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3628.1

Style editing without having to go through a three tier process, I would like to just ctrl+click the color chip or something to pull up the swatch box and select a different color

Hi Grendel,

> Style editing without having to go through a three tier
> process, I would like to just ctrl+click the color chip or
> something to pull up the swatch box and select a different color

That actually works exactly like you're describing already in V2 - hold down Ctrl and click on the color swatch area of a style in the scene browser and the color picker will pop up and let you edit the color.

Also another related shortcut is if you right-click on the style line in the properties panel (the panel that shows some info on the currently selected objects), that will pop up an edit style dialog for editing that style's name and/or color without going to the full style editor dialog.

- Michael

ahhh, thanks Michael

This may have come up earlier in this thread, haven't read them all...

But as a long time Solidworks user, the idea of not being able to change my mind, many steps into a process later, i.e. complete unbreakable history, still makes me twitch. ;) (What if I get something wrong, what if a requirement changes, what if, what if, what if...)

Doubtless its a tall order, but this is a "wish" list so I'm wishing.

(It's cool that at least to some level you can make real time changes profiles/curves without having to start over.)

-GregW

Hi Greg,

> (What if I get something wrong, what if a requirement
> changes, what if, what if, what if...)

Well, you just delete pieces that you don't want and draw some replacement pieces...

When drawing and creating things happens very quickly it's not such a big deal to redraw particular pieces.

However having said that, I do want to add a deeper history function in the future. It's a pretty involved area so it's hard to know exactly when that will happen though.

In the meantime if having the ability to do history updates is a vitally important thing for your particular workflow, then you should probably be using some other program that puts a lot of emphasis on that type of process as its main function. Of course a kind of more cumbersome drawing and modeling process that tends to make you go through more steps is usually a part of packages that put a lot of emphasis on that kind of stuff - for MoI it is much more of a priority to have drawing and modeling feel really quick and light and not have a lot of steps and processes to go through.

But if you don't want to do quick modeling and drawing and you instead want to do more heavily planned and constrained layouts that can be tweaked with history, there are quite a lot of CAD programs out there that are focused on doing that already, like SolidWorks, SolidEdge, Alibre, Pro/E, etc.. etc... etc... MoI is actually focused on a different feel than that partly because there are already so many choices you can use for doing that style of modeling. Instead of trying to make MoI a kind of clone of programs that already handle that style of stuff I wanted to make it have a kind of different focus.

It may be a good idea for you to use MoI in combination with one of those other programs - maybe use MoI for your early process stuff where you want to draw more freely and use one of those parametric MCAD programs when you get to more nailed down designs...

But it's important to use the right tool for your particular job - if history is a major criteria for you, then MoI is probably not the right tool for the particular task that you're trying to do - it's not really a focus for MoI to be an exact drop-in replacement for a production MCAD system like SolidWorks or things like that. If you're trying to treat it like that you may be using the wrong tool for your job, kind of like trying to pound in nails with a screwdriver or something like that.

- Michael

I have heard, that Icem Surf, now a part of Catia, has been made meanwhile fully historical.

In my opinion a history should be more important then circular selection.

Rudl