Hi southpaw - re: voxel manufacturing - that's certainly true that a voxel model can be produced as a physical object. But there's a lot more to the whole field of manufacturing than that - for example one big thing about part accuracy is making sure particular areas of the part are accurate enough so that they can be connected together with other parts. For things like that you can't just have something that looks generally circular for example - the geometry has to be accurate to a tight tolerance so you know pieces will fit together. In general both voxel and polygon sub-d modeling is more about smooshing stuff around so they have the kind of look you want, not about achieving a precise circular hole for mating parts and things like that.

So just in general polygon and voxel modeling are not widely used in manufacturing industries because of that, there are exceptions of course depending on what kind of thing is being manufactured.


> That's definitely voxel manufacturing. (At least, I think it is.
> Maybe it's converted?)

Actually it will typically get converted to a polygon mesh if it's being generated on a rapid prototyping machine - usually STL format is used for that which contains triangles in it.


> (And nurbs from moi are converted to polygons on export, right?

Yes, if you export to a polygon mesh format like OBJ, LWO, STL, FBX, or SKP.

There are other CAD export formats which contain the NURBS data, those are: 3DM, STEP, SAT, and IGES - these formats allow transfer of the NURBS data to other CAD programs.


> So, I could bring nurbs and patches to the same
> environment for lighting and such because they'd all be
> polygons at that point, right?)

Yup, sure you can combine together the outputs of various kinds of modeling programs within the same rendering program usually - most of the time for rendering output programs will output polygon mesh data.


> This leads me to another question. What are the limitations on
> the student version?

There are no limits in the software - it's the exact same software as the regular version. The only difference of any kind is that a student license is non-transferable.


- Michael

Michael,

Thank you. You answered a lot of questions. I was sure I could use MoI, it just was starting to look like I need to use other things too.

Voxel manufacturing... that makes sense. Less than millimeter accuracy probably isn't a sculpting priority. I don't suppose perfect geometry is either. conversion to STL... cool, thank you.

Student license... thank you so much on that... it's as nice as rhino's student license. You programmed Rhino too, I thought.

So now I have a question. What is houdini doing(or how?) when I take a sphere, sub-divide it 3 or 4 or 5 times and then just carve right into it. I mean really, it's like a piece of wood or something. Is this sculpting? I really haven't seen any other non-voxel program do anything like this kind of thing without any slow down like houdini does... so it seems rather magical to me. Is houdini converting it to something else to play with it, or what?

Hi Southpaw....
Here is a link that shows some results of a model i made in MoI and sent to shapeways 3d printing, and the result I recieved...

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2984.9

The only difference is now they have a $25.00 "minimum", so gone are the days of getting my model for only 9 dollars..

That is really neat. It seems so foreign to simply give a 3d model and get a result for so little money. I could see how MoI was perfect for making that model too.

Yes. it is very handy if you are going to manufacture somthing in very expensive material to be able to test it out first for $25.00! Actually, very cool for making little "Figures" too!

Holy cats Burr! That's really awesome.

Hi southpaw,

> I was sure I could use MoI, it just was starting to look
> like I need to use other things too.

Yeah, if you want to build models that are not very well defined by profile curves (like human figures for instance), then you probably do want to use a poly/sub-d type modeler for those particular models.


> So now I have a question. What is houdini doing(or how?)
> when I take a sphere, sub-divide it 3 or 4 or 5 times and
> then just carve right into it.

I'm not really familiar with the carving function in houdini - do you have any screenshots of that?

It kind of sounds like you may be painting a displacement map on it though - that's a type of texture that can be applied to an object to make the surface push up or down.

You should be able to see a similar thing in ZBrush or 3D-Coat. ZBrush actually works by displacing polygons, and 3D-coat has multiple modes in it - it has a poly displacement mode and a voxel mode as well.

- Michael

Hi BurrMan are you a fisherman like me??
very nice work

Hey spiderweb,
No, my brothers fish... I never had the patience for it..



But you did recognize a reel drag there... He makes custom components for reels, among other things... He also made the part.. I just modeled it with him.

http://www.rocketreels.com/videos/casting_v_1.wmv

A offset curve command which does not yield a million overlapping line segments would be great 8)
Rainer

> A offset curve command which does not yield a million overlapping line segments would be great

Could that situation be fixed with the Rebuild command?

Perhaps a new addition to the Offset command would be an option to "interpolate" the result curve.

Hi Rainer -

> A offset curve command which does not yield a million
> overlapping line segments would be great 8)

If you've got an example that you've got a problem with, could you please send me the file at moi@moi3d.com or post it here?

Do you possibly have a messy starting curve that already starts out with a million little overlapping bits in it to begin with?

If you want to reduce control point density, then the Rebuild command can work well for that - that's different than having overlapping line segments though.


(EDIT: oops at first I thought this was on Mike's thread and I wrote about starting a new thread but forget that)

- Michael

Michael,

I love that the lines and curves in MoI are anti-aliased. They give a smooth appearance and really do justice to the smooth nature of Bezier type splines.

As a plus, even the corners are perceptively pointy and purely triangular.


However, I noticed that the edges of surfaces and edges (especially with the curves and edges turned off from view) are not anti-aliased. Just left jagged.

I can gather that providing this treatment to the video card rendering would slow it down severely, IF the model was in motion.

But could there be a way to provide this feature when not changing the view-port. Or in other words, a second after movement has stopped,

an anti-aliased version could be updated. On top of that, this complete anti-aliasing of all edges, surfaces and curves could be done only during idle time,

during the instant that there are no calculations, or mouse movement. Being an optional flag in the setup dialog of course.

Moving the view functions, such as panning, dolly and so forth would be done without anti-aliasing as in the past.

But as soon as you stop and look at your work: Man, would it look just that much better.


Maybe this is card dependent or not even possible?... It's just a nifty thought for suggestion.

Thanks, Mike

Hi Mike, yup that is certainly possible to have anti-aliasing on surfaces only, unless you have a lower memory (like less than 256MB say) video card.

That's something that I haven't focused on very much yet because under normal operation you've got the edges being drawn on top of most of those areas which obscures that stuff. Also there is a speed hit involved with doing the surface antialiasing, although this is minimal on modern cards.

But anyway since there are some potential performance consequences of turning it on, it's not something that I can just blindly switch on - it needs some testing with a variety of machines to make sure that it does not get turned on for the more basic and low memory video card situations and cripple those basic cards. Maybe it's something that you'll have to switch on yourself manually in options rather than on by default.

Anyway, it's mostly because under regular operation the edges cover up many of those areas that it has just not been a priority so far at all.

- Michael

Thanks for the insight Michael, if there ever was the option, it would have to be 'off' by default for those reasons.

These are things I would like most to see in MoI and think they would benefit most people using the software

- Surface continuity tools.
- Rebuild surface tool to clean up your surfaces where there a lots of bunched points which happens with many commands like network and 2 rail sweep.
- Ability to sculpt surfaces like Tsplines. (I know, I know you should be using a sub'd modeller for this but far easier if you could do the whole model in nurbs rather than parts of it. Its also far easier to do further work with booleans on nurbs surfaces rather the poly meshes).
- variable radius filleting.
- Patch surface tool for filling holes and where surface continuity is req'd

Some other notes
- Join tool is too model size dependent. Most of the time it doesn't work for me without scaling the model down in size all the time so it would be nice to get further work done on this tool.

Rebuild does exist and there is a reconstruct command too.

Hi Ed...There is a rebuild.. But not for "surfaces".....

My mistake!

Hi all.

here is something I would like to see in V3. In the file I supply, you can see on the default style we have 4 surfaces, on union we have the union command applied, on join we have the join command applied and both give us a solid. But I would like the option to create a solid more like the Final result style shows, where there is a pretty nice and clean solid with no multisegment edge and basically no undesired edge and of course no seams.

May be it could be a kind of solid rebuild kind of command. This is the way I think Michael would implement such a thing.

Regards,
Felix