Thanks Michael for the detailed answer and insight. I'm a 3D beginner but I see.

I tried to model an 1 meter long threaded rod. Because it didn't work I used a simpler example.

Changing the Mesh angle to 25 helped and the example sweep actually displayed eventually. But your suggestion of joining several short pieces is the way to go for me. Should I use Join or Boolean Connect for this?

Hi Martin - if you have pieces that have edges that are directly on top of each other then you can use Edit > Join. If you're going to do that you would want to delete the end caps of the pieces (or not generate them in the first place by disabling the option in Sweep) before copying them so that the edges to join are open and not already connected between 2 surfaces.

Boolean Union would probably work too, but the booleans generally try to do a kind of more complex task of finding intersections between objects and then cutting them up and removing some material.

If you don't actually need any material to be removed like when you've got surfaces sitting next to one another with their edges actually touching each other then Join will glue those together with a lesser amount of computation than the booleans.

If you've got something like 2 objects that are pushing partway though each other, and you want to combine those, then that's the kind of thing where you would definitely need to use Boolean Union since you would want some intersections between the different surfaces to happen.

- Michael

Seems pretty stable on the iMac with the specs i gave before. I did what I (a newbie) would consider a fairly complex (study see attached). A flow with a high number of spherical solids to a twist to a boolean. When I tried to boolean all at once the it failed to produce the desired result however when I boolean in small bites the the end was successful. The old shortcuts and the scripts I tried work. script for quit Alt+Q or Cmd+Q works well and it holds my changes except for the full screen for which I just click the green button. Will keep testing on other machines.

oK Michael
wait and see...

thanks

Vincent

;-)

A 2.5 OSX release sounds good to me.

Look forward to seeing the public trial version

atb

Paul

Hi Luis, earlier you had reported that it doesn't work on your machine:

> Tried it on an my black macbook with Lion (OSX 10.7.2) but the views
> don't work. only get a big pixelated black ellipses on all of them. doesnt
> matter if I switch to single view either. :(
>
> any suggestions?

Could you please go to the "About this Mac" > System report > "Graphics/Displays" section and post what that screen there says about your display chipset?

Over here I just got in a 13" MacBook Pro with Lion 10.7 which has "Intel HD Graphics 3000" as the display chipset, and I had thought it would help me to test and debug the display problem that you're seeing on your machine, but on this machine the display is working fine without any of the problems that you are seeing.

This is good news for me on one hand that not all Intel chipset systems have a problem. But on the other hand it leaves me wondering what is the difference between this system and your system where it does not work properly.

I guess one difference is that you've got Lion 10.7.2 and this one has just Lion 10.7 - maybe there are some new video driver problems with the update, I'll try to update and see what happens then.

- Michael

>Over here I just got in a 13" MacBook Pro with Lion 10.7 which has "Intel HD Graphics 3000" as the display chipset, and I had thought it would help me to test and debug the display problem that you're seeing on your machine, but on this machine the display is working fine



hey, that is good news!
college students are going to love you :)

Hi Jeff,

> hey, that is good news!
> college students are going to love you :)

Yup, it should help a lot of people out having it work on the low-end machines.

That Intel chipset is not exactly a high performance chipset for 3D graphics though, and so it probably will be more suited for more medium level complexity scenes and not particularly high detail modeling. But it should work fine for quite a lot of kinds of models.

The question is why does not it not work on Luis' machine... Maybe there was some kind of driver glitch in the 10.7.2 update, I'm downloading that now to see if I can repeat it under 10.7.2 - it could be something simple like the updated graphics driver not reporting that it supports some particular function when it actually does do it.

- Michael

OMG... I was just away for a few weeks and now a OSX Beta Version? I just nearly fell off my chair when I read this. Michael has to win some kind of best-customer-listener award or something... :D

*EDIT* Seems to work very well for me on 10.6.8... I'll have a closer look later.

Ok, well I updated this 13" MacBook Pro with the Intel HD Graphics 3000 chipset to Lion 10.7.2 and MoI is still running fine on it...

So Luis, any information you can give me about what your graphics chipset is or if you possibly have any system extensions/haxies running would be helpful.

Also if anyone else is running the MoI OSX beta with an Intel graphics chipset, please let me know if it's working for you or not.

Over here at least it seems to be running fine on it.

- Michael

my black mac has a lowly intel GMA 950 w/ 64MB video ram. no hackies, plain lion (10.7.2) on intel core 2 duo + 4gb main memory (although it can only access 3gb, don't ask me why, ask apple and/or intel). :(

Hi Luis,

> my black mac has a lowly intel GMA 950 w/ 64MB video ram.

I see - so that's the difference. That Intel GMA 950 chipset is much older than the Intel 3000 series.

On Windows, MoI can actually run on a GMA950, but on the Mac the display system that it uses needs to have certain OpenGL features available, and most likely the GMA950 just does not have the particular OpenGL function that is needed.

I'm sorry but I'm not too optimistic about making it work.

It looks like the MacBook line switched away from using the Intel GMA 950 back in 2007, so as far as I can tell I can't actually buy a new machine from Apple that has that graphics chipset in it anymore.

Right now to use MoI on that machine would involve using Boot Camp to boot to Windows, then MoI would run there.

On top of all that, the GMA950 is basically at the extreme far low end of things as far as 3D graphics computing horsepower goes. It's just not a very good system to use for 3D graphics oriented programs.

- Michael

I'm sure it's between OSX and the way they enable OpenGL, since Moi ran just fine on the same machine with Vista + W7.

I also tried it with Linux Mint + wineconfig a while back and was able to get the viewports going just fine at one point, but the rest of the ui would just not work properly...probably cause the wine 1.3 libs were still under heavy development (i think they were on alpha at that point)...

since then i reloaded the mac with lion and haven't looked back...

Hi Michael,

thanks for your efforts on the Intel graphics, but actually there is probably a little misunderstanding. There are quite a few chips with a 3000 in the name. Here is a short chronological list (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMA_X3100 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_Graphics ):

Graphic chips on motherboard:
Intel GMA 950 (MacBook 2006 - mid 2007) Luis's MacBook
Intel GMA 3000
Intel GMA X3000
Intel GMA X3100 (MacBook late 2007 - late 2008) My MacBook
Intel GMA X3500

Graphic chips on CPU chip (Sandybridge):
Intel HD Graphics 2000
Intel HD Graphics 3000 (MacBook Pro 13") Your MacBook Pro

Hope that helps a bit...
Chyman

I'm very excited to see MoI coming out for Mac OS X (even if it's running under X11). I'd truly love to see MoI on the iPad ;-)

I've got a v1 license (which I still use via VMWare Fusion), so my question is if I pay for an upgrade to v2 to get access to v3 beta will I then need to pay for another upgrade to get to v3 when it is released?

Hi Chyman, yup I was just figuring that out, that the "GMA" 3000 or x3000 is a different one than Intel HD 3000.

So far I know:

Does not work:
Intel GMA 950 chipset

Does work:
Intel HD Graphics 3000
All nVidia and ATI graphics seem to be working fine.


So far I do not know about the GMA 3000/x3000 ones.

Those are actually quite a bit newer than the GMA 950 though - the GMA 950 is particularly old. The 950 dates back to around 2005 and even right at that time that it was introduced it was at the extreme low end of the performance pile even then.


If anyone is running the current OSX beta with one of the GMA 3000 or x3000 Intel chipsets, please post how it is working for you.

And Chyman, you will be able to test it in just a few more weeks here when I release the public test version.


The GMA x3000/x3100 is a pretty substantial step up from the ones before that, so I have a pretty good expectation that it should work. According to the chart here the x3000/x3100 support OpenGL 2.0 which I think should be sufficient:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#Graphics_Media_Accelerator

I think that the cutoff point is actually probably OpenGL 1.5 level hardware - I think the current build needs support for "Vertex Buffer Objects" (VBO) - the GMA 950 only supports OpenGL 1.4 and that's missing VBOs.

I will continue to look a bit more though, I think that Wine actually has a fallback path for "no VBO" support but it appears to be buggy.


- Michael

Hi podperson,

> I'm very excited to see MoI coming out for Mac OS X
> (even if it's running under X11).

Don't worry - I'll be tweaking it some more with a few more native access points like with a native file dialog. By the time it's finished I think the main thing you'll have to live with is just an "X" in the title, hopefully that by itself is not enough to cause problems.


> I'd truly love to see MoI on the iPad ;-)

Unfortunately that's a very much different thing - the iPad uses a completely different kind of CPU than regular Macs, and so the porting method that I'm currently using is not possible to use for an iPad. Doing an iPad version would require such an extensive rewrite that I don't think that it realistically has much chance of happening anytime soon.


> I've got a v1 license (which I still use via VMWare Fusion), so my
> question is if I pay for an upgrade to v2 to get access to v3 beta
> will I then need to pay for another upgrade to get to v3 when it
> is released?

You will have to pay for a v3 upgrade if you want to use v3 when it is finished - that will be something like a year from now.

However, if you upgrade to v2 now you will not have to pay anything to get the v2.5 release which will be an OSX-specific release that I'll be putting out much sooner than v3, targeting something like the beginning of next year.

The v2.5 OSX release will be available to current v2 owners to download and use their same v2 license with without any extra purchase. It will also be a version that brand new customers who were waiting for an OSX version will be able to purchase instead of waiting all the way until v3 is released which is what I was originally going to do.

- Michael

Ok - I'm getting a little more zeroed in on the graphics chipset issue.

It looks like the thing that is required is OpenGL Frame Buffer Objects (FBO) which were introduced with OpenGL 3.0 .

It looks like this means that the minimum required at the moment is:

Radeon: HD series
GeForce: GeForce 8 or higher
Intel: Intel HD Graphics 2000 or 3000 (not any GMA version it looks like).


There is a fallback path which is supposed to allow things to work if FBO is not available, but it appears to be buggy for the case of multiple swapchains being used. I'll be digging into that to see if I can solve it.

- Michael

I'm noticing a strange behaviour which could probably be a bug.

MoI suddenly doesn't respond until I hit the esc key and then I'm stuck in "rotation mode". I'm not able to select anything all mouse actions rotate the model instead. In this mode the keyboard shortcuts also do not work. Other than this MoI works as expected. The only solution to get out of this was to quit and restart MoI.

I'm sorry that I'm not able to be more specific but I noticed this at least two times in the last days. I cant say what causes it. Did anyone also notice this?

Hi Martin, that definitely sounds like a bug but one that will be hard to track down without being able to reproduce it.

Please let me know if you see any pattern to it in the future like if it happens after some particular command is run or something like that.

Thanks,
- Michael