Hi Martin, personally I like the minimalism of just plain "MoI" up there instead of any additional labels. But if you wish you can change your installation to have whatever label you want by editing the file SidePaneTitleBar.htm inside the \ui folder, on line 9 change the text that says MoI to MoI v3 or whatever.

That area is actually used currently for a debug menu that will be triggered if you hold down the Ctrl key and click on it, and also if you double click on it that's another way to un-minimize the main window, making it act similar to the title bar on a regular window (it's an old Windows shortcut that double clicking on a title bar does maximize/restore).

It's probably a bit too non-discoverable to use for very much stuff though, because it's more of a title looking thing and doesn't really look like a clickable control. I definitely want to have some way to organize scripts better in the UI, but I would want to have that as a more discoverable button actually labeled "Plugins" or "Scripts" or something like that which would pop up a menu, not quite so hidden.

Hopefully under normal circumstances you should be able to just run everything in the v3 beta rather than v2, but yeah I can see how you haven't been able to do that so well with the inset problems that I'm still working on tuning up. Those stem from updating the geometry library which can be one of the more disruptive types of processes that I have to go through. Once I've tracked down that remaining Inset bug is there any other reason why you'd be working in v2 rather than v3 all the time?

I mean it is good to be able to have v2 around also just in case there is something messed up in v3, but the main goal is to actually get v3 fixed and suitable for regular full time use all the time through the entire beta process. When I update the geometry library, that's one of the things that can tend to throw things a bit out of whack for a little bit though until the kinks are worked out.

- Michael

Hi Michael.

From your reply I learned at least three things about MoI and Windows, one of which is that you're way ahead of me with the idea of using that 'Icon' for something already :-)

I'm using v3 all the time, but being a newbie, if I hit a snag I'll reference back to v2 to see how things behave there, so I do get mixed up on occasion. Editing the file that you mention is easy enough and serves the purpose, so that's what I'll do - and I may just leave it there as evidence, when I upgrade.

Good luck with the bug-finding.




Martin (2).

Hi Martin, just one quick note that I forgot to mention - when you go to edit the file when you launch the text editor that you'll use to edit it (like notepad or whatever you're using) you'll probably need to right-click it and choose "Run as administrator" to run the editor with a special privilege level, because by default recent versions of Windows have kind of locked down everything in the "Program Files" folder to avoid changes to them. But if you've run the editor with elevated privileges then it will work.

- Michael

Michael.

All done now - thanks for the help!


Martin (2).

Michael, I can't find the new setting in the .ini file that turns off script caching so I can test script edits without the need to restart MoI.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the explanation.
Btw I really appreciate the ThinAntiAliasing mode.

++

Hey Michael,

thanks for your reply - I can no longer reproduce it myself. Maybe it was a fluke - on that day the latest Beta behaved rather odd.
I'll keep an eye out for this and if it happens again I'll try to create reproduction steps.

BTW. I start to hit the 32-Bit border regularly now on export. I know you don't plan to do the port to 64 Bit anytime soon, but I'm really looking forward to it.

Cheers,

Tom

Hi Martin,

> Michael, I can't find the new setting in the .ini file that turns off script caching
> so I can test script edits without the need to restart MoI.

Sorry that one is still on my todo list and didn't quite make it into this release. It should make it into the next one.

- Michael

Hi Tom,

> I know you don't plan to do the port to 64 Bit anytime soon, but I'm really looking forward to it.

It's going to involve a whole lot of work, including switching to a new compiler and updating all the various libraries that MoI uses.

I've also just recently completed a similar major porting project in producing the Mac version, and so I'm not really eager to jump again on doing many months of work for just one individual area like this would require, so a 64-bit port will not likely happen anytime soon.

Also in addition to that for larger projects I expect that some particular features like instancing will actually help more than 64-bit-ness, so I don't want to go off into 64-bit work while there are other major feature areas that still need addressing more than that.


If you're hitting limits right now, you probably need to break a really large project up into some separate files.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

There is still something I dont completely get about MoI viewport performance.
(Please forgive me, I dont want to annoy you about that topic ... it's just by curiosity).

If I understand right, it's the curve line segmentation that get the most impact in the drawing performance.

But what about the MoI mesher ? There is a really huge difference of performance when I export a model into polygones, between Shaded display and Shaded + edges.

On an average model (250.000 ngones), shade + edges is about 15fps, while shade only hit the display refresh limit : 60 fps

When I look at the same model in modo, there is no such a big gap between shaded and shaded + wire ... (for both mode I'm at 60 fps).

It's not a complain, and I dont want to compare MoI viewport engine to modo one, but I find the result very interresting.

Maybe there is something in 'modern' graphic card you don't use for compatibily purpose than can really boost lines segments drawing ?
(not sure if it makes sence for you :))

Hi PaQ - that particular area for displaying edges of polygon meshes at mesh export time is a kind of special case area of the drawing engine, before the stuff I was talking about was more for the general case area of the regular working display where there are actual curves being displayed.

Currently MoI does treat those mesh-export polygon edges with basically the same process as curves, so it handles projecting the vertices onto the screen and forming polygons and then sending those polygons to the graphics card. That whole projection process is pretty fundamental for curve drawing since curves need to be broken down into individual separate lines, but for polygon edges it's not really quite the same thing so yeah for that particular area it could be possible to get a speed increase if I were to send 3D lines to the video card rather than textured polygons with the downside being that they won't get any antialiasing on them.

I can probably do an experiment in that one particular area - basically it's not an area that I've focused on a whole lot for performance tuning since it's only something that happens at one particular time (during mesh export) rather than all the time through regular work.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Ok I get it.
I finally understand the difference between the way you draw curves on nurbs models, and polygones wireframe.

and I agree, boosting performance only during the export time is not really important.

Thanks for your time.

Hi PaQ,

> and I agree, boosting performance only during the export time is not really important.

Well at the same time I guess it's also not so bad to have the display look worse (with no antialiasing) at that time either...

Probably what I could do is use a different polygon-edge display method once you got over a certain number of polygons.

This is a lot less tricky area to experiment with than stuff involving the curve display engine so that's something that I'll take a look at.

But yeah for curve display there is certainly a lot more work being done than with a polygon display - surely you've noticed that curves are displayed in MoI very precisely, and when you zoom in they never become jagged? That's because there is a lot of work being done right "on demand" directly in the display engine to refine a curve to make it look smooth right at the current view of it.

That kind of quality makes it so with curves you're always seeing more of what the "true curve" really looks like and not only looking at some rough jagged approximation of it, and in a lot of cases that's like a kind of an always-on built in analysis tool where if you really want to know what the geometry of the curve looks like you can zoom in and see what's happening with it and not have to worry about "is it just a display artifact" ...

So anyway I've tried to focus my optimization efforts on improving speed while still maintaining that same quality level, and I haven't been all that excited about doing things that would degrade quality very much, at least not yet when there was still stuff on the table for improving the full quality speed like the multi-core use which is now in v3. But for mesh export on heavy meshes I probably don't need to worry about that high-quality aspect so much at that particular time.

- Michael

Hi PaQ, also there are a lot of CAD engines that draw NURBS curves all jaggedy looking, there are many for example that draw edges just by drawing the polygon edges of the shaded surface display mesh instead of doing the "show the true curve" way that MoI is focused on.

If you were to try one of those you would probably be surprised at how gross that would appear to you now after being used to MoI's display though... ;)

And not just gross from an aesthetic view only, but it also removes an important visualization and analysis method of being able to see more detail on what a curve is really like when you zoom into it more.

It wouldn't necessarily be bad to have a kind of hybrid mode where at certain times like when orbiting the view it would switch to a low-quality-but-faster mode and switch back again when you're actually drawing... But again it often comes down to "where to put in the effort", and so far I've decided that it's better to put more effort into making the regular full display mode to get speed improvements as more of a priority. With the multi-core work being done now I think I may have just about ran out of things that were potential things to do for that though.

- Michael

A little test of MoI's new DXF import/export functions.

This file was originally done in the '80s to exhibit the precision capabilities of AutoCAD, I think.

The text doesn't show up, but I suppose that's expected because MoI is still growing, but bear in mind this drawing is to scale...

...Try to find the Lunar Lander with its plaque (text is gone, but the frame's there).

Very nice Michael, how circles don't degenerate into very low-count polygons.



Martin (2).

Hi Martin, thanks for testing the DXF import!

Yeah that is normal currently that text will not come in - MoI does not currently have anything set up for "annotation" type entities like dimensions or annotation text so it does not attempt to read those kinds of entities in yet.

MoI's DXF importer will currently read any of these AutoCAD entities: LINE, CIRCLE, ARC, POINT, LWPOLYLINE, POLYLINE, ELLIPSE, SPLINE. Also blocks ("INSERT" elements) and nested blocks are supported and their contents automatically converted into regular geometry.

The text that you are asking about is in the file as a "TEXT" entity and not any of those above geometric entities, so that's why it does not show up.

I think you can use Explode in AutoCAD to convert from "logical text" into just plain line geometry though, if you did that then it should come through.

- Michael

Hi Michael.

I'm posting this file because I'm not sure about the outcome of the fillets around the handle to body intersections.

The main body is a network surface and the handle is a sweep, each made as a solid, unioned, filleted and the whole lot scaled up x 10.

I wondered if there is an continuity issue, as fillets (which had to be done by clicking several times, due I think to the surface seams) don't flow smoothly from one to the next, i.e. there's a distinct join between them.


**Actually, I think it might be a manifestation of this problem http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5376.1 **



Martin (2).

Hi Martin, it's a similar problem as that previous one but a fairly different case inside the filleter itself as the fillet in your case here is made up of multiple different segments and not all one single closed fillet surface.

Do you have this in its pre-filleted state?

Also it looks like this may have been done with the "constant distance" option in filleting? That particular filleting method seems to have some various more problems than some of the other methods, I've sometimes thought that maybe I should remove the option for it since it doesn't work all that well.

- Michael

Hi Michael.

File attached, pre-scaled and pre-filleted.

My vote would be for you to retain the Constant Distance fillet if possible, as it makes a nice compact blend (in this file), which is of a fundamentally different shape to all the other options and I find, suits some situations better.

*TWEAK REQUEST*

I've been using MoI's text tool and it's very nice thank you - could you consider allowing the scroll wheel to adjust font and size? Little video of the feature in CamBam included of what I mean. http://screencast.com/t/RV7Bsen2


Thanks for the constant work you put in.

Martin (2).