Hello,

Extrapolation of curves and surfaces would be a great addition to MoI. Scale that model up x10 and you can fillet the edges at .15 to get a complete round on the edges.

Hi Michael.

Have a nice day.

What do you say ? We can except a "hot" October :) ?

V4 is coming ?

Bye!

Hi Michael ...
Yes, I am on pins and needles. You have said 'soon' awhile ago. I'm confused about the definition of that word, :-).
cheers,
eric

Hi Marco & eric - it's getting awfully close! I've got a good path forward for the viewport display, I've been able to modify the rendering library so it matches up with what I need to do and I've got curves and surfaces drawing on screen now.

The main areas left are shaders, background images and text labels, hit testing, and more exploration of a fast path for high memory video cards. I've been thinking that I might release an early version before all that stuff is completely done.

Here's what it looks like at the moment (model by PaQ):



- Michael

Ok Michael!

We're on the right track!

It seems to be a good starting point.

If you create some shader to apply to the base rendering it could become interesting.
I mean, ambient occlusion and some shader with environement illumination/reflection.

I stay tuned.

Thanks.

Hi Marco, well the first priority is for shaders that make curve and surface drawing look the same as V3.

For ambient occlusion that's something that I'd like to look at later on, but probably initially in a simple "offline" renderer. That's not something I'm targeting for the first V4 beta release though.

- Michael

OK. No Problem.

For me the most important things of the new display engines should be these :

1) Improved antialiasing (both for curve/edges and surfaces)

2) No "display glitches"




3) Speed. Moi must take advantage of the modern GPU, if it is installed on the machine where Moi is executed.

I hope these things will be done within the V4 beta period.

Have a nice day.

Hi Michael
Thanks for the response. I can hardly wait to start using the beta 4.
cheers,
eric

Hi Marco, for #1 curve antialiasing in MoI is pretty much already as good as it's possible to do so I don't really expect to be able to improve that in particular. Do you have an example where it isn't working well?

For #2 I'm afraid that display glitches in the viewport display are difficult to avoid without taking a hit in speed at the same time. I do have some ideas on possibly improving that particular type of artifact but it remains to be seen how much of a speed hit will be involved.

For #3, that is something that I do intend to focus on, however your other requests would generally come at the expense of speed so you're kind of asking for mutually opposing things on your list here... ;)

- Michael

Hi Michael.

@You : "..for #1 curve antialiasing in MoI is pretty much already as good as it's possible to do so I don't really expect to be able to improve that in particular. Do you have an example where it isn't working well?.."

Please look at these screen shots and this video : http://take.ms/YULPS



As you can see even if I force the antialiasing with my Gtx 1080 Ti (a beast of Gfx card), the results doesn't change.



And this is the 3dm file : http://take.ms/f2aR5

I made the model intentionally in that way, obtained by curve projected on curved surfaces and then lofted and blendcap.

@You : "..For #3, that is something that I do intend to focus on, however your other requests would generally come at the expense of speed so you're kind of asking for mutually opposing things on your list here... ;).."

Well...I can't believe that with a card like the Gtx 1080 Ti, or even a 1080, 1070 or a modern AMD card, MOI should be slow.

I can understand that you want that Moi runs on every system, also slow computers, but in 2017 it's a shame not to take advantage of modern GPUs.

In this way all the owners of fast and powerful GPU are always penalised.

I hope you understand my point of view.

Thanks a lot for your support.

Bye.

Marco (mkdm)

"""""Here's what i looks like now, with PaQ's model"""""""

Dont know how much i appreciate the beautiful antialiased curves of MoI until their gone!!! Lol

Hi Marco, none of the areas that you are indicating have any curves being drawn there, so that has nothing to do with curve anti-aliasing. It's shaded surface anti-aliasing that you want there. I think that could be possible to add as an option for v4, it just hasn't been a priority since most models have many of those areas covered by edge curves which are anti-aliased and in most cases there isn't a lot of contrast with shaded surfaces silhouettes against the background so aliasing in those spots usually isn't very distracting. You're using a customized background color which makes it more apparent. Additionally there is a speed penalty that comes along with it as well.

I have done some initial experiments with taking advantage of the plentiful amount of VRAM that is available on newer cards. I'm not sure yet if that will be done for the first beta release or not. I think I've got it worked out how to speed up shaded surface rendering when there's a lot of VRAM available but I haven't yet got it worked out for curves yet.

> As you can see even if I force the antialiasing with my Gtx 1080 Ti (a beast of Gfx card), the results doesn't change.

That's good, because if the driver changed that without MoI asking for it that would break selection.


> Well...I can't believe that with a card like the Gtx 1080 Ti, or even a 1080, 1070 or a modern AMD card, MOI should be slow.

Not for a limited size model like you've got there but if you increase the model complexity a lot more then it's a different case.


- Michael

@Burr,

> Dont know how much i appreciate the beautiful antialiased curves of MoI until their gone!!! Lol

Not to worry, I expect it to return! :)

Just getting pixels to be drawn is an important step first. Getting them to look nice again will probably be just about the last thing.

- Michael

Hi Michael.

Good morning.

@You : "...It's shaded surface anti-aliasing that you want there. I think that could be possible to add as an option for v4..."

Yes! It would be very desirable to have that feature. Thanks.

@You : "...I think I've got it worked out how to speed up shaded surface rendering when there's a lot of VRAM available but I haven't yet got it worked out for curves yet..."

Ok. This is good.

@You : "...Not for a limited size model like you've got there but if you increase the model complexity a lot more then it's a different case..."

Yes, you're right. But for very, very complex assembly or model you can always play with the Mesh Angle option.
Please consider that actually, on my laptop with a almost outdated Quadro K3100M with 4GB Ram, I always use a Mesh Angle of 5 without any speed problem also for a (not simple) model like this one (the model it's not mine).
And with my Gtx 1080 Ti I can easily copy and paste the same model many times to have no noticeable speed issue.
Nothing that really impact the modelling process.



I stay tuned.

Have a nice day.

Hi Marco, well although that's not a simple model you show there complexity can go up quite a lot more than that, particularly for large assemblies that someone is importing from another CAD system.

I hope at some point to maybe get rid of the mesh angle setting and try to make it more automatic, like start out with a rough angle and then if things are going well with that do higher density ones on a background thread.

- Michael

Ok Michael. Thanks for the info.

I stay tuned.

Have a nice day.

Hi Michael,

reading Marco's requests about GPU support, i hope it will be not mandatory to use
a modern GPU for MoI V4, because MoI V3 is already fast with it's viewport on my
old iMac. Modern apps like ZBrush or Render Engines like KeyShot don't use a GPU
either and are very fast and can handle lots of geo.

Should this be a feature that can be switched off or on if one needs it than i'm
all for it, otherwise if mandatory i would not upgrade, sorry.

Best regards
Stefan

Hi Stefan.

I cannot speak in place of Michael but knowing his way of deal with Moi, I'm pretty sure that a modern and powerful GPU will NOT be mandatory for V4.

I hope that at least that kind of hardware will be supported as an option.

Bye.

Marco (mkdm)

Hi Stefan, no I don't plan on it being required. The way I'm working to set it up is that if you have a GPU with a lot of memory on it, MoI will use that memory to speed up drawing to help with higher complexity models. If you don't have a whole lot of GPU memory then MoI would work the same as it currently does.

The difference is that MoI currently sends all the polygons to draw from main system memory over to the GPU dynamically for every screen draw. This consumes little GPU memory but when there's a lot of data the transfer time becomes significant. The potential change will be that if there is a lot of GPU memory available I'll send the data over once and keep it there to avoid the transfer time.

MoI v4 will require a somewhat more modern card than v3 and prior did, but I'm talking here about something say within the last 6-7 years or so. V3 supported cards all the way back to the original first GeForce and Radeon 8500 cards which are very ancient now. V4 will need something more modern than that since it will use Direct3D11 on Windows 7+ and OpenGL 2.1 on Mac 10.8+ but these are modest requirements.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

thanks a lot for your detailed explanation, much appreciated!

Best regards
Stefan