@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Please consider that actually, on my laptop with a almost outdated Quadro K3100M with 4GB Ram, I always use a Mesh Angle of 5 without any speed problem also for a (not simple) model like this one (the model it's not mine).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

For me persoanlly I'm interested to see how the V4 handles large models (250mb +) .. also exporting to PDF or ai is always running out of memory.

Fingers crossed it won't be long before i can give v4 a good workout :-)

Matt

Feature Requests:
In case these haven't been mentioned before...

1) Layer panel grouping-- extremely helpful for large assemblies with a lot of parts.

2) Sizing or scrolling of the layer panel to be able to see long names on imported assemblies.

Many engineers name things like targeting multi-level objects in coding. i.e productName.areaOfProduct.feature1.areqOfFeature1.blah1.blah1a.blah1a1.finallyAUniqueName. Currently the layer panel looks like a long list of identical names, as only the left "common" part shows.


Also , 64bit. I know you have mentioned this would be a lot of work, but I wanted to put in another plug for it, as currently complicated solids frequently bump into memory limits when exporting.

Hi fred, 64bit has been a lot of work but I have been working on it for quite a while now and it's almost ready. So the first v4 beta will have the 64-bit part.

I also want to improve the handling of long names in the scene browser like you're asking about. That won't be ready for the first v4 beta but I want to work on that during the beta test period. In the meantime it is possible to adjust the width of the scene browser panel to be wider by editing one of the text files that has the UI setup in it, please see here for some details on that: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5319.2 . The instructions there for where the file is located are for Mac, for Windows look under the ui folder inside MoI's main installation folder.

- Michael

I'm sorry, Michael, MoI V4 is taking too long. We have no other choice but to switch to… switch to…… uh……….. I give up. There's no alternative. We'll wait. ;)

Hi Metin, :) I hope it will be worth the wait! The first release will probably be a little underwhelming since it's mainly foundational stuff that is improved. But it will be good to be 64-bit and to have a more stable Mac version. I am looking forward to work on new features instead of rewriting.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

;) I totally understand. I'm really looking forward to work with the native MoI for Mac, and of course to the subsequent feature additions.

Thanks, and have a nice weekend everyone,

For the MoI help button, would it be helpful to have a customizable section,
in order to provide some help with add-on scripts?
Versus using an alert window...

And a way to quickly locate the relevant help, say for some script?

- Brian

Hi Brian,

re:
> And a way to quickly locate the relevant help, say for some script?

The way it works currently is that if you're in a command when you push the Help button, it will launch the help file reference help file going to the location for that command. So for example if you run the Line command and push Help before you exit the command, the help file should open up to the Line command.

If there is not any command currently running when you push Help, it opens to the table of contents page of the help file.

The part that's difficult about help for new scripts is that help file is currently set up as a static HTML page.

- Michael

Hello guys, MoI newbie right here! :)

A while ago I started testing the demo version out for a while and already love the workflow that MoI offers.
I would like to purchase it - I just have one question: since it looks like version 4 is around the corner,
is an update to version 4 also included if I'd buy V3 right now?

Thanks!

Hi TheFlow, I'm glad that you're liking MoI!

It's actually the first beta release of v4 that is right around the corner, that will start the beta testing period which could last anywhere from 6-12 months and the final v4 release won't happen until after that.

So the final v4 release is still a ways off and if you purchased v3 right now it's not likely that v4 would be automatically included, that will only happen if you purchased it within a couple of months or so of the final release.

- Michael

Hi Michael! Thank you for your quick answer. I can live with that, just wanted to clarify it a little. So let's go! :)

A minor wish:-)
Script numeric entry keypad restricted to non-negative numbers.

A minor question:
Is there a method to restrict keyboard entry of numbers to be greater than the previous entry of a different parameter value.
Example, Dupin Cyclide had a cRadius which can be any positive value. The aRadius has a positive value which must be greater than the cRadius.
I could replace the aRadius entry with delta_aRadius = aRadius - cRadius.

- Brian