It seems a lot like LineWeb.
Maybe some of the new crv methods of MoI4beta could be adapted...(?)...coplanar tangents...

- Brian

Hi pafurijaz,

> Hi to all a think this was asked before but with upcoming version a figure out if planed
> a script or a new command to develop surfaces inside moi like Rhino here
> https://wiki.mcneel.com/labs/devsrf

Sorry no there are not currently any plans for developable surface focused tools in MoI. I would recommend using Rhino for those particular tools.

- Michael

Hey Michael!

Hope it's not too late for the next beta but I've found another model of mine which MOI 3.0 seems to have trouble with and it's different enough from the previous ones that I think it might possibly be a different bug than the one already addressed. So I thought I'd upload it here so you can maybe test the latest 4.0 beta with it as well.

I provided the problem model in .sat, .step and .3dm (Rhino 5) format in the attached archive file. Can you please test this .3dm as well? I promise I'll stop bugging you afterwards :)

Thank you!

Best regards,

Larry!

Hi Larry, thanks for sending it in, it is indeed a different bug than the other one. Actually it's 2 bugs, the first one is in display mesh generation and the second one was in the same area of code as that previous bug but in a slightly different thing.

The display mesh bug is the one that looks like this:


So the problem is if this edge here is not refined with enough points:



It's going to cross over the inner boundary like this:



That one will go away during mesh export if you use a tight enough angle like 6 degrees or lower. This one is pretty difficult to fix because it would involve testing a lot of edges against each other to see if they intersect or not which would be a major performance degradation in display mesh generation. In the future maybe I could try something like only do that additional testing if the mesh was damaged. But it's basically a display artifact and the actual model is ok there and will also be ok during mesh export using a tight enough angle. Even without a tight enough angle the export mesh doesn't leak out so badly and the damage is contained just to that small area. So I'm not expecting to fix this one in v4.

All the other messed up areas are from the 2nd bug which I've fixed for the next v4 beta so in the next beta the export will look like this:




> I promise I'll stop bugging you afterwards :)

:) It's not any problem at all in fact I really appreciate you sending them in so I can get them fixed in v4! If you run into any more please go ahead and send them. If it's more convenient you can e-mail them to me at moi@moi3d.com .

MoI itself does not happen to write out .3dm files with the thing that involves these bugs, that's why they've stayed hidden for quite a while.

Thanks, - Michael

Hi Michael,
With PDF export is it possible to control line widths for export - please find same file exported to PDF on MOI3 and MOI4.

Have checked INI file but not sure where to make changes.

thanks
Alex.

Hi Alex, yes when exporting a solid where it will create a hidden-line drawing, it is possible in both MoI v3 and v4 to control the line widths by using the "Line style options" button in the PDF export options dialog:



Then on the "Line style options" dialog, the widths are controlled by this column here:



It appears that your v4 export is using the default values while your v3 export has had them modified.

Did you do the v3 and v4 export from different machines though or from the same machine? If it's on a different machine then you would want to modify your v4 settings to match what you have on v3. If it's on the same machine that might be some kind of bug since the values should be coming from the same section in moi.ini for both v3 and v4.

If you want to sync up 2 moi.ini files, you would copy over the [AI/PDF Export] section from your v3 to your v4.

- Michael

Thanks again Michael - sorry on my part for missing the obvious I presumed the Line Style Options Box was referring to the tick boxes above and never clicked on that. All AOK your in depth support is priceless.

regards
Alex.

After my recent re-install to SSD drive:

The moi.ini file is in the appdata directory, and is being used by both MoI3 and MoI4Beta, which is a problem when trying to use the same hotkey
for nodeeditor for both MoI3 and MoI4Beta.


- Brian

I see on my old laptop, which lacks V4beta, that MoI3 saves moi.ini to %appdata%.

So on my main SSD drive computer, I have only Moi directory in appdata. Maybe I need Moi3 and Moi4beta directory there?

Hi Brian, probably the easiest solution would be to make the shortcut key do different things depending on the MoI version that it is running inside of.

That would be like this:

script: if ( moi.majorVersionNumber == 3 ) { moi.ui.alert('running in v3'); } else if ( moi.majorVersionNumber == 4 ) { moi.ui.alert('running in v4'); }

Then that way you don't have to have separate moi.ini files just to have that one thing different.

If you do want to have separate moi.ini files there are a couple of ways to do that.

One is to move the moi.ini file to be in the install directory in the same location as MoI.exe . If MoI finds a moi.ini file there it will use that instead of getting it from %appdata%\moi . However, by default Windows restricts programs running at a regular privilege level from modifying the contents of the Program Files directory so you would need to run MoI at an elevated privilege level for it to be able to save your settings out. You would do that by setting the "Run as administrator" option in the properties of the shortcut you use to launch MoI.

Then the other way is that you can pass the path to a moi.ini file to MoI.exe as a command line parameter, putting " " around it if there are any spaces in the path. When MoI.exe is given a command line parameter that ends in ".ini" it will use that as the .ini file for reading and writing settings. You could have it in the regular appdata folder and name it moiv4.ini for example.

Hope that helps!

- Michael

Thank you Michael.

2nd method, v3 Moi.ini in same folder as v3 Moi.exe, with admin. priv. in icon key for MoI3 works well, but it is necessary to use admin. priv. for each reboot of Windows 10.

v4Beta Moi.ini still good in %appdata%

I'll look at the other methods...

- Brian

Hi Michael.

Is there way to Export Selected only geometry (I'm exporting to OBJ)?
I'd just like to pick some surfaces and export only those instead whole model or instead hiding parts i don't want to export first.

If there is not such thing please consider it as feature for v4 :).

Thanks

EDIT: Ignore my message, I'm an idiot, i've not noticed those 3 yellow rings on Export button :) :).

No problem Lewis! I have considered making that button say "Export selected" to help clarify that but it's unfortunately a difficult place to put in more text. Either it would need to word wrap and have "Export selected" on 2 lines, making extra space underneath the other buttons or if it was one line that button would be really wide.

- Michael

Yes i understand, there is no more room for text, Maybe add another Export icon (without rings next to it so one would be export (all) and then current one would be more noticeable as Export Selected (yellow rings).

Just an idea for easier visual feedback, no big deal one I've RTFM :).

Hi Lewis,

re:
>? Maybe add another Export icon (without rings next to it so one would be export (all) and
> then current one would be more noticeable as Export Selected (yellow rings).

The problem there is that Save As already does that job, so there would be 2 icons there doing the same function...

- Michael

Hi Micheal,

I love MoI -- in particular the simplified interface. Thanks for creating this great piece of software!

On macOS (10.14.6) the V4 beta has an annoying issue. When I pan or rotate with the mouse there is a short delay before MoI reacts to the mouse gesture. MoI V3 does not have this issue, so my guess is that it have something to do with your current rewrite of MoI as a native macOS app.

Have a great day,

Nis

Hi Nis, I haven't seen that problem over here. What is your hardware?

One of the big differences after the rewrite is that MoI v4 now supports Retina screen resolutions, that means that on a retina screen MoI draws the viewport at 4 times the resolution of v3. If you're on a somewhat older machine maybe that's enough extra work to bog things down a bit.

Do you see any difference if you right click the v4 app and choose "Get Info" and then check the "Open in Low Resolution" checkbox?

Thanks, - Michael

Hi Michael,

I tried to enable "open in low resolution" in "get info" and it actually helped a bit -- though it didn't completely solve the problem.

I have two Macs and the problem occurs on both of them. One is an 27 inch iMac from 2014 and the other is a MacBook Pro from 2017. I've attached specs for both of them.

Here's a link to a video that demonstrates the problem (I've used wetransfer, so it should work for one week from now):

https://we.tl/t-x0f3VXXoik

Since you can't see my mouse, I'll explain what I am doing; I move the mouse to a random position, wait, press the middle button, and then start panning. As you can see in the video there is a delay (while the mouse moves) before MoI recognizes the mouse gesture.

I regularly use Blender, Substance Painter, Onshape, ZBrush and other 3D software, and I've never encountered this issue in either of those programs. Also panning/orbiting works fine in MoI V3. I've tried two different mouses (Magic Mouse and 3DConnexion Cad Mouse) -- it makes no difference.

An important thing that I just discovered is that orbiting works perfect when I press ALT and then use the left mouse button; hence it cannot be related to hardware issues. It only happens when I pan/orbit with the middle/right mouse button.


Best regards,

Nis

...Being a Mac programmer myself, I think it could be related to NSGestureRecognizer (if you use that). Sometimes in order to handle multiple types of gestures the user needs to move the mouse around quite a bit, before NSGestureRecognizer recognises what particular gesture he/she is doing. I don't know if this is the problem, but at least it is worth to look into.

Best regards,

Nis

Hi Nis, thanks for the video. So what's going on there is that MoI waits until you have moved the mouse a certain distance before it starts doing a drag operation. That's so a press and release "click" can be distinguished from a hold and drag.

I looked over the code involved and I do see a bug though where on a Retina display it's incorrectly waiting for double the distance to be traveled compared to V3. So on V4 (on Retina) you need to move the mouse 30 "window coordinate" pixels for the pan or orbit to start while on V3 it was only 15 pixels. I'll fix that for the next beta release.

When "open in low resolution" is enabled though you should be seeing the same behavior between v3 and v4, if you do the same test in V3 and move the mouse very slowly like that you should see the same thing happening, that's intended behavior.

Thanks,
- Michael

Hi Nis, it looks like there are a couple of other similar kind of subtle unintended mouse behavior bugs in v4 on Retina like when you're panning the border region size for how close you need to be to the outer viewport border for "auto pan" to engage is also incorrectly doubled.

I'll get those tuned up too, thanks for reporting the bug!

- Michael