Thanks to MOI, I found myself trying to do anything in other programs in the same way. Have you any idea how much shortcuts I have learned and how many actions are configured in the 3 button mouse an in the pen? And just like nothing you come with this, this, program and none of that is necessary anymore! ... the nerve!

And for the serious part, I found MOI to be excellent in it's interface and in the way you can "fly" with a wacom tablet and a pen.
This program really "is" what others claim to be: "easy" to learn and handle...

The documentation is really good, and necessary, not because you can't doing nothing without it, but because the combination of tools can give you a lot of different results and if you know how to use them, they can save you a lot of work.

As for the suggestions:

A way to group objects and be able to transform them all together

A"skew" tool

Thank you

Great work!...

Thanks Ket, I'm glad that it is working well for you!

> Thanks to MOI, I found myself trying to do anything in other programs in the same way. <...>

Sometimes I warn people that they might want to be careful getting started in MoI because it can make them end up unhappier with other stuff that they used to be satisfied with before! :)

Somehow once you get used to the flow of working without modifiers all the time, it is easy to get a little resentful every time you need to do a Shift or Shift+Alt or Ctrl+Shift, or whatever, each one is kind of like a little mini interruption. I'm not exactly sure but I think the big thing is that you have to glance down at the keyboard often to hit those kind of key combos. A big shift in the direction that you're looking kind of breaks a feeling of continuous flow...


It was a big risk to develop the MoI UI, since I decided to just pretty much toss out standard conventions and start from scratch. It also took a long time to work on it, just about a year's worth of work just on making the UI work through several different iterations. It's pretty unusual to be able to devote that much time and effort to an experiment, that's why MoI is kind of different than other stuff.

Luckily the experiment seems to be paying off!


> The documentation is really good, and necessary, not because you can't
> doing nothing without it, but because the combination of tools can give you
> a lot of different results and if you know how to use them, they can save
> you a lot of work.

Yup, this exactly right. When I demo MoI, people are frequently surprised at the actual depth in many areas.

Since it doesn't really smack you in the face with lots of stuff, it is easy to assume that things are more limited than they actually are, since more of the standard way to present a lot of functionality is to smack you in the face with it all at once...

Definitely the documentation is going to be a big help in making it easier to learn more of the in-depth stuff. I think that the video tutorials will be especially helpful once I get to that area of the documentation.


> A way to group objects and be able to transform them all together

This is definitely going to be a focus area for version 2. I want to try and incorporate this kind of grouping mechanism as part of an entire set of object organization and browsing tools.

I want to take some time to carefully design that area to try and get some functions similar to grouping, object browsing, and layers, hopefully all in one more combined mechanism instead of as separate things. That's going to take quite a bit of time to work on, so that's why I decided to push that entire area off until version 2 instead of doing it initially.


> A"skew" tool

There are some technical difficulties with certain kinds of skewing on solids like bending or tapering. But if you mean a skew like a shear type operation that kind of shifts thing along a slanted diagonal then that is actually not as difficult - that one should be feasible for V2.


Thanks!
- Michael

- It was a big risk to develop the MoI UI, since I decided to just pretty much toss out standard conventions and start from scratch. It also took a long time to work on it, just about a year's worth of work just on making the UI work through several different iterations. It's pretty unusual to be able to devote that much time and effort to an experiment, that's why MoI is kind of different than other stuff.

Luckily the experiment seems to be paying off!

- Thank you for that vision, is paying off quite well

- I'm not exactly sure but I think the big thing is that you have to glance down at the keyboard often to hit those kind of key combos. A big shift in the direction that you're looking kind of breaks a feeling of continuous flow...

- Besides that, some how every program (or programer) tend to forget the basics, that we the users are used to the same basic commands in any program, in their effor to make the "complex" operations more "easy" after you make the "basic" cube, sphere, etc. you end up with a pile of deformers or cheking how many undoes you have allow the program to handle and in the top of all that, a lot of the same operations have a different name on each program!!!

- As an example, in some of the other posts I read how to extract a curve or anything for that matter, just select it, copy and paste it, easy! nobody thought it was so easy (at least not me)...

- I want to take some time to carefully design that area to try and get some functions similar to grouping, object browsing, and layers, hopefully all in one more combined mechanism instead of as separate things. That's going to take quite a bit of time to work on, so that's why I decided to push that entire area off until version 2 instead of doing it initially.

- Great!

- But if you mean a skew like a shear type operation that kind of shifts thing along a slanted diagonal then that is actually not as difficult - that one should be feasible for V2.

- Yup that's what I meant, and to talk about a specific problem: I had three different curves that I wanted to "skew" to conform a profile, I know that I can do that by moving the points in the curve, but when you have a more complex curve, the result is not precise enough.

- Anyway, this program is by far the easiest and straightforward I have used and you can believe me, I have used a lot in PC, MAC, NeXT, and UNIX operating systems.

Again Great work!

Thank you

Hi Ket - just wanted to let you know about one technique that makes it possible to calculate a shear/skew with curves right now.

It's kind of a sneaky trick, I don't expect it to become a standard operating combination like Copy/Paste of edges is, but it may be useful to you until there is a proper Shear command.

So say for example you want to shear this curve:



Select the curve and run Construct / Planar. This builds a plane surface that is trimmed to the outline of the curve - the curve must be a closed loop for this to work. Hit delete after the planar surface is constructed to delete the original curves.

Now select the surface and use Edit / Show pts to turn on surface control points. There will be 4 points shown at the corners of the plane. The plane is usually quite a bit bigger than the curves, you need to zoom out to see them.



Now you can select the top two points of the surface and slide them over which will produce an exact shearing effect on the trim curves. Extract out the updated Trim curves by Copy / Paste (if you have a lot of little edges, select just one at first and then do Ctrl+A to select all the other edges).



It can also be nicer to use the ShrinkTrimmedSrf command which when applied to the trimmed plane will shrink the plane down so it is right around the trim curves. There isn't a button for ShrinkTrimmedSrf, to use it you have to set up a new keyboard shortcut under Options / Shortcut keys.

Hope this may be useful,

- Michael