Hi Everyone

I've been meaning to learn CAD for a few years. I found out about MoI a few years ago, lurked around the forum here and there and then finally bit the bullet and got MoI in January this year (I thought I might as well learn when I've got time on my hands during lockdown). I used Autodesk for about a week at school like 15 years ago, and tried a bit of Blender many years ago, that's about all my experience with 3D modelling. Having used MoI for a few months now, I'm really enjoying it and am finding it very intuitive to learn.

I just thought I'd show a couple of things I've been working on and also ask a couple of questions as I feel like I need to learn some more advanced techniques that I'm finding tricky to find all the information about.

As a bit of background, I have a small company making props for film/TV/theatre here in the UK. So the things I've been designing are mainly props as kind of 'portfolio' pieces whilst I get my head around the process. I'll hopefully be making some of them into real items for our portfolio in the future.

Partisan type spear head. The first thing I made in MoI and it took me far too long..:


Mostly messing around with flow and twist functions here:





Trying to go as ornate as I could on this one as a challenge. I modelled the gold leaves on this in Blender using polys, then imported into MoI and used lots of the Flow function to arrange them on the solids:








In terms of questions:

Is there somewhere that I can find a list of functions that don't have buttons directly in the UI? Somewhere hidden on the wiki? For example I've been using the 'Rebuild' function that I just happened to stumble across in the forum. If I hadn't have stumbled across it I might not have known it was there, and it's very useful. I'm pretty sure there's a related function for joining curves or edges without having the sharp points (a bit different to the normal join function), but I don't recall the name of that one, so it's lost to the ether for me...

Is there any more info about subdivision techniques with MoI out there? Tutorials anyone has seen? I know there are a few forum posts about it and there are Max's SubD scripts, but I haven't fully got my head around it, and I haven't really been using any scripts so far either. I think it would be very useful for some more organic forms to do this directly in MoI.

It would be great, but understandably might me a bit of an undertaking, to have a list of scripts and a basic description of their function on the wiki. I know there are some really useful one's but it's a bit impossible to browse through them and find useful ones as they are spread about the forum and other websites without necessarily a concise description of what they actually do.

Thanks to Michael for the great software, and thanks to all the friendly and helpful forum users!

Hi DanC,

I'd say your initial efforts at modeling are quite impressive, well done!

To your question about the commands that don't have UI elements, click on Help, then Command reference and look underneath Additional commands.

I agree, it is challenging to find scripts that others have contributed. The good news is that there are many interesting solutions, but you've got to search them out. I find using DuckDuckGo or Google with the site:moi3d.com tag on the search augments the forum's search capability.

--Larry

Hi,

You could see this page : http://moi3d.com/4.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#Additional%20commands

Have fun

About subdivision inside Moi a little thread here! ;)

https://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=9689.1

Hi Dan, those are some great results you're getting!

> Is there any more info about subdivision techniques with MoI out there? Tutorials anyone has
> seen? I know there are a few forum posts about it and there are Max's SubD scripts, but I haven't
> fully got my head around it, and I haven't really been using any scripts so far either. I think it
> would be very useful for some more organic forms to do this directly in MoI.

Some tutorials here:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=8845.16
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=7389.1

But I'd recommend using a sub-d modeling program to make your sub-d models, not MoI. You can import the model into MoI as a base shape to do further work off of using the SubD > Create > From file command in MoI.

- Michael

Thank you all!

Somehow I hadn't noticed that those additional commands were in the help file. I guess I'd never made it that far down!

Thank you for those links to SubDiv tutorials. Yes, I have looked at that thread that Pilou posted a number of times, that's the main one I had come across, but I couldn't find a huge amount describing actually how to do it for someone who's not actually at all familiar with the scripts.

The two that you posted Michael look to be a bit more in depth about the process so they will be very helpful, thanks!

In terms of using a dedicated poly modelling program for subdivision modelling, yes I fully understand. I actually modelled the leaves on the last sword in Blender as they were far too complex and organic to do with Nurbs (SubDiv or not). But there are some relatively simple organic shapes that I find myself needing quite regularly that I think would be quickest and easiest to model SubDiv model in MoI directly as it will save time on all the import/export and swapping software/methods in order to get an object that fits with the existing parts of the model. I might post an example of a situation that I would use it in. It certainly wouldn't be every model, or large parts of the model, but I think it would be very useful in some specific situations. So I want to learn it as a kind of additional tool in the toolbox for a specific task, rather than trying to use the wrong tool for the wrong job. If it's better to be done with actual poly modelling, I'll just use Blender.