I have been searching the forum and googling to find the ultimate companion to Moi that does the best fillets and has the fastest workflow out and into Moi. I couldn't find a thorough answer and there has probably been changes and limitations to different programs that make the choices not so obvious.

What are your favorite fillet companion and why?

My own experience is the following:

The best companion:

1. Fusion 360.
Fusion simply made the fastest, easiest and best fillet for my trial model.
I used an iges file for import in Fusion and exported in stp back to Moi.
There are some extra curve lines that wasnt there in the beginning.
Disadvantage: You get a personal free version but it can't be used commercially.

2. Onshape
This one was as good as fusion but it was annoying to import and download the changed model from the cloud.
Disadvantage: You can't use the free account commercially and everyone has access to your models.

3. 123 Design.
123 Design was almost as easy as Fusion but you had to select all edges one by one where as you could select faces more quickly in Fusion 360. The fillet in Fusion seemed to be better as well. In the attached version I had some problems with the corners that I didnt have when I tried initially. I dont know what went wrong.
I had also bad luck with every file type but sat-file type. The size of the model changes when using stp.
Disadvantage: You have to look around on the web to download the software because it's abandonware.

4. RS Designspark Mechanical
This one was tricky to get working. The program is free to download but Step-files are locked for edition and filleting. Moreover you can't export in a format that Moi can read. Before september 2022 you could by an expensive addon module to be able to export in Iges and Step but they changed that possibility - maybe due to too much overlapping with the very expensive other CAD program they make.

After a long time I found a youtube video to unlock the import step file and downloaded a python script to convert the rsdoc file to a sat-file that moi can read. The youtube video link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gethrB_T3Oo

and the file converter python file is: https://github.com/arekm/rsdoc-to-sat/blob/master/rsdoc-to-sat.py (you have to install python and then use CMD to run it).

The actual fillet was a little bit harder to make for me than in 123 Design but maybe that's due to the other workflow.
Disadvantage: Cumbersome workflow and a bit akward fillet process.

5. Viacad Pro
I could only get it to work with sat files. If I tried step or Iges I couldnt orbit or rotate the model. I dont know if it's a bug in Viacad Pro.
I couldn't get the fillet working unless I filleted one edge at a time. There was no way to adjust the fillet with arrows/sliders. You had to input numbers. I couldn't get the same amount of fillet on the outer edges on all sides. The size of the model changed when exported back to Moi and was very tiny.

Disadvantage: The program costs a few hundred $. The filleting was worse than the other programs and Viacad seemed buggy.


I tried Freecad also but couldn't get it to work and fillet the imported moi-model.

The trick of DesignSpark was yet here from 2015! ;)

https://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=6186.18

There is another very young program -
Plasticity.

https://github.com/nkallen/plasticity/releases/tag/v0.1.61

Ah ok. I didn't find it. The good thing is that it's easier to export with the python script.
Stefano mentions it here: https://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=6186.74

You can export the rsdoc directly to sat with that script that uses the sabsatconverter where DesignSpark is installed.

So you can open cmd and just write: rsdoc-to-sat.py myfile.rsdoc
You have to have Python3 installed.

Thanks. It has been discussed here also. The guy that made it did actually work on a node addon to Moi but he abandoned it probably in favor of Plasticity. But I actually forgot to check if Plasticity can import and export sat/igs/stp-files and it can.

I didn't have much luck with it though. I could only get the igs-format to work and Plasticity couldn't fillet the model properly. Actually it was worse than Viacad. But if you can get it to work I will put it up by the rest ;-).

123D Design is still available: Autodesk 123D Design (free)
https://autodesk-123d-design.en.lo4d.com/windows
Best Regards

Hello,
Does any of the solutions above allow for even further editing of the object ? By that I mean, editing features like changing the diameter of a hole by dragging on it - with the related features (like a fillet around said hole) following along as one would expect.

In Fusion 360 you can change the size of a hole after import from Moi. I think that if you have to delete the fillet first and remake it if you want to change a hole with a fillet from both sides. So import hole with fillet, delete fillet. Change hole size and remake fillet.






Fusion: Hole made smaller

Yes true there are old version around the Internet but the problem is that there is no official download from Autodesk so you have to take the risk of downloading a virus infected installation file. That said I took the risk myself and there wasn't any virus in it.

Hello Hans, thank you so much for the reply. Your original post also cleared up the most straight path to go from MOI to Fusion and back (exporting as IGS out of MOI and exporting as STEP out of Fusion for MOI reimport), which is something I was meaning to look into for a while. This worked perfectly.

Edge features are indeed straightforward to remove in Fusion, but a lot more can actually be done with Push/Pull. Now of course the Fusion360 UX is as awful as it has always been and I don't want to spend more than a few seconds in this software, but this will be without a doubt a handy companion to MOI in some cases. Here is some very quick testing on a simple part :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y_k86M0pQU



I know that many users have been asking for a full featured History feature in MOI, but imho this is a bit of a misguided request. I feel like what most people actually need is *some* way to edit features after the fact, but not necessarily on a timeline (even though linear timeline editing is obviously the first idea that comes to mind). This non-linear Push/Pull editing paradigm (which I believe is at the core of DesigSpark) would really work fantastically well in MOI.

Hi pior

I like that you made a youtube video of it. That's actually the easiest way to follow ;-).

I'm glad you could use some of it. I actually did some trial an error before I succeeded in finding a non destructive way to export/import from Moi to Fusion and vice versa. Some of the other formats altered the model wrongly.

Regarding the history feature what you could do is simply copy your model in different states and put them next to each other in chronological order. Just like my attached file with the 6 different models. This could as well be states of the same model.

What you are after seems to me to be a parametric CAD modeller where you can change every little part without changing the whole model or starting over. Solidworks and Onshape can do that and others as well. Allibre can also do it and it's much cheaper. Fusion 360 is also parametric as well.

The best systems has both direct modeling which is the usual faster modeling way and parametric which can change the model without ruining it as a whole but you have to prepare in advance to be able to go back and change different parts of the model.

https://www.designworldonline.com/what-is-parametric-modeling/

https://www.ptc.com/en/blogs/cad/parametric-vs-direct-modeling-which-side-are-you-on

Heya,

Absolutely - I have tried all of these (or almost all of these) in the past, and while these paradigms all have advantages on paper they still don't come close to the raw speed of execution that MOI allows, at least for the kind of work I am doing with it. I also happen to have extremely low tolerance for poorly design user input/interaction, so that doesn't help (but it is beneficial in the long run :D)

But still, the MOI>Fusion>Moi route seems very viable, so again thank you for clearing that path. Amusingly enough Fusion crashed immediately when I closed it after exporting out the part - something 100% to be expected given the disastrous state this software is in.

As for history : that's precisely what I do :) But earlier I meant *construction* history/timeline (with all steps going from sketch to part editable after the fact), which is useful in many cases, but not so useful in others, especially as the number of operations grow. I know it's been requested a lot for MOI but I am not completely convinced just yet. Still, curious to see where that could lead.