Hi All,

I am a very experienced SubD modeller (since early appearance in Lightwave), currently using Modo who, over the years has been
regularly frustrated by the non-cad limitations of said subd's. Many years ago I bought release 1 of Rhino but it was clumsy and counter-intuitive
to learn, and not good at organic stuff. My main line of work is bespoke bottle design, which you'd think subd's would be perfect for. However once
you start trying to add detail like screwcaps etc, you need cad accuracy, which subd's don't have, or booleans....ditto. So anyway, I saw MOI some months
ago after following a Frenchy link from the Amapi forum and liked the look of it a lot, except that I am a Mac user through and through so couldn't use it.(I have a PC, but I
hate the damn thing and never turn it on as it makes me want to hit stuff!). Ho Hum... But, now I have a shiny new 8 core intel mac and parallels 3 and whoop de doop!,
MOI runs lovely so long as I keep in quad view (no problem). I can export beautiful meshes to Modo for rendering and they work like a dream. Brilliant. So I printed out the
80 page manual to get stuck in.

Then.... and here's the point of this rambling post: I surfed over to Rhino's place to see just what was going on there, (while I was in nurbs mode and waiting for the printout).
That's where I discovered T-Splines. My god they look good, like nurby sub-d's. How cool is that. I could build my bottles in Subd mode and trim 'em up in nurb mode and they'd be cad accurate...wow! But, I still don't like the Rhino interface and neither do I like the combined cost of a rhino upgrade and t-spline plugin. So, should I get my head
around MOI and see if I can build my bottles here on the off-chance that maybe one day T-Splines will come to MOI? or, am I kidding myself and should I just go down
the Rhino route. Or maybe MOI is so good I'll never need t-splines??

Now I'm leaning towards MOI because of all the great things the users seem to be saying, but I have a job to do and a living to make and I can't spend ages learning software
that never gets used. I did that with ViaCAD, which seems great on first look but has some major shortfalls that renders it useless.

Any advice from users of both Rhino and MOI would be much appreciated, especially if they also have T-Splines.

cheers
Roger Harris

OK Don't worry. I've answered my own question by finding other posts. I'll see what I can do in MOI, especially as I can export meshes so clean I can sub-d them in Modo
once they are there.

By the way, I need to be able to bend some text around a cylinder (for a bottle cap with text on the edge, like a coin). How do I bend stuff in MOI, I can't seem to find the bend tool?

Thanks

I got Rhino1.0 for free and I still don't use it.

Tips:

export to LWO and load that into modo.
I often have to import 3dm files from Rhino, and again MoI´s 3dm>lwo is a killer

Luxology Coming soon! Rhino 3dm file translator.....

Thanks guy's.

Yannada, that's great news about a 3dm importer for Modo. I'll keep an eye out in the forums. Or was it on Vertex monkey
you saw it?

cheers
Roger

By the way, just in the couple of hours I've spent in MOI this afternoon it's FAR exceeded my expectations. I've been knocking
stuff out in minutes that ViaCAD or Form.Z just can't do or takes ages. Brilliant!

Keep up the good work Michael! You have another convert!

cheers
Roger

http://www.luxology.com/whatismodo/markets_productdesign.aspx

bottom of the page.

Hi Roger, it sounds like you are up and running now - I'm glad that you are being productive in MoI!


> <...> but I have a job to do and a living to make and I can't spend ages learning software
> that never gets used.

This is one of the cooler aspects of MoI - it's easy enough to use that you don't need to invest a huge amount of time before you start being productive in it. This makes it a lot easier to use as a supplementary tool along side of your normal primary modeler.

For models that involve booleans or precision cuts, you can jump into MoI and create it really quickly and then get back to your main modeler.


> By the way, I need to be able to bend some text around a cylinder (for a bottle
> cap with text on the edge, like a coin). How do I bend stuff in MOI, I can't seem
> to find the bend tool?

MoI will be missing a bend tool for version 1.0. It is something that I want to add in the future but it is a fairly tricky area of work to make it function on solids (while maintaining joined edges between surfaces), so I'm not really sure when that will happen.

In the meantime you'll have to use another tool for bending and twisting type squishing. Normally I recommend Rhino V4 for doing those kinds of deformations - but I think that ViaCAD also has a bend tool as well, so that may be worth a try. You should be able to export from ViaCAD as IGES format to read the NURBS surfaces back into MoI.



> Keep up the good work Michael! You have another convert!

Thanks Roger! :)

Over time MoI should get more capabilities that will make it more applicable to bigger chunks of your work. For v1 MoI is focused on just doing more simple Booleaned type models really quickly.

- Michael

Hi yannada, hi Roger,

yannada wrote:

>Luxology Coming soon! Rhino 3dm file translator.....

From what I have heard, that translator will only grab out already existing polygon mesh data from a Rhino .3dm file.

So I don't expect it to do anything with MoI's .3dm files which only contain NURBS data and no polygons in them at all... Just a heads up.

- Michael

Thanks Guy's.

The bend tool in ViaCAD is Pants! However I can jump into form.Z and do the bend, then come back to MOI.

the .3dm reader for Modo is not a problem as the meshes I'm getting out of MOI are rendering really well.
You just need to make sure you delete the polygon normal map in Modo after import or you get weird shading
issues.

Jumping back in now!!

Roger

> You just need to make sure you delete the polygon normal map in Modo
> after import or you get weird shading issues.

Hi Roger, which file format are you using when you are seeing these weird shading issues - .obj or .lwo ?

If it is .obj then it is likely to be something messed up in Modo's .obj importer. But if it is .lwo then there is probably something that I can do to tune this up.

Generally for going into Modo I would recommend .lwo format.

If you have an example that causes messed up shading, could you please send it to me at moi@moi3d.com ? Possibly both the .3dm file and the polygon mesh data? That would let me check it out to see if there is anything I can do to fix it up.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

It's happening with .obj and .lwo but I am only using .lwo to export to Modo. I'm emailing you a file
now and a quick modo render to show the problem.

cheers,
Roger