Hi !!

Just discovered MOI and am pretty enthusiastic as it may [ hopefully ;-) ] turn out to be a great
complementary tool for modelling purposes where Cinema 4D reaches its limits regarding precision
modelling. There are two spline-patching tools available for Cinema but it gets complicated very
soon to work with them, so I am considering to make use of a nurbs-modeller like MOI.


I am impressed by the efforts of the developer to exchange information with the user community
and am sending him regards and congratulations for his work.


I have some questions regarding the compatibility between MOI and Cinema :

- Is it possible to export splines from Cinema and use them as Curves in MOI ? (tips ?)
- What is the best method to export models from MOI into Cinema ? (tips ?)


Kind regards :-)

- What is the best method to export models from MOI into Cinema ? (tips ?)
Format OBJ

- Is it possible to export splines from Cinema and use them as Curves in MOI ? (tips ?)
Just look the formats permited by Moi
3dm, igs,iges, Ai,Eps,Pdf
One of them can be works ;)

Adding a question :

Does MOI offer "tweening" between 2 curves?

Thank you. ]

Thank you for answering.

I just exported a spline in Illustrator format but what I got
imported in MOI had a complete different shape.

Thats why I answered as someone may have some
experience with this kind of operation.

Hi Tom, welcome to MoI!

MoI has a pretty different modeling approach from Cinema4D, you may find it especially useful for building industrial or mechanical type shapes quickly, with precision. Like Pilou mentioned, use OBJ format to export models from MoI into Cinema4D.

> Does MOI offer "tweening" between 2 curves?

No, not in the 1.0 version.


> I just exported a spline in Illustrator format but what I got
> imported in MOI had a complete different shape.

Could you please attach the file here or send it to me at moi@moi3d.com so I can check it out and see what might be going wrong?

- Michael

Sorry for my french :(
My slave Frenchy Pilou, you translated :-)

J'ai fait pas mal d'objets et scènes entières avec MoI + C4D et tous marche nickel par l'export Obj, il n’y a pas mieux pour l'export vers C4D

On peu aussi exporter le tracé des courbes MoI vers C4D par AI (en plan 2d uniquement), ça marche super, notamment pour faire les objets en (fausses)NURBS de C4D

L'export des courbes C4D n'est pas faisable, sauf peut être en trouvant un plug-in qui export le courbes en AI. Mais j'en vois vraiment pas l'intérêt, puisque dans les courbes, c'est justement la que MoI fait 100x mieux le travail. Faut tout faire dans MoI, et surtout les courbes. Il faut revoir sa méthode de travail, et tout ira bien :-)

Frenchy Pilou becomes lazy. He doesn't translate within ten seconds anymore... Hehe.
So I'm gonna try to do it... ;-)

Steph has created a lot of objects and scenes with MoI and C4D. Everything works great when exporting in OBJ format. There's no better format for export from MoI to C4D.

You can export MoI curves to C4D by using AI (Illustrator) format. It works great but only for planar curves. You can then easily create your objects like you would do with the "NURBS" curves of C4D.

You can not export curves from C4D (unless maybe by finding and using a plug-in that would allow export in AI format). Steph doesn't see any interest to do that because he finds that MoI curves are 100 times better. Do everything into MoI, especially the curves. Just re-think your workflow and everything will be fine...

Hope this helps...

thx Schbeurd ;)

Hey, amazing support here !! I`ve sent the Illustrator-file to the MOI-Mastermind :-)

Well, even being just 10 minutes into MOI I realized that drawing curves is much better
than in Cinema.

. . . . but . . .

in this curent project I make use of an tween-tool for generating lots of interpolated
curves between two "leads" what, as Michael said, is currently not possible in MOI.
Thats why I thought about importing the whole array of splines.


What is you experience with imported objects ? Are they only useful for rendering purposes ?
Or does the mesh-structure allow further reworking in Cinema ?

Thank you for helping [TOM]

On peu modifier les objets importé de MoI dans C4D comme n'importe quels autres objets poly fait avec C4D, surtout que MoI exporte très bien des objets propres en n-gon parfaitement gérer par C4D à partir de sa version 9.

Seul problème trouver, quand on modifier les polygones des objets importer, on abime parfois les infos des normales du lissage phong parfaitement généré par MOI, et ça peu posé quelques problèmes de rendus, surtout sur les objets en basse résolution ( réglable à l'import )

translation ;)
We can modify imported objects in C4D from Moi as any else poly object made with C4D, especially Moi has a very good system of NGon export very clean, so C4D can manage it very easily from the version 9

Just a little problem
the good UV Phong + normal of smoothing from Moi can be altered when the object are modified in C4D in low resolution (so just divide after the importation)

Thanks a lot for the french-english cooperation ;-)

Is there a special secret to filleting !! I try and try but no results.

Tries results as simple as a box :

1) Selected the box
2) Filet > entered a radius
3) Finish
4) Nothing happened :-[

Ok solved that question by restarting the PC
Must have been a hardware fault as it works now

"Tweener" curves can be achieved using the "sweep" command with 2 rails and 2 profiles. see in this example image:

1) the 2 source curves to be "tweened"
2) draw 2 line segments, snapping to the midpoint of distance bewtween the ends of each curve
3) use the Sweep command, selecting the 2 curves as the rails, and the two lines as the profiles.
4) Select the edge of the surface, and Copy/Paste to extract the tweener curve.

jonah

Thank you - great tip !!
What if I need a larger amount of tweens ?

I am attaching a "spline sketch" done in Cinema as concept for a glass vase.

The modeling challenge is the surface : It is not thought to be clean but
consist of ripples, each ripple being defined by the respective splines.
Adding a second image to show what I mean by "ripples"

easy. Set up the profile lines as i explained in previous post. then you draw another line segment snapped to the end of one of the profile lines. Then make mulptile copies of this new line segment using "Array" along curve. this should give you any set # of copies along the line. Use the trim command to divide the profile line into pieces. then select all the profile segments and join together again. repeat process to create the second sweep profile. Now you can use "Sweep" as explained earlier and the resulting output will be a polysurface. Highlight select the edges on the polysurface and Copy/Paste to extract all of your tweeners...

jonah

"Now you can use "Sweep" as explained earlier and the resulting output will be a polysurface. Highlight select the edges on the polysurface and Copy/Paste to extract all of your tweeners..."

I have done it this way but stopped after obtaining a polysurface as attached.

1) I did not figure out how to tell MOI how MANY tweens I wanted to obtain
as no respective dialog popped up ??
2) I did not know how to highlight the tweens ??


Second attachment is a "rippled" surface done in Cinema.

attachments

Here is a very quick video of how to setup the multiple tweener curves. Sorry i don't have time to properly edit the cursor timing as I am on my way out the door!

jonah

OOPS! try this one...

Very sweet support here thx ;-{)