It excuses Michael, but is very attractive this software that I am impatient on news MOI V2.

Thanks

Marco

Hi Marco, no news yet sorry. Hopefully not too much longer...

- Michael

Projected upgrade price?

$5 for all V1 users???????????!!!!!!!

Hi Nick, I don't really have it planned out yet... Definitely less than the price of V1 though.

Also just to be clear - the released version 2.0 is quite a ways off, probably something like a year away. What I want to start soon are beta releases of 2.0.

2.0 beta releases will be available to v1 owners without any charges, but they will expire at a fixed date, similar to how the v1 betas worked.

- Michael

will v2 include some hierarchy (object > surface/edge ...) and history concepts ? you know, so you can undo a fillet, change its radius and things like that ?

That's great Michael. Really looking forward to it.

Hi Iwan, I do want to work on a deeper history function for v2 that would allow for more types of editing. But it is a pretty difficult piece of work, I won't really know yet how much I will be able to accomplish for this in v2 until after I have spent a couple of weeks working on that part.

I will probably work on this a little bit later into the beta, initially the focus will be on the grouping/organizing type tools.

- Michael

Yay! Grouping! :) Sorry could not resist.

That's what i really miss in V1 ... and the ability to change the FOV for the 3D-View.

MfG
sk2k

In addition to layers and parts management, I'm hoping that we'll be able to assign "surfaces"; to be able to select a face or object and assign a material name and have that export out so when I'm working on my textures, I don't have to "hunt down" and select all the polygons generated by the mesher for material assignment.

Similar to say Lightwave where you can select a bunch of faces, and assign them to a surface.

I guess MOI would have to keep track of all the polygons generated for each assigned surface when meshed and tag them with the surface name for export. (I never got further than modeling in Rhino so I'm not sure how material assignments carried over to Flamingo and other renderers...)

It's just so much easier to assign surfaces in MOI where there's only a coupla faces, after meshing, there can be tens to hundreds of polys for a single MOI surface!

-Will

Hi Will. I don't know anything about Lightwave, but i imagine it's very similar to Modo. If you export from MoI with unwelded edges. Then you should be able to select the polygons for each surface by selecting all contiguous polygons. In Modo, it's simply a double click...

Would be useful for many people to have material assignments per face, especially if MoI will eventually tie directly into an external render engine. Rhino 4 has a "per face" material assignment as a hidden test command. It's not a fully developed command yet (V5 probably), but it's easy to see the benefit of not breaking your solids for the purpose of mapping regions...

jonah

jonah +1

Hi Will - an "object properties" type mechanism for assigning some basic attributes to objects is also going to be part of the whole object organization batch of work - it should include the type of stuff that you are asking about here.

In the meantime, if you are having some problems assigning materials, you should give the SeparateOBJ.exe utility program a try, you can get that from here:
http://moi3d.com/wiki/Resources#SeparateOBJ_editor

When you run that program, it will let you pick an .obj file saved from MoI, and it will edit the .obj file to break it down into smaller objects which can help make different grouped chunks of the polygon model more easily selectable in certain programs.

That should make it easier to assign materials without needing to select individual polygons.

Like Jonah mentions, for some programs you can just uncheck "Weld vertices along edges" and they know how to separate the chunks out themselves, but some programs won't handle that automatically but do respond better to the additional information that SeparateOBJ.exe adds to the file.

- Michael

Thanks Jonah and Michael, I'll give the utility a tryout!

My problem with seperating parts is the polys don't line up at export time - reworking the topology in the poly editor is hella painful especially for curved surfaces.

That's why I'm hoping that MOI will keep track of the polys generated by the mesher and can assign them based on the surface being meshed...

-Will

PS - I see the MergeOBJ and SeperateOBJ links lead to the same SeperateOBJ download, is that correct?

That's always a problem. I imagine you could import the whole mesh object into Lightwave, make duplicate objects for as many different "regions" as you need, then delete the polygons from each of those objects until only the desired polygon parts remain...

jonah


>>My problem with seperating parts is the polys don't line up at export time - reworking the topology in the poly editor is hella painful especially for curved surfaces.

Hi Will,

> My problem with seperating parts is the polys don't line up at
> export time - reworking the topology in the poly editor is hella
> painful especially for curved surfaces.

That normally means that you have 2 surfaces that are sitting next to one another, but are not actually joined to each other.

If you have a situation like that, you should use Edit/Join to glue surfaces like that into an object that has a shared edge, before exporting to polygons - MoI will do extra work when it finds shared edges like that to align the polygons in that case.

If you just have surfaces that are next to each other but not actually joined, MoI doesn't know about the connection in that case and each one gets meshed totally independently and that can cause slightly different mesh structures there.

If that's not what you are running into, could you please post an example file of one of these problem areas? That would help me figure out what is going wrong there.

In general the polygons are supposed to line up if the pieces are joined...


> PS - I see the MergeOBJ and SeperateOBJ links lead to the same
> SeperateOBJ download, is that correct?

Oops, that was a typo there, thanks for reporting it - fixed now.

- Michael

Thanks guys, yes, Michael, I've seen you say that before about unjoined surfaces will not have matching edges...

I was working on those nurnies of mines and a couple of pipes had disjoined edges starting at the curves - I thought I had joined them, I tested this now with a quick straight/curved pipe and it appears okay this time...

-Will