I love the way MoI looks. The elegant simplicity reminds me of a polygon program called Amapi that I used about seven years ago. I was spoiled by it's unique tool selection solution and intuitive operation.

I want to create some antique furniture models with MoI and also some organic forms that will appear on the shelves of the antique bookcases I create. I will do most of the furniture construction in MoI for export to a detailing program for texturing and rendering. There will be some objects that I will place on the shelves of the antique furniture. I plan to rough out these forms in MoI and export for detailing etc.

My question is: will MoI export these roughed out organic forms in polygon form that is suitable for detailing/sculpting in a program such as Silo or Modo? Would I be better off just doing everything for these objects in the other programs? My aim is quick easy "sketching" of the object in 3D in MoI...is this something MoI is good for?

Have you had a good look at the gallery?
Click on the images as working images will then show up as well.

Probably you should be able to do all you need within MoI but MoI exports , for example, ideal .obj files for use in those apps you mentioned.

Yes, I did... great stuff in the gallery.
I have not modeled much. For example, if I wanted to model a wrinkled piece of paper that has been spread flat, would I have an easier time in a box-model polygon program, a freeform sculpt program or in MoI/nurbs or a combination?

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI

Have a look at this thread and how it develops.

Some of other recent threads could be of interest also to you.

Hi shokan,

>>>For example, if I wanted to model a wrinkled piece of paper that has been spread flat,

For that I would just make a deformed plane and add a texture map in an external rendering pgm.

Hi Shokan,

> My question is: will MoI export these roughed out organic
> forms in polygon form that is suitable for detailing/sculpting in
> a program such as Silo or Modo?

For doing detailing using brush stroke type operations, then yes, that method would be fine.

But you generally wouldn't use MoI's output polygons to do further box modeling / 3d point manipulation type detailing where you move individual object points around instead of doing brush-based stuff.

Brush based versus box modeling are pretty separate types of polygon object manipulation methods.


> Would I be better off just doing everything for these objects
> in the other programs?

It's not really possible to give a definitive answer to this without knowing more details about what these objects look like. Just the description "organic forms" is way to vague to really know what you want to do.


For many kinds of details it is a good idea to apply those details just with textures and materials instead of trying to add them as actual model detail at all, Steve shows a good example of this.


> My aim is quick easy "sketching" of the object in 3D in MoI...is
> this something MoI is good for?

Usually yes - in fact this is generally what MoI is all about!

But sketching objects in MoI tends to be driven by drawing and using profile curves that define an object's form.

The more sort of blobby and less distinct an object is, the less easy it becomes to identify profile curves that define it well, and those are the kinds of things that then generally become better to do in box modeling from the beginning.


It is hard to say much specifically without clearer examples of what you want to do though.

- Michael

That was great advice. Thanks.