Hi, there,

Nebulous title, I know, so apologies in advance. :)

I just bought MOI and haven't done much modeling (in any program) yet, so this might seem overly basic. When you're importing an image to model by, does it matter how big or small it is, obviously taking into the fact that you can see enough detail?

I mean, I could import an image to where it could be huge or small depending on my scan or camera settings, and don't know if there's any implications of scale when exporting to the next program.

Any suggestions or best practices here?

Thanks to all who read or respond,

- A

Scale is no matter ;)
Import your model
Press Reset icon (in one window bottom page) for see all the model
Menu Tranform /scale
and you will scale your model as you want ;)

Hi angeliclight - the image that you bring in is basically just a reference guide for you to use as tracing paper. The size of the image file itself in pixel density won't really directly effect your model.

But a very high density image may just not work very well if you have an older video card that does not have very much video RAM on it. If you see stuff like slow screen redraws, or the images showing as all black when trying to use a very high density image, then you'll have to use a lower density image instead to avoid running out of memory on the video card.

High density images do tend to consume quite a bit of memory.

But if you have a fairly new video card those tend to have a lot more memory available on the card so it isn't really an issue there.

- Michael

1 thing is that MOI works well down to 0.001, but does funny stuff smaller than that (am I right, Michael?). So you wouldn't want to import something in too small a scale.

Hi Nick - yeah you should generally create models in MoI with a size of like somewhere between 0.1 to 1000 units, and generally try to avoid very much smaller or very much larger than that.

But that's the size of the model - I think the original question was about the scale of an image background (like a scanned image or an image from a digital camera) in pixel density.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>>yeah you should generally create models in MoI with a size of like somewhere between 0.1 to 1000 units, and generally try to avoid very much smaller or very much larger than that.

Is there a problem if I modeled something to scale that is 3 meters long ?

Hi Danny, you mean a size of 3 meters, where you are using meters as units in MoI?

There isn't just one single answer to that - it depends on the size of the smaller details in the model. I guess it should actually be ok to go down about 0.01 units for a size of a feature but not too much much more down than that.

So if your 3 meter object has details in it that are smaller than 1 centimeter in size, you will probably need to model it with centimeters as units instead of meters as the units.

But if your 3 meter object has details in it around 1 centimeter or larger in it, then that's fine.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

What if I was modeling the 3 meter object in mm (3000mm) and it had 1mm details ?

Cheers

Hi Danny - that should be ok I would think. You're going to get calculations that keep working until they get to an accuracy of 0.001 mm in that case, which is kind of too accurate - it will tend to cause somewhat larger sized files with more control points in intersection curves than are really necessary.

If you go very much larger than that, then that problem gets to be more and more magnified where things that are fit to tolerance just get to be too dense because 0.001 is too tiny in comparison to the objects being constructed.

I would like to try and tweak this system in the future sometime to be more adaptive to the size of the objects being built, but it is a pretty complex and sensitive area to mess with.

I guess my ideal recommendation for something of that size would be to do it in centimeters and have values that maxed out with numbers like 300 and details at 0.1, that would be somewhat more optimal from a file size / complexity kind of standpoint. But it is not like doing it mm would be a disaster, just something like 20% larger file or something like that maybe.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>>I guess my ideal recommendation for something of that size would be to do it in centimeters and have values that maxed out with numbers like 300 and details at 0.1

Ok, So if I model scaled down, say 1:10 of the size I want, then after finishing that model could I scale it to actual size for export ?

-

Hi Danny,

> Ok, So if I model scaled down, say 1:10 of the size I want,
> then after finishing that model could I scale it to actual size for export ?

Yup, that would work fine.

If you have your units set (under Options / General / Unit system) to Centimeters, then you can scale your model before exporting by just switching that to Millimeters - that will do the scaling for you unless you have turned "Scale on unit system change" off under Unit options.

You can also scale everything to a particular scale factor by using Transform/Scale. To do that, select all objects, run Transform/Scale, type in "0" <enter> to pick the 0,0,0 origin point as the scale origin, then type in your scale factor for example 0.1 to scale by 1/10.

- Michael