Ok - finally here are some notes on the new stuff that is in the Jul-3-2008 beta.

Probably the biggest thing is the new edit frame that shows up around selected objects, I think that all the details for that have been covered already here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1743.2
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1742.6


Another major area is drawing and snapping directly on to surfaces. This is made up a few related pieces.

First there is a new "On srf" object snap that lets you snap a point directly on to a spot on a surface that is under the mouse. In v1 it was only possible to snap on to edges and curves and not directly somewhere in the middle of a surface, but for v2 you can now do that.

On the Object Snap menu (it is a pop-up menu that will show up if you move your mouse over the Object Snap button in the bottom toolbar), there is a new "On surface" checkbox there to allow turning this kind of snapping off or on if it is getting in your way.

Another related area is surface normal snapping - this is an additional kind of straight snap similar to perpendicular or tangent straight snaps, except coming off of a surface.There is a new checkbox option for turning this off under Options / Snaps / Surface normal snapping. There is a demo of how this works here: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1621.27
To avoid over-snapping, there will only be one surface normal straight snap line at a time. If your base point is snapped on to an area common to more than one surface (for example the corner of a box), you will only get a surface normal snap if just one of those surfaces is selected.


The last piece of on-surface drawing is surface snap plane alignment. This is when a surface gets used as a temporary construction plane for a drawing command, aligning the drawn object to the surface instead of to the default world x/y/z planes.

Snap plane alignment will only happen when you are picking points in the 3D view. Using your mouse in the 2D views like Top, Front, and Right will keep their alignment to their regular view plane.

Different commands can have slightly different intensities to which they align to surfaces. The draw commands that are symmetrical around a center point like Circle from center, Rectangle from center, Polygon center, Polygon Star, will align to a surface if just their center point is snapped on to any surface, including both planar and curved surfaces.

Most of the other commands such as line, polyline, rectangle, curve, etc... will only align their snap planes (which for example with polyline controls which direction straight snaps will go in) if you have both the base point and the current point snapped on to a planar (not curved) surface.

If the base point and the current point are snapped on to areas that are common to more than one planar face (for example, drawing a circle by center point, with the first point at the corner of a box and the second point at the midpoint of an edge below that, those points are common to 2 faces of the box), then the planar face that is pointing most towards the eye point direction will be used. So for example if you snap one point on to a corner of a box, rotate so that you are facing more towards the face of the box you want to draw on to control which face will be used.

There is a new setting in the moi.ini that can be used to disable surface snap plane alignment:
[Drawing Aids]
UseSurfaceSnapPlanes=y

So there are a bunch of subtleties about how snap plane alignment works but generally you should not need to worry too much about it, if you want to align to a surface just snap your points on to it in the 3D view and there you go.


Some other stuff:

Improvement for hidden point targeting - there is a new checkbox on the View palette for "Display hidden lines" that lets you turn the hidden line view on or off easily. When it is off the object snaps for points that are hidden will not be targeted anymore, in v1 those hidden points would remain as snap targets and could easily get in the way a lot more. Some description on this here: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1621.35


Grid snap now can work in combination with object snap on lines or construction lines that are running the same direction as the grid. Previously in v1 object snap would always override grid snap if they were both turned on at the same time.


There is a new moi.ini setting you can turn on if you want to try only allowing "on" snap to selected objects only instead of all objects:
[Drawing Aids]
OnSnapOnlyToSelected=n


Improvements for targeting stacked up points and objects - now when you do an object snap on to a spot where there are many stacked up points (for example the corner of a box when viewed from the Top/Front/Right views), the topmost point towards the eye point will be taken. Similarly the topmost curve in a set of stacked up curves will be taken for selection or for "on" snap.


Int snap now works with distance constraint - if distance constraint is active there will be additional "int" snaps where a circle of that radius intersects nearby curves.


New relative point placement available on the first pick of a command. Now entering a relative point (example: r6,4) when there is no base point will define an offset distance for the current point. This allows placing the first point of a command (for example the center of a circle) at some offset distance from an existing point.


New "Delete input objects" option for the Mirror command.


New "Distance from edge" option in Move command allows moving a point to be at a specified distance away from a line, see here: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1727.31


Also a variety of minor tweaks and bug fixes.


- Michael

Cool list!
I will translate that in 3 days :)
Big week end here for the 1789 revolution celebration ;)

A little Cabernet my french friend!

Hi Michael,

> On the Object Snap menu (it is a pop-up menu that will show up
> if you move your mouse over the Object Snap button in the bottom toolbar),
> there is a new "On surface" checkbox there to allow turning
> this kind of snapping off or on if it is getting in your way.

I tend to use the Object Snap filtering quite a bit, is there any chance of placing an 'All' and 'None' selection button in the pop-up ?

Cheers

Hi Danny,

eee? You can enable/disable all object snap by clicking "Object Snap" button.

And also:


Petr

It will beautiful if one day all Moi tips / trick gather in one place...

The ol' press the Alt key and click trick :P

Thanks Petr, laziness on my behalf.............now where are those MoI notes before I embarrass myself again :(

.

Hi Frenchy !
Still can remember the bicentenaire with Jean Paul Goude scene in Paris in 1989 !
Peter

>>now where are those MoI notes

For instance:
1) http://moi3d.com/wiki/Hidden_Secrets
2) http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1312.1
3) http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/doc/releasenotes.html

Petr

Hi Danny - that one is an Alt or right-click on the menu item itself for batch processing of checking/unchecking items.

But there is also another way to use Alt - if you hold down Alt when you are picking a point while drawing inside the viewport, that will suppress snapping while you have it held down. So that's a quick way to turn them all off for just one single pick.

Like Petr mentions, if you want to turn them all off for several picks, then the regular way to do that is to click the "Object Snap" button in the bottom toolbar so that it is not highlighted in orange - that is the global Object snap on/off button. You can use that to disable them all without disturbing your filter settings.

- Michael

Let's see a couple of small notes I missed:


You can now read in GIF format images for background images.


I already mentioned the grid snap and object snap working together on axis-aligned lines. There is also some similar stuff for making "on srf" object snap work in combination with grid snap at the same time.

If you move your mouse over an axis-aligned plane with both "on srf" object snap and grid snap active at the same time, you'll get a point snapped to the grid but on the surface of the plane. In the 3D view this also works on stuff like the side walls of an axis-aligned box.

For curved surfaces in the 3D view, "on srf" will override grid snap, but by default in the 2D views (Top/Front/Right) onsrf will be disabled for curved surfaces so that it does not get in the way of picking grid points. There is a moi.ini setting for this behavior:
[Drawing Aids]
DisableOnSrfInOrthoWhenGridSnap=y

There is also another setting for disabling onsrf entirely in all views (including the 3D view) when grid snap is also active:
[Drawing Aids]
DisableOnSrfWhenGridSnap=y


It looks like that clears out the last of my notes.

- Michael

(edit - fixed typo in second .ini setting)

Well, I have gathered all new stuff together on the page here. It is quite impressively long list, isn't it :)

By the way, correct setting for disabling onsrf entirely is:
[Drawing Aids]
DisableOnSrfWhenGridSnap=y

I also noticed that edit frame got a strange relation to the original object after rotating with Ctrl and edit frame's rotation grip (i.e. when I make a clone).

Petr

good job petr !!!

Hi Petr, thanks for gathering all that up!

re: Ctrl + rotate grip - yup that was an edit frame bug, thanks for reporting it, it is fixed for the next release.

- Michael

Here's a PDF of petr's efforts.

Michael T.

Quote-----There is a new setting in the moi.ini that
can be used to disable surface snap plane
alignment:
[Drawing Aids]
UseSurfaceSnapPlanes=y

Is it a Brian day? I don't know what a moi.ini is or what I am supposed to do with that"Drawing Aids etc" line of info?

Brian

Hi Brian - moi.ini is the file where MoI saves all of its settings to.

Normally the settings that are frequently used also have some more normal UI for changing them, like checkboxes, and edit fields in the Options dialog.

But when I am developing new features I will occasionally put some kinds of options or things relating to the new features just inside the moi.ini file and not add any UI for that particular one. Sometimes these may be kind of "emergency use only" type things, like for instance the one that you asked about there is for turning off one piece of the draw-on-surfaces mechanism that is new for v2.

That way if there was some major bug where that new feature was crashing or getting in the way of normal use, there is at least some possible way to turn it off.

Basically if everything works as intended you should not need to change that setting at all.

But I wanted to mention it so that I had published the complete notes on all the new stuff in the beta, some people want to know all the details so I try to mention all the details when giving a full overview.

Most of the time if you see something like that when you wonder "what use is that", it probably means it is not useful for your particular case and you can just ignore it.

- Michael

Michael
You are saying that that stuff I can not actually see/find, or access anyway, in the MoI App folder?
Maybe those passages of wordings should be in red to highlight as "Not for the interest of Brian!"!

Brian (Who is just over curious!)

Hey Brian,
It's actually good to be curious about this stuff. Thats what makes you good at it.

Let me partake.

When you select a checkbox in MoI's options dialog, How does it know you selected that option the next time you open Moi?

The answer is an "ini file". Alot of apps use them. Usually you can find it in the root folder of the application. (It's just a simple text document that the application can read and write to. To store those "Settings".

Do you know what Windows explorer is?

Hit the windows key and E at the same time. then navigate to the MoI folder. (if you dont know what that means I can explain further)

In that folder is where you will find the MoI.ini file. Open it with notepad.

Just look around at first, dont change anything.

In there you will see a bunch of lines that seem odd but you can soon recognize them. As with the checkbox example I started with, there could be a line that say's "checkbox1.state=y" What that could mean is that Michael named one of his checkboxes "checkbox1" and then it has things that can be set like the "state" with a value of Y(es) or N(o)--Checked or unchecked--!. Sometimes 0 means yes and 1 means no. Get it?

What they are talking about is changing the behavior of things in Moi without actually cluttering up the UI with more checkboxes and things. (Soon there would be 50 checkboxes, one for Burr, one for Brian, etc.....).

Ask again if you want more info, I can talk to you about what it is, but for specifics on how to use it, there are others that could answer better.

Burr

Hi Brian,

> You are saying that that stuff I can not actually see/find,
> or access anyway, in the MoI App folder?

It's normally in this folder (for Windows XP):
C:\Documents and Settings\ [your login name] \Application Data\Moi\moi.ini

Windows will by default hide that "Application Data" folder, but if you turn on some setting in Windows explorer to show hidden files then it should show up, or also you can just type in that folder name and it will go there even if it was not displayed in the regular Explorer view.

- Michael