After converting the work done so far to a mesh and bringing it into my 3D rendering software. I'm impressed with the results I'm getting. Some of the posts Michael has made about the best way to convert to a mesh were really useful in understanding what to do and getting good results.

Michael

I have tried the drawing on a surface command and it is really great. I find I'm using it constantly. Two thumbs up from me the way you have implemented it.

I'm still finding it would be really handy if it were possible to set up a construction plane for new objects that I need to create that are at odd angles to existing objects. I believe this would be a heavily used feature if it were incorporated into MoI.

As my model had become more complex I'm finding the lack of being able to put objects onto layers so that I can hide them a problem. I should be able to get around this limitation in V1 and current V2 by have multiple versions of my file. I would definitely like to see layers incorporated into V2.

Anyway just my thoughts on MoI so far which I hope helps you in your further development of this pretty cool little program.

Hi Kevin, very nice result on your plane! You know things are going to turn out nice when just the plain untextured rendering looks as clean and smooth as that.

I'm glad the surface drawing is working well for you, that's good news!


> I'm still finding it would be really handy if it were possible to set up
> a construction plane for new objects that I need to create that are at
> odd angles to existing objects.

Yes, I am intending to add this, hopefully pretty soon here.

It will definitely be useful in cases where you want to control the angle of the drawn shape.

The general thing that I'm hoping for is that the direct surface drawing will work for many common cases, and that is faster since you don't have to do any kind of setup or restore type steps for it. But there will still be a construction plane command that you can use in the cases where the quick simple one is not what you want.


> I would definitely like to see layers incorporated into V2.

Yup, this is definitely going to be a major focus area coming up in v2. I will most likely start working on this area once I have the next beta release wrapped up, it shouldn't be too much longer for that.

It will be a fairly involved area so it will probably span across a couple of months and a few beta releases before it is all complete (the object organization type tools I mean).

- Michael

I am remembering Ashlar Vellum's Cobalt has similar stuff to draw directly on surface while keeping the surface like temporary cplane, but you seem to implement more coherent approach to this. -Petr

Hi Petr - interesting - I did not remember this part of Cobalt.

I just downloaded the latest demo version of Cobalt to give it a try, and it looks like enabling the "Face on" snap works for snapping the point location on to a surface, and some "center-point" based commands like circle are aligned as you would expect, but other commands such as polyline aren't. Like the x-axis and y-axis type ortho snapping does not happen aligned to the local plane's x/y axis. Rectangle corner/corner is not aligned, etc...

Yeah, the new function in MoI is much more comprehensive than that, it actually literally becomes a temporary construction plane including straight snaps for polyline, angle constraint will be in that plane, etc...

One thing I need to do is to maybe re-organize the x and y axis directions to be in a more expected direction, right now it uses the literal u and v parameter directions of the plane, which can possibly have stuff like the cplane x axis pointing up vertically, stuff like that.

- Michael