A new Nov-2-2006 beta is now available from the download page (http://moi3d.com/download.htm).

New features:

Revolutionary new N-gon meshing technology! Generate an .obj file that contains 100% n-gons with no excess triangles.

This industry-unique mesh output is amazingly clean and clear. Meshes have a very "hand optimized" feel to them, completely the opposite of typical NURBS mesh output.

The new mesher also allows for much more gradual changes in density. You can now increase or decrease density in much finer steps, so it is easier to add just a little bit more detail without the density suddenly increasing by a major jump like in the older version.

There are still a few bugs and things to clean up on this new mesher, so it is a Work-In-Progress. Please let me know how it is working for you and if you have anything with glitches in them, please post them here (with the model files, please). It would also be great to just see any screenshots of nice mesh output as well, show off those wireframes!

Enjoy,

- Michael

Yay! Thanks Michael!

Trim is not working right in new beta :(
Try to trim that "star" with parabolic surface. It will trim only straight parts of the "star", but it won't trim cylindrical part.
Previous beta does it right.

> Previous beta does it right.

Over here I seem to get the same behavior in both the previous beta and the new one.

This seems to be running into a bug that I've seen a few times - trim is actually cutting the cylinder parts, but it gets confused about which parts are supposed to be separated from each other, so the part of trim where you pick parts to delete doesn't work.

You can still trim the object though, instead of picking which part to delete, just push "Done" (or right click in the viewport) right there to just take the result, which is cut but still joined together. Now you can select the faces you want to remove and push delete to throw them out.

When you select the faces to delete, you may need to zoom in a bit to pick the first face, because you need to grab it somewhere that is not nearby an edge since edges take preference. Once you have clicked on one face, you can then use window select to grab the other ones. I think in this case you will want to window select from the right towards the left, that will have a dahsed outline and will grab anything that intersects the window. If you go from left towards the right, it will have a solid outline and only grab things that are completely enclosed within the window.

Please let me know if any of this doesn't make sense.

- Michael

great stuff indeed :) keep up the good work.We had been expecting it for a long time. That's a really great advanced function.
Nikolas.

Getting nice results with transfering to modo.
WTG, Michael!

Hi Michael,

have a very funny issue exporting this obj

as you can see when you load the 3dm file in moi it shouldn't look like this at all...
I fear that the vertex enummeration may be the source of this evil
It happens in Carrara 5 Pro and in Kerkythea, blender and Silo 2 Beta somehow gets along with it and fixes the issue while loading,

best regards,

Thor

Hi Thor, I took a close look at this polygon output, and I could not find any problems with it, as best as I can tell the polygon output is properly formed.

Unfortunately, it is not really an easy task to code a properly working n-sided polygon triangulator. It is very easy for programs to have bugs in this area, where triangles "leak" outside the boundaries.

I'm pretty certain that is what you have run into here - Carrara and Kerkythea seem to have some bugs in their handling of complex n-sided polygons, while Blender and Silo are stronger in this area and process it correctly.

This is actually a rather common problem. This is the reason why MoI has a setting so you can output to "quads and triangles" or "triangles only" instead of ngons. If your target program does not handle complex many-sided polygons well, then you can have MoI break it up into quads and triangles which will then work properly with the target program.

If you like, you may want to send that .obj file to the authors of Carrara and Kerkythea as a bug report.

- Michael

Thnx a mil Michael,

no prob at all,
just wanted to get you up to the max with your lovely MOI,
I will do forward it to the relevant guys and see what happens,

Best regards,

Thor

Carrara Pro 5 works fine with n-gons as long as n is not greater than 9. Then problems happen.

-Shonner

In this case n = 79.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

just one question, would it be possible to have some kind of autosave before operations like bool rail ect it sometimes happen that MOI crashes away and my work is gone.. I know I'm a lazy buzz and forgett to save regulary...

THor ;-)

Hi Thor, yes this should be possible. I have been meaning to add in an "emergency save" type feature where it would automatically save the current model if there was a crash.

I won't be able to get it in for the next beta, I'm still focused on finishing the new meshing stuff for that, but I will try to get it into the next one after that.

- Michael

Thnx a mil Michael, it will make my day :-D
Thor

>> It would also be great to just see any screenshots of nice mesh output as well, show off those wireframes!

Here we go... ;-)



Cya !

> Here we go... ;-)

Looking nice! Very tidy.

I haven't really heard much from people about the ngon export yet, does it seem to be working well so far?

- Michael

>>I haven't really heard much from people about the ngon export yet, does it seem to be working well so far?

Hi Michael,

I did not experiment a lost since the latest release...
Seems that I still have problems with Modo import. Same problems that were already reported (flipped polys...) I'll send you examples if I have some...
Hexagon reads your files without problems.
Just testing with Vue Infinite also. Imports very nicely (but it seems that internally, Vue triangulates the mesh...)

Have a nice week-end !

A am so much thankful to the author Michael Gibson for this immensely beautiful 3D software!
There is some special simpliciy, which makes me feel happy.
Other software seem to be full of details, complicating each step, whereas here, in Moi, all affects my expectations the way I have been dreaming...

Thanks, guys, also for introducing new shortcuts. I can now adopt the program to my desires still father.

Warmly,
Anatom

Thank you Anatom!

- Michael