Hi Michael,

I have been playing with MoI for two weeks and I must say that MoI is more powerful than it seems! There is a lot of CAD packages with enormous capabilities, but none of them with the basic set of tools for people, who want to make a fresh things not to fill items in annoying pop-up windows again and again. I withstand anything, some people don't. From this point of view I think that the non-tablet users would not be ignore completely. However, I understand that you have just decided to occupy the gap, logically.

For example, I am command-line addicted, definitely. So it would be nice if you could add a possibility to define not only such one-letter shortcut as "r=Rotate", but full aliases like "er=Rotate", "dll=PolyLine", "fo=Open" and so forth. The aliases might sort into meaningful groups according to the first letter; e=edit, d=drawing, f=file... How beautiful it will be, just like Vim text editor normal mode. I know I am absolutely odd.... hehe...

But generally speaking, MoI? No matter whom you ask, everybody will give you the same answer. It's just a perfect tool with fancy and neat looks!

Best wishes

Petr


P.S. I tried copy T-Splines object through the clipboard from RhinoV4 to MoI today and I was surprised that I was able to show and manipulate a control points although it was still a solid (closed polysurface), really. Of course, it wasn't the T-Splines' control points grid, only the control points of NURBS patches enclosing a volume, but it's quite interesting.

Hi Petr, I'm glad that you've been trying MoI!

I'm certainly hoping that Version 9 won't be ruined compared to Version 1, that's something that I am going to be keeping a close eye on, and I have planned the UI for expansion in advance which should help quite a lot as well. By this I mean that I can add major new feature areas by adding new tabbed palettes on the side pane, and their complexity impact on basic use is quite small if they start out collapsed. This is a pretty key thing, but we'll see how it works by version 9, hopefully it will still have a similar feel by then!


> From this point of view I think that the non-tablet users would not be ignore completely.

Yes, in fact I expect to have quite a lot of non-tablet users, probably more than tablet users actually. This started to become more apparant to me after talking to a bunch of people at SIGGRAPH.

The nice thing about focusing on working with the tablet (other than it being a niche that no other CAD program is currently filling, which was the initial reasoning), is that it forced me to work with a pretty small set of UI actions, just simple left-clicks and drags. Having this constraint really forced me to simplify stuff which then has had a good effect for non-tablet users as well.


> So it would be nice if you could add a possibility to define not only such
> one-letter shortcut as "r=Rotate", but full aliases like "er=Rotate"

This would certainly be possible to add at some point, but it's kind of outside the scope of what V1 is focused on.


> P.S. I tried copy T-Splines object through the clipboard from RhinoV4 to
> MoI today and I was surprised that I was able to show and manipulate a
> control points although it was still a solid (closed polysurface), really.

This is because MoI supports a feature where you can turn on and edit the control points for a polysurface, if all the individual surfaces of it share the same points along common edges. So for example the result of a loft is still editable even if there were creases in it which caused it to be split into multiple surfaces, and a simple box is point editable as well. This is different compared to Rhino, since as you are aware in Rhino you can't turn on the points for any polysurface at all.

But if you have a polysurface that has trimmed-back edges instead of natural surface edges, or the control point structure is different along the shared edges, then you won't be able to turn on points for those types of polysurfaces in MoI.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

And what about mouse/pen gestures in viewports like in Opera browser, e.g.? You will have known about it. You must admit it would be really cool for such frequent commands as ResetAll, Hide, Invert, Undo or Redo. On the other hand I must admit that I am not able to imagine how this nifty thing would be implemented...

Petr

I think those kinds of gestures are cool, but they tend to be a little hard to remember, and they're very non-intuitive. By non-intuitive, I mean that there is no way that you could figure out how to work them just by messing around with the software, you need to read documentation to learn them. These qualities kind of narrow their usefulness to a fewer number of people.

On the other hand, they do provide a lot of functionality without using the keyboard.

I've tried to stick with just one single gesture of click+drag for now.

- Michael

It seems that the competition never ends, but I will believe it when I see it ! Petr

Dead line Mars 2007 :)

> It seems that the competition never ends, but I will believe it when I see it !

Yes, that certainly sounds interesting. I believe it will be a version of Concepts3d, since Punch! Software bought that company quite recently: http://www.csi-concepts.com/PR/pr110906.htm .

There is a demo available for Concepts3d here: http://www.csi-concepts.com/demoDownload.htm, that probably gives a pretty close idea of what the new one will be like.

I kind of doubt that it will be actual "competition" though - I would be very surprised if it had any of the signature features of MoI, such as anti-aliased curve display, smooth and fast surface shading with hidden-line display, keyboard-free tablet friendly operation, clean mesh output with n-gons, simplified UI without legacy pull-down menu/toolbars, construction-line tool for accurate drawing without getting in your face too much, .... These are the kinds of things that are unique to MoI and just aren't found in any other existing CAD program (I guess some have the hidden line display... :) ). Of course this remains to be seen but it is pretty unlikely.

This is not to say that concepts3d is bad - on the contrary, it is quite useful and powerful itself, and having a $99 version of the full package (as they seem to be describing) will be a great tool to add to the arsenal.

I can see it as being a very useful companion to MoI, you could bring in geometry over there, do dimensioning and printing and certain modeling operations that might work better in there (since I think it has the ACIS geometry kernel, some kinds of filleting and shelling operations will work better in it).

- Michael

I always thought Concepts Unlimited was a pretty interesting application, although i never demo'd it. This certainly makes me interested again. This $100 price can't be for equivalent of the Unlimited version (2D,3D,animation,and rendering). Is it? That would just be crazy :) !!!... It makes me kind of worried for it's future, the same way that people worried when DAZ bought Carrara and Hexagon (Hexa-gone?) from Eovia. but i'll definitely have to consider it if they're really selling the whole package for $100...

jonah

such amazing coincidence! Maybe there is some after-effect from the absinthe drank by the great artists during the renaissance? It gives an inner vision to the following generations of French, perhaps. I have a bottle of the "real" stuff at home, but not yet drank enough to reach my own enlightenment :) ...but actually my comment was a play on words, as in "Hexagon will become HexaGONE". I would worry a little bit about the direction of Punch to develop this software as a respectable CAD program... :)

jonah

Hi Michael,

By the way, could you tell us how many people have already downloaded MoI's beta up to now and how many users is currently registered to the discussion forum? Thanks!

Petr

add: ConceptsUnlimited, Concepts3D and so on...

It appears to be a remarkable application. Don't you know, jonah, how much does it cost? Their web sites state a price only for concepts2D ($99).

Petr

> By the way, could you tell us how many people have already downloaded MoI's beta up to now

Well, there have been 52,803 requests for the setup .exe file from the web server.

But that's very inflated, some download managers seem to make multiple requests, and there appear to be a couple of rounds of some attempted web site attacks that tried to download it a few thousand times apiece to the same address.

So it seems to be really more like 1/3 of that.


> and how many users is currently registered to the discussion forum?

390

i think i remember the full Unlimited package being somwhere near the area of $1000 (similar to Alibre). I could be wrong, though. I don't CSI was targeting the hoibbyist designer. I think they were aiming to be affordable to profesional designers...

Well, after some stumblling around, and getting a handle on the workflow ( Lay out some profiles first, then build from there ), MOI is a killer little app. It's simple, fun, and very powerful. And each beta release seems to add more power without introducing crippling new bugs.

One thing I love is the lil 'rotate/pan/zoom' popup. With a trackball mouse, those buttons work great. And tablet input is a dream!

One useful feature would be a way to have a 'library' tab in addition to the "Draw Curve" "Draw Solid". The library tab would be a way to quickly load and import shapes from our own, or external libraries. Say, standard jewelry fittings, etc.

> ...and there appear to be a couple of rounds of some attempted web site attacks that tried to download it a few thousand times apiece to the same address.

Sorry, that was me. I love MoI so much that I wanted to make sure I had plenty of backups.









...Oh I'm kidding! :)

Another suggestion.

I find drawing arcs using 3 points to be somewhat unintuitive.

Most editors, you draw the first point, the last point, and then pick the point on the arc, and the circle is calculated through all 3. This way I can get feedback as to what curvature I want.

As it is, I have a hard time using the 3 point arc, if I select start, point-on-arc, end and have it come out correctly. I don't know it's gonna curve until I click the last point, and then it is too late.

Also, it would be nice if "Draw arc, Center" could also be used to draw quarter ellipses. This should be a fairly simple change of a check box, and allowing the arc to pass through the 3rd point drawn, instead of forcing it to stay to a circle.

> Most editors, you draw the first point, the last point, and then pick the point
> on the arc, and the circle is calculated through all 3.

Hi Crusoe, it is not hard to make this change, but I'd like to hear from a few more people's opinions to make sure that switching it won't cause any problems for people.


> Also, it would be nice if "Draw arc, Center" could also be used to draw quarter
> ellipses. This should be a fairly simple change of a check box, and allowing the
> arc to pass through the 3rd point drawn, instead of forcing it to stay to a circle.

This one doesn't seem as easy - the first thing is that drawing a quarter of an ellipse in that way will result in an ellipse with a center point different from the starting center point that you click in the command.

For example here is an arc with a center point, start point and end point:



Here is the ellipse that I think you are asking for (the full ellipse shown here, not just the quarter of it):



As you can see, the center of the ellipse is different than the center point that was picked at the start of the command, that's kind of confusing (and sort of "false advertising").

This makes it seem like it doesn't really fit in well as just an option in this command, it seems like it would need its own command that does an ellipse quarter through 2 points. I should be able to add in a new command for this eventually, but I've got some other things that people are asking for more often right now, so I'll have to put this on the back burner for a bit.

- Michael

No, not quite what I mean....



In the first case, where the arc angle is 90 degrees, they define the short and long axes of the ellipse of which we are using a quarter of it.

In the second case, which I crudely drew, you have center point ( 1 ), the first point of the arc ( 2 ) (the darker red dot ) and the third point ( 3 ) ( the one at the end of the grey line ).

Knowing (1), the center of the ellipse, the length from (1) to (3), and the angle of 1-2-3, it should be possible to determine the ellipse arc that passes through 1 & 3 and satisifies the angle 1-2-3.

Thus, in both cases, the center of the ellipse is in the proper position for both cases.