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.

A better diagram of the second example:

So knowing the center 1, pt 2, and point 3, and angle 2-1-3 ( oops, typo in my prev post ), we can construct a arc of the ellipse that passes through 2 & 3.

In both cases, the center of the ellipse is always in the proper place!

I see - before I thought you were talking about doing something special for quarter-arcs.

I suppose this is possible - the command would have to be modified a bit because right now you don't actually have to pick 3 points, you can just do the first 2 and then enter an angle without picking a 3rd - this wouldn't be valid for the elliptical style.

I'll try to take a look at it tomorrow.

- Michael

Hi Crusoe - elliptical arcs will be in the next beta. Here is what it looks like:



There will be an "Elliptical" checkbox for Arc/Center. If you check it, the angle box is hidden and an elliptical arc is created as you described.

This does have some cool properties, since the elliptical arc will actually start and end on the points you pick, unlike a circular arc which uses the ending point as the angle which will only touch there if the point you pick is at the arc's radius.

It is also easy to do 90 degree elliptical arcs.

There are some slightly odd things as well, like you can't do a 180 degree elliptical arc because when the points are lined up in a straight line it doesn't have any way to calculate the length of the other ellipse axis. And it kind of oscillates in a bit of a strange manner as you trace the mouse around the center point. But that's ok.

I don't think it will be possible to make any of the other arc commands do ellipses, since there are not unique solutions to many of them. For instance you can't do an ellipse through 3 points because there are multiple possible ellipses that can fit through 3 points. But Arc/Center works because nailing down the center point and first ellipse axis length nails down the constraints enough.


Thanks for the feedback!

- Michael