Dear Programers,

i find the develoment of MI very nice and fast and like it a lot beside one very important point.

i truly miss layers. best hierarchical layers like rhino or other software have.

i am architect and the complextity of projects i do is only manageable via layers. not only to export and import, but to be able to work on projects. as long this is not in MOI i cant really do much in this nice software.

so i really hope there are layers planned for MOI? i read some where disturbing things when i searched the forum. i hope i read wrong. layers are essential for many people. the hierarchical layers like in rhino are one of the best scene managment systems.

for export it would be cool to have option how to export, like this was in formz in old times. so you could group to layers, or syles or colors to be able to have a perfect export structure depending for what the modell is needed afterwards.
but for modelling itself in MOI i cannot imaghine doing that without a layer system.

best greeting
stefan

Stefan,
"Dear Programmers" actually should be "Hello Michael Gibson"! One man is writing the MoI program. The man that wrote the "Rhino" program! He WILL respond here to you and you will find MoI to be a very exciting program!

Not sure what you read that had you alarmed but MoI WILL have an object management system. It is being worked on now with this beta version!

Welcome!

Burr

Hi Stefan, I do plan on adding in a system for organizing objects pretty similar to layers.

You can find some previous discussion of this here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1944.1
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2127.1
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2150.5

I think it will have some similarities to layers, but there are some pretty big limitations with a traditional layering system (even with hierarchical layers) that I want to try to avoid - specifically the limitation that each object can only be on one single layer.

That tends to prevent doing more arbitrary kinds of grouping with layers. For example if you have a car you can't put the front left wheel on a layer called "wheels" and also at the same time on a layer called "front of car". You're limited to only having it in one single slot at a time....

I think that the concept of a "style" will map more closely to layers though since it will be limited in this same way, and then I want to have a scene browser type thing that allows for some more flexibility than that. The above links have some more info on some concepts for these.

This is pretty much the main area left to finish up before v2 is all complete.

- Michael

I don't know if this has relevance, but I would love selection sets. Or groups.

Things can belong to many groups. For example, if you have a car and you hide the "car" group - all disappears. Then you unhide the "lights" group - you get just the lights.

Very easy to work with.

Hi zpoonfed, yup, I hope to have something along the lines of what you describe...

All the details have not been quite worked out yet for that part yet though, but there is some previous discussion of it here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1944.1

- Michael

HI Michael,
this is really the big thing missing,
I understand you have your own dev schedule, but I would have gladly taken v1 as it were with the addition of layers, before anything else.
I use Moi sporadically. It is the best hard modeler I have used, for what we do except that,
without layers,
it is still not ready for production work.

Hi okapi, mostly I wanted to take some time to do a grouping/layers method in a good way the first time they are implemented, rather than just kind of doing something with the same kinds of limitations that a kind of "standard" system has in it.

Traditional layers can tend to be rather clumsy in several aspects, and it will just pay off more in the long run to do this area pretty carefully rather than rush through it.

It wasn't a focus for v1 since layers do not really do any good for simple objects.

It has worked out better to try and focus on making things work really well for simple objects first, before chewing on stuff for complex objects.

Being able to handle simple things easily and quickly is a very foundational thing and it is a hard area to try and come back later and fix up.

By the time we get to MoI v4 or v5 I think it will be more apparent how this kind of careful route of UI development will pay off, with a more cohesive final result at that point. I understand that it is hard to appreciate it here more in the earlier stages though! :)

- Michael

Hi Michael,
I really appreciate the effort you put into moi.
I am sure it is important to have a strong basis.

I just think that, with layers (which can also be exported well) I would switch for 80% of my modeling work to Moi.
Because I deal with large architecture models, I need to have a way to manage complex hierarchies.
It might be different for people modeling industrial products ,but if I have hundreds of objects and I need to export to an external app a few time (also back and forth), then scene organization is very important.

Hi okapi - definitely I understand that it is an important issue for many types of work.

It's pretty much the main area that I have remaining to finish up before version 2.0 will be all wrapped up.

- Michael