A Challenger! ?
http://www.bonzai3d.com/

Hi Pilou, certainly sounds interesting from the marketing bullet list!

But did you actually try the software yourself yet?

That is usually a much better test than going off the marketing materials... :)

I've just tried it over here and maybe it is not compatible with my system or something, because it crashes about 2 seconds after moving the mouse over top of the toolbars. I mean I would expect some instability in the first beta but not like this. Does it work better on your system?

I think that they got some ideas from MoI (I gave an in-depth demo to their CEO at SIGGRAPH a few years ago), but I think their main target is much more to try and compete with SketchUp.

From talking to some architects, it seems that SketchUp has really displaced Form-Z to a large extent in the architecture world (where Form-Z used to sort of have its primary presence), I think they need to try and do something to compete against it to survive.

- Michael

I had exactly the same experience as Michael on my laptop HP (Win XP, 2GB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600).
Moreover, after four crashes I got a "Trial expired" error. o_O

same than yours...numerous crashes and 30 days options expired after 10 minutes :)
UI very traditional
seems not very finalized :)

Works ok here so far, but it's not my kind of software, too much archi oriented tools.

Hard to say anything after playing only 5 or 10 minutes too, I will look at it more closely this evening, ... maybe o)

The website doesn't seem very professional either, it's just a single page with hardly any useful info and a 'get beta' button.

Hi Pilou,thanks for the link.

Have just downloaded, it is currently running OK.
It looks interesting enough to take time to have a longer play later.


- Steve

it runs fine on OsX here; it is good to see a new generation software from them. FormZ was a really good tool in its time, but it is really updated.
Bonzai seems quite intuitive, with good import export functions. From playing with it a few times I don't find it as fluid as MOI though

Hmm, I see it's not just my system.

Seems like it may especially not get along with ATI cards right now, it runs for bit longer on an nVidia system here.

They seem to want to say that it is small and light, however they seem to be using an alternate universe definition of "small" - it's a 76MB download and just after launching it takes up 137,404K of RAM reported in Task Manager... I guess it could be worse, but that does not fit with "small" in my book anyway.

But it is definitely interesting, and certainly a better path than what Form-Z was heading down.

They should have probably waited for a bit to release the beta until it was at least a bit more generally stable though. They're probably giving a pretty bad first impression to SketchUp users with its current state.

- Michael

"They're probably giving a pretty bad first impression to SketchUp users with its current state."

They are. At least to this SU user. :)

In any case: I've been eager to replace SU for basic modeling with another app lately, and Bonzai ain't it. Looking forward to MOI getting layers - that'd make it the perfect substitute.

MoI certainly seems to be moving in the right direction. Keep at it!

Thanks for the link Frenchy. I'll give it a try.
The marketing info certainly makes the software sound perfect for some modelling tasks (a more advanced sketchup).

Just had a mess around with it and for me it is nowhere near as intuative as sketch-up or moi. To be fair i've just had a quick go so maybe it makes more sense when you have used it a bit longer. I agree it sounds like a winning formula of a combo of moi and sketch-up and it does have some nice touches ive noticed already but I don't think autodesys are the best people to impliment it - i just get the feeling it might be a bit flaky with loads of half baked features and the interface is so five years ago! ;-)

Push and Pull?
Sketch-ups push and pull feature has been its main hook from the start and I seem to remember that they say it is patented. Bonsai has a similar feature but not as flexible (from what i can work out) as the sketchup version. Firstly I can't believe no-one did this before sketch-up - it seems like such an obvious function, secondally how can you even patent such a simple opperation, thirdly how tight is the patent and how easy would it be to impliment a similar feature into moi? I know it is obviously possible to achieve the same outcome but takes quite a few more steps.

Just my thoughts

I had a play with it to but I had so many crashes that the current windows beta is pretty much unusable as is although the mac version might be fine (don't really know).

Looks like plenty of great tools in there and far more comprehensive and complete & powerful than sketchups tools. Sketchup doesn't even have a fillet or chamfer tool.

My initial thought is that this software won't be cheap when finally released.
Anyway, I'll keep an eye on the development of this software as it looks like an extremely promising modelling tool. Yet to try how it exports stuff as this will be a crucial function for me come uv mapping and rendering time.

< Sketchup doesn't even have a fillet or chamfer tool.
In native yes but with Ruby script no ;)

I had set aside a couple of hours to try out this software this evening, but unfortunately, I am now informed that the trial as expired (a day after first running the software).


EDIT:

I have now got the software running. It still says it as expired, but it is running/working.

Hi rhodesy,

> Firstly I can't believe no-one did this before sketch-up - it
> seems like such an obvious function, secondally how can
> you even patent such a simple opperation,

Unfortunately the US patent system is horribly screwed up and has allowed a ton of software things to be patented that should not have been.


> thirdly how tight is the patent and

I guess you'd need to hire a patent lawyer to really get a proper answer on this.


> how easy would it be to impliment a similar feature into moi?

Well, I do want to include an "automatic boolean" type option in MoI's extrude command which should streamline this kind of thing in MoI a bit.

My most recent idea on this is to enable an automatic boolean if you have a solid selected in addition to a curve when you do an extrusion, that could be a signal to MoI that you want to boolean the result of the extrusion with that selected solid.

- Michael

Make real time boolean don't slow down the screenplay in case of complex volumes?

Hi Pilou,

> Make real time boolean don't slow down the
> screenplay in case of complex volumes?

A couple of possibilities for avoiding that - one method could be that I would only do the boolean calculation just at the very end after you have picked the extrude distance, instead of trying to do it on every mousemove.

But it also may be possible for me to make a special case faster boolean for just this one particular purpose since it will be for curves that are sitting on a plane of the object, rather than for a fully general surface/surface intersection that the booleans normally calculate.

- Michael

When you have a multiple boolean with complex volumes that can't be "real time" ;)
So I understand when you have one / one volume that can be real time but with massive more I don't believe
like this one for example : take 2 second (on my old comput) but just for the concept ;)
Move all cylinders with the boolean function over the sphere seems problematic :)

Hi Pilou,

> When you have a multiple boolean with complex volumes
> that can't be "real time" ;)

No - not for the fully general purpose booleans, particularly when things get complex it involves a large number of calculations. A large number of calculations does not usually combine very well with "real time".

But like I was mentioning for this new possibility of doing an extrude with boolean combined, it may be possible for me to do a specialized boolean that may work faster than the regular general purpose booleans. It is probably worth a try anyway when I get a chance to work on it.


> Move all cylinders with the boolean function over the
> sphere seems problematic :)

This new function that I am talking about would not do that job - it would be for extruding a set of curves from a plane on an object, something like this:




However, the primary purpose of this is not to do a real-time boolean, it is to avoid the need to do the boolean as an additional operation to make for fewer steps in the workflow...


- Michael