Show me a bug free app or OS.
You're dreaming Steve, no offense.

Oh! btw can I have your copy of MoI ? :)

--------
~Danny~

I am really confused by the last comment from Manz....
Michael's attitude is actually one of the best things about MOI, I have not seen many developers that are as responsive to user comments, about fixing bugs, adding features etc...
In my opinion, Michael is top notch for this.

As for the rest of the thread, here is my 2 cents:

The price of moi is incredibly low. As others have already mentioned, even plugins for certain apps, such as ext render engines, can cost up to 1000$ easily.
I have bought several apps for much more, and that have delivered a lot less....
As moi grows, I would also be willing to pay for upgrades, and I find Michael's suggestions of charging only the difference to the new price, as an upgrade price, very fair.

- MOI produces the best ngon meshes I have seen so far, and it play very well with RHINO (except for a lack of polygon mesh import). Even if you only need a mesher for 3dm or IGES, the price is a steal, really. I get a lot of 3dm models from clients (I deal with visuals for complex architectural projects). Moi has been a huge boost to get clean meshes out to our render apps.

-Beyond that, moi has by far the best workflow of any linear app out there in my opinion, for hard edge modeling.
Because I deal with visuals for Competitions / project at the conceptual stage, it normally does not make sense to invest too much time setting up a model with a deep construction history. It works much better to have a linear modeling approach in most cases (especially since we only model the smaller projects in-house; for more complex projects, we normally receive 3d models from our clients.)
Moi is incredibly fluid to work with.
And the tools just make sense.


All I need now are layers (...edited....), and I would be switching almost completely to moi for modeling!

Keep up the good work Michael.

I suppose we can't please everyone.

I don't excpect to have a lifetime free update from MoI. Everything has a cost, an MoI gives a lot for what I've payed for.

- Instant feedback for every little bugs. I'm not affraid to use it in production, I know whatever the problem I can have, it will be fixed most of the time in the
day, and if not I'll reveice 10 workarounds from Michael or others Moiers.

- For someone who never userd nurbs, bying MoI is like having a private teacher, called Michael, every day of the week ... priceless !

So maybe the develepement is quite different from others companies, but I'm glad to give a little of my money in this project, and I know where
my money is going.

Now I do agree with Manz, maybe, depending of the time Michael can put in, if the V1 is sold as a lite version, it would be wise to fix all the little bugs discovered
during the V2 beta (library updates, etc) without any feature update ofcourse. Actually V1 (and the V1 demo) is no more really revelant from what Moi is.

In the other hand, I've the feeling that having access to V2beta is part from some licence bying decission too.

OMG just reading this thread - I can't believe people are winging that MOI is or will be too expensive! MOI is the best value app out there for me and the high level of support is worth $100 a year anyway! If you think moi is expensive then look at the major architectural cad packages - autocad is just outragous in terms of bang for buck and they make you subscribe! How do people expect michael to make a living - no michael = no moi. I bought moi as a hobby app but seriously considering using it for work, even still I would/will be buying it for $100 each year till it levels out at the suggested $495 by which time im sure if will be a killer app. Keep up the good work michael.

""""He removed it.

Even REMOVED it easier and faster than any other app!! :)

Keep up the good work Michael.

Hi Michael,

When you where working for rhino3d,
how many programmers worked on
the program?

Yust curious,

Keep up the good work.

Hi Paolo,

> When you where working for rhino3d, how many programmers
> worked on the program?

For the initial 2 years or so I worked on it all by myself while several other programmers worked on a project called "AccuModel" which was an AutoCAD plug-in that used that same NURBS geometry library (called AGLib).

After something like 2 years or so of the initial work on it, it was looking like it was going to turn out a lot better than AccuModel, so everyone agreed to cancel AccuModel and shift everyone over to work on Rhino instead. As that ramped up I guess something like 7 or 8 people would work on various aspects of it. It took quite a while to finish even after that shift of resources, something like another 2 or 3 years after that.

So the final result was certainly a group effort, but it was sort of "my baby" as the phrase goes - there is no doubt it would never have existed at all if hadn't put a really intense effort to create it initially and get it going.


When I started MoI I had a lot more experience with software design than when I started Rhino, so it has been easier for me to do a larger extent of work on my own for it.

A bit of trivia: Early versions of Rhino were actually called Sculptura 2.0 , after an earlier modeling program that I had started while at college. But I had basically thrown away everything and started completely from scratch so after a while I decided to give it a brand new name rather than continuing it as Sculptura.

- Michael

Thanks for the little story,

I hope some guy's in this thread cool down
a bit and have more respect for the effort
you put in this project

I have full respect for Michael and his efforts.
And probably one of his best salesmen on the web.
But there is another side of the real world that should not be forgotten.

http://www.finfacts.ie/biz10/globalworldincomepercapita.htm

Brian

Wow. Australia's not even there! Looks like they dont matter.

TRUE! (The story of my life!---sob., sob)
(It's on that pdf thread though!)

Brian

ps I wonder how many of the thousands of USA 3D/computer programming workers laid off recently can now afford the products they participated in producing?

It is a changing world?

I saw that. Number 34 on a list of 209+++. So since your one of the richest nations in the world, Michael doesnt have to worry, you can afford the measley upgrade price. But, Michael should really worry about Burundi, at 209, and make sure he prices MoI so they can buy it.

As the American programmers realize the future of the computer, many of them become involed in the NEXT big thing! I suppose the rest of the worlds burden would be to figure out what that is.

Some simple maths---

US$100 in country "X" is---HOW! much% of the income of that average person in that country?

Some great bargains buying/involved with apps MADE in those other countries (Brilliance overides nationality!)

Brian

ps--NOT complaining, just trying to make the otherside of the world become more realistic.
Recent history needs to sink in more perhaps?

Michael, I am glad you're early efforts turned out so well. Otherwise I probably would have been using Autodesk Inventor. And well, I'm somewhat happy to be running with the "independent" parties! Actually I might have bought Inventor, except that the salesperson couldn't tell me what advantages it had over modeling in Rhino. I suppose that's what happens when resellers don't actually know what they're selling. Lucky for me! :) I did have to endure 6 months of annoying follow-up calls from the AD reseller...

I know this is way OT, but considering the wild turns this thread has taken, I might as well ask... Didn't I read that your school project was a polygon modeler? Did any of it's workflow trickle into MoI? Or was it a completely different animal (sorry for the bad pun)? Would be interesting to see the type of work it was able to produce back then... :)

jonah

Hi jonah,

> Didn't I read that your school project was a polygon modeler?

Yup, that was Sculptura.


> Did any of it's workflow trickle into MoI? Or was it a completely
> different animal (sorry for the bad pun)?

No, not really, it was pretty different. I mean this was way back in 1992 so it was pretty primitive.

The system requirements were:
386sx or better processor
Windows 3.1
4 MB memory
Hard Disk
A 256 color display and a math co-processor are recommended.


> Would be interesting to
> see the type of work it was able to produce back then... :)

One thing that it did have in common was a sort of general idea to try to do things quickly, there was a "conform to outline" tool in it where you could sketch a closed outline in one of the 2D views (the 3D view back then was for visual feedback only and not drawing in directly), and mesh vertices would travel towards a "local origin" point until they hit that outline. So you could repeat that in a couple of different views to kind of sketch/carve the vertices to some blobby shape pretty quickly, that was kind of interesting.

At the time there was not even anything really available for Windows at all, that was the time of 3DS DOS, so having anything 3D at all on Windows was kind of cool...

You could then save your scene out to POV-Ray or Vivid formats for fancier renders.

But it mostly served as a learning experience.

The first place that I gave a public demo was at the Olympia AutoCAD User's Group meeting and Bob McNeel and several other RMA people were there, at the time their main business was that they were an AutoCAD dealer. That's how I got hooked up with them, they became the distributors for Sculptura and I started working there as an intern initially. After I finished Sculptura 1.1, I threw everything out and then started Sculptura 2.0 from scratch and that is what turned into Rhino.

- Michael

With your unique experience, knowing the initial creation of it, can you see limitations that are there, that cant be easily overcome, because of the initial design and thought process?

Philosophies?
(Is there a trend for Americans to want to emigrate to get work?)

Go to "-----" and with the same US income you would live twice as well---and, then if you reduced a product price you might sell twice as much even in the USA---"compound interest"--billionaires overnight!

It works for the likes of Nike!

It's all relative--

But good fun keeping the mind working.

Brian