What UI library does Moi use? I am looking for a slick UI to use for a small 3d modeling application, and this one is really beautiful...

Thanks Dave, I'm glad you like it.

Are you asking about the outer frame UI, like the bottom toolbar and side pane? For that MoI uses my own custom UI library that is built on top of the IE HTML renderer (mshtml.dll).

The UI is defined by .htm files, which you can see in the \ui subdirectory under MoI's main program files directory. If you look through those you will see a bunch of custom elements for many things like <moi:CommandButton>, <moi:TabButton>, etc...

There are some cool features to this UI mechanism - like for instance you can scale the entire UI up or down to your preference by using the UI size: slider in the Options dialog.

- Michael

What about the graphic for display the model?

> What about the graphic for display the model?

That uses another custom engine that outputs to Direct3D.

Some of the interesting parts of that are a surface tessellator that turns trimmed NURBS surfaces into dense display meshes very quickly, and a mechanism for drawing anti-aliased curves (and hidden-line style curves) even on older video hardware.

- Michael

Thanks for your reply. I am working on the code for topmod most likely as part of my thesis. We are going to put it on sourceforge soon, but I would like to think about changing the UI toolkit. right now it uses FLTK, which is pretty limited and ugly. It's also extremely tedious to update and add features.

I can't rely on a windows only interface, as this original code for topmod was written for linux and sgi boxes, and we use mostly linux at our lab.

Do you know of any good toolkits that would be good for a 3d opengl app like topmod? I am looking into gtk and something called ghost, and a friend suggested that it would be better to use an interface like blender that is rendered in opengl.

From what I've heard, I'd say that probably Qt (http://www.trolltech.com/) or wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/) are your best bets.

I'm personally more interested in the Mozilla platform (XUL) because I prefer writing UI using a markup based HTML type mechanism. But I think this would probably be a lot more work than what you really need.

I believe that both Qt and wxWidgets have an OpenGL window mechanism included with them, so probably either one would be a pretty good fit.

This is probably worth a look: http://www.wxwidgets.org/wiki/index.php/WxWidgets_Compared_To_Other_Toolkits

I'm not really familiar with what UI libraries are available that would render themselves using OpenGL.. I would worry that you probably won't find something quite as general purpose or as stabilized as either one of these.


It will be fun to see what new stuff you cook up for topmod!

- Michael

wow. these links are great. thanks so much for your help. i'll keep you updated on what we do with topmod. I did finally get a new version compiled for windows in mingw, but the code for the new functions is still being debugged. I will post it here when I get a stable version of the code from the students who are working on it in the lab...

http://forum.jotero.com/viewtopic.php?t=132

Do you say that you make a new interface for TopMod?

Anybody can be registered on the adress above? (Yes I can:)

yes, eventually topmod will have a new interface, and I am considering taking on the task of ravamping the topmod code as part of my graduate thesis.

the jotero forum is for everyone, but some posts are in german...