Hi, well again for me, my initial request for this >was because of scale< - typically when working on spaceships, I need to zoom out to a coupla hundred meters to move around to different parts of the ship and then "dial in" to work on say a window or a hatch or vent area etc.

When I got home, I had MoI and LW open and that was when I noticed how MoI's grid becomes unusable when you zoom in or out while in comparision, LW's grid maintained the same visual distance but your "view" of the visible space within your scene became either more or less.

My thought there was "wow!, I'd still be able to have all of MoI's great snaps working for me if the grid worked this way" - that's why I brought up the snapping part there at the end.


If you look at my GIF again, as I zoomed out to 20m level, your objects just keeps getting smaller, which to me, is my indication of scale.

Say that cube was a "man" floating in space and I wanted to rough out the size my Rescue Shuttle next to him - I can sorta judge the scale of objects I need to create by dialing up or down and seeing the amount of space I have available relative to other object(s) in the scene.


I thought the problem with this in MoI would have been wheeling arbitrary zoom values again like 1.82cm or similar - THAT would be horrifying for me also to work with!

However I can easily grasp creating my objects when I can see my grid is say 1, 2, 5 or 10 (20, 50, 100) units etc., it's not distracting at all.

Mentally for me, it's like a multiplier; "hmmm, let me zoom out 10 units and add this...", "this part should be 50x larger..." - that's typically how I use this kind of grid.

I thought if it was trival or not too hard to implement, it would have been a nice INI file option.

Yes, you'd need a UI to display the current grid value, but looking at MoI just now, I could see a small text item right below the viewport axis icons for each viewport " G:10m " or " G:50' " in that same nice light/semi-transparent font.

OR (looking again), right next to the viewport name "Top (20mm)" may be a good spot to display the grid unit - it could also be made to fade out similar to the viewport controls as well so it's not distracting...

-Will

Hi Will, I wish it was actually as easy as you make it sound to do alterations like this! :)

But that kind of a system with different possible grids for every viewport is not necessarily easy to integrate with MoI's current system which has some pieces of the UI that are built on the current idea that there is one global grid size.

Changes need to be reconciled with the existing UI, like what should the Options / Grid / Grid size control say when you have this situation that you want where there would be 4 different grids on the screen at the same time?

What kind of UI is necessary to control the new system, do you need to specify what kind of increments are possible?

Does there need to be a control to switch between this system and MoI's current system?

Does LightWave actually have a way to manually set the grid to a specific value at all? If so, what happens if you set the grid size to something that happens to be dense in the current zoom level, does it immediately shift it away from the specific value that you entered?


> and that was when I noticed how MoI's grid becomes unusable
> when you zoom in or out

Actually when you zoom out and the grid gets dense that does not mean it is totally unusable, it is still doing that job of serving as a visual scale reference which is one of the other things that it can be used for aside from snapping.


At any rate, I would like to do this at some point of time in the future but it is not just a matter of writing a couple of lines of code and it's done, there are quite a few things to consider about how it would integrate, I already mention several issues above those are just the ones right off the top, it takes time and careful consideration to change things like this, and it doesn't help that the end result would cause problems and not really be good to have turned on by default.

- Michael

Hi Michael, being a programmer myself, I wouldn't expect implementing something similar to what Newtek does to be all that simple - that's why I had initally asked was it feasible.

Not knowing how you've implemented your grid system, I was just wondering if it was a matter of just adding some kind of switch that could be enabled that would let you "zoom out the object" on a locked grid step in a similar fashion.


I didn't realize until I got home and tried it that it was the camera that is pulling back when I zoom out, not changing the grid size and have the object scale follow to indicate the change in distance between the grid units.


However you managed the zoom between your viewports now is fine for me, (it can be locked for all I care), I wasn't expecting a whole lot of fancy, I was just looking for a way to be able to zoom up and down my grid resolution so I can work with large structures or fine details in a similar, continuous flow...

-Will

Hi Will,

> that's why I had initally asked was it feasible.

Well, not without solving the problems I previously mentioned about how to integrate it with the existing UI...

That last problem that I mentioned seems to be a particularly big one though - I assume in LightWave that there is some method for you to choose a specific grid cell size?

Or does it not have any ability to do that, with having that dynamic changing size grid system completely in place of a user settable grid size?

I'm not quite sure how it would work to have both - what if you were zoomed out and then you enter in a grid size that would normally make the grid show up as a dense set of lines, does it immediately switch out to a different scale factor, shifting away from the value that you just entered?


> I was just looking for a way to be able to zoom up and down my
> grid resolution so I can work with large structures or fine details
> in a similar, continuous flow...

Probably the closest thing to this right now in MoI would be to set up some keyboard shortcuts for moving the grid up or down in increments, like this:

Increase grid by a factor of 2:
script:moi.grid.size *= 2.0; moi.grid.snapSize = moi.grid.size;

Decrease grid by a factor of 2:
script:moi.grid.size /= 2.0; moi.grid.snapSize = moi.grid.size;


- Michael

Another option that may solve part of Will's issue is to have a "readout" of how far away from me (the center of the universe) his view is.

He could then do the math as to the relative size of his objects. The snapping wouldnt follow but his mind would.

Thanks Michael, I get your point.

i was just playing around with the circular array variables in MoI, when i thought how cool it would be if the vertical step or the radial step could be changed in an organic way.

having said that though I have to say that the available array possibilities in MoI are excellent

Hi Steve - yeah circular array happens to not really be set up to have those kinds of in-viewport mouse feedback type parts to it. It is driven more off of just numeric input and that would be a good candidate for something along the lines of what you were talking about.

Probably something like an up/down arrow that shows up on the right-side of an edit field and lets you click or drag in it as another way to manipulate the value will make sense to do eventually.

It just was not a thing to focus on initially since the other method of snapping to points inside the viewport tends to help deliver accuracy in quite a few areas.

- Michael

it's not an important thing...maybe something for v4.2 :)

Hi Michael

>> I assume in LightWave that there is some method for you to choose a specific grid cell size?

No, here are the 'only' options available for the grid.



The grid unit option let you change the auto incrementation method.

Hi PaQ, I see....

But that sure seems like an enormous limitation.

What is that grayed-out "snap value" thing in there, does that get enabled when you change the drop-down above it? Does that then switch to a regular grid instead of the morphing style grid?

- Michael

Hello Michael,

>> What is that grayed-out "snap value" thing in there, does that get enabled when you change the drop-down above it? Does that then switch to a regular grid instead of the morphing style grid?

No it doesn't change the morphing grid behavior, but let you force the snap step.

Hi PaQ, well I guess I would call that pretty "interesting"...

But seriously - no way to set the grid to a specific value?? Really, you are not kidding?

@Will - I just can't see how it would be feasible in a CAD program to have no method for setting specific values for the grid size.

- Michael

I don't know Michael, I've never felt limited by LW's grid system??


In fact, I liked it enough to the point of requesting similar in MoI if it wasn't too out of the way to do...


I've never had to specifically set my grid to an absolute value to get my work done?

Perhaps it is my limited experience/use of 3D packages due to developing mostly for games and video / multimedia?

My works are mostly artistic, I'm not doing any absolute hard CAD here - I thought that was also what you touted MoI to be - an artistic tool? I know you need to cover your bases in the future ala Rhino but that's also why I asked for an INI switch...


In LW if I need to create an object that matches a blueprint and is sized accurately, that's very much possible with LW - you can absolutely position points, edges, surfaces same as with any other package. With LWCAD, it becomes even easier with all of its real-time measurement features. (Which would be nice to see in MoI as well. :-P )


I didn't wish to belabor the point since this thread was actually about something else and you already expressed that you felt that it was a weird setup and wasn't worth having in MoI but Paq answered your last question.

For me, LW's grid is a reference to size (or space) you can set your snap as Paq has shown to be a division of that grid value - I'm not even sure if I've ever used a grid where I required the increments to be an absolute value?


That's why in MoI I've been running with No Units all this time; I see the grid as a place to start an object - I see the snap value as a way to divide that grid to give me "resolution" to place additional points (2-snaps, 4-snaps, 5-snaps per grid etc.)

Just the other day I was looking at some SciFi meshes and the ships were hundreds of meters across.

Usually for my models I create them without consideration to actual size (not like they really exist anyway) and then size them up later. (Which is where I have probs when I drop in a Poser reference figure; I have to scale stuff like crazy to get the ship to match what I feel its size should be...)

It was after seeing those models and also knowing that Wing Commander games always had spec'd sizes for there ships that got me to thinking perhaps I should try for the first time doing the same.


For a change, I figured I would to create an "average man" (similar to SketchUp's stand-in) object as a reference for scale and then zoom out and create the model to match and when I zoomed out in MoI that's when I noticed the probs with the grid I mentioned above.


Of course I can use LW for this, and I do - thanks to the work you had did previously that helped both Paq and I out, I create starter meshes in MoI and take them to LW and add the detailing there.

Obviously since MoI is (for a lot of us here) our modeler of choice, I'd prefer to do as much as I can in MoI before I have to drop down to the polygon level.

I'll look at the scripts you provided - they may very well be enough for what I need.


-Will

PS - Looking at my original post, I used the word Guessimate - from that alone you can see I wasn't looking for absolute CAD related stuff here...

Hi Michael,

>> But seriously - no way to set the grid to a specific value?? Really, you are not kidding?

I'm not kidding :) You can set a specific value, but in the layout only. (you know, lw is divided into 2 modules, linked with something called a hub).
The layout grid don't have any morphing zoom behavior.

Modo grid works like lw modeler.

I really like this sytem, but lw is my 3d 'mother' software, so I probably don't have a good overview of the limitations ... I'm not working in the CAD area either.

Yes I think Will hit his nail on the head here. For "Relative" artistic creation, this may be very useful. (polymodeler's). For cad work this would be a disaster.

I wonder if there is a means to "disregard the grid" or perhaps have "2 grid systems" that can be switched. This may be something that comes after a mature MoI, but the artists I think would utilize this feature.

Lightwave was my "Mother" package as well - my first real ($1500+ bigg-bois) 3D package I owned.

I started in at v5 (bought off eBay - was lucky the seller wasn't a crab), immediately upgraded to v6.5 and have been using it ever since - it's the package I know the best.

I may be dropping XSI this year - can't even get the damn v7.5 thing to register on my machine till this day!

Cinema 4D is on the chopping block too but I actually really like C4D - especially paired w/MoI so I may keep just the two, well ZBrush also - just the three... :-P )

-Will

PS - @Burr - that was my initial thought as well. I was actually surprised to hear that LW's (modeler's) grid system was "such a disaster"!

I've just never had a reason till date that I can think of where I required my grid to be absoluetly a certain value?

I would depend on the wonderful snapping and construction line features that are already in MoI.

LWCAD's wonderful real time display of length and angle while creating objects would be a nice addition to MoI also as I mentioned.

But the grid - I use that as an indicator of space - I guess I took for granted being able to zoom a mile out to work on something and zoom back in really small and still have a visible grid to work off of each time?

Hi Will,

> I thought that was also what you touted MoI to be - an artistic tool?

Certainly! Sometimes I've used the phrase "CAD for artists".

But notice the word "CAD" is in there? ;)

MoI is generally meant to be a CAD tool but one that is more friendly for use by artists rather than only exclusively focused only on more technical users.

The basic premise behind MoI is that there are artists out there that need to create things that CAD tools are good at doing. So I wanted to make a new CAD program that would be easier for an artist to pick up and be productive with, without necessarily having an engineering background.

But make no mistake - MoI is certainly a CAD tool.

There is an overall focus in MoI on making it possible to do accurate things, input specific numbers when you want to have a particular numeric result, snap things together precisely, etc... Being able to set the grid to a specific value is just a basic part of that whole accuracy package.

It would be extremely bizarre to have a CAD program that would not let you choose a specific value for the grid, that is just a huge mis-match with the overall basic structure of MoI.

That's not even the only problem with the auto-morphing grid though - just having the grid change also causes the problem that I mentioned previously about not being able to use it for one of its other basic functions as a scale reference. That's a significant problem all by itself...


> I'll look at the scripts you provided - they may very well be
> enough for what I need.

Yeah, they may be able to give you the sort of overall feel that you are looking for, since that will let you tap a key a few times to enlarge or shrink the grid quickly without needing to know what specific value it is currently set to.

That's certainly worth a try...

- Michael

Hi PaQ - the part that I am really surprised about is that you can't set the size of the "base grid block" to a specific value.

The way that I would have imagined that it worked would have been that you could set some base grid size, and then there would be a scale factor applied to that base size.

But no way to set the grid at all... That is even weirder than I thought, and I already thought it was pretty weird to begin with! ;)

- Michael

Hey Will,
Michaels really fast but I wanted to post anyway. When I said "Disaster" I only meant for doing "CNC" work. I think Light Wave is a great package. I was actually looking at it for the "virtual Studio" stuff that was way cool. Anyway, I can see your use. Thanks for accepting my input.

Hi Will,

> LWCAD's wonderful real time display of length and angle
> while creating objects would be a nice addition to MoI also
> as I mentioned.

Actually, that is already a feature of MoI - the distance from the previously picked point and also the angle from it in the plane are available as a real-time display in this location:



As a bonus feature, they kind of stay "out of your face" while you are drawing so that your screen stays free and clear of excess stuff while you are drawing. Just glance down there when you want to know that information.

- Michael