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

Thanks for reminding me Michael - sorta embarassing.

In my defense, I guess I don't like to take my eyes off my work too much when I'm drawing out stuff - times like that, I don't find it distracting at all to see numbers on top of my lines and curves...

-Will