A new v2 beta (version Apr-12-2009) is now available for download here: http://moi3d.com/beta.htm

You will need to enter your v1 license key to download the v2 beta.

The v2 beta installs into its own folder, it is not a problem to have v1 and any v2 beta installed on the same machine, in fact I recommend that so that you can fall back to v1 if you run into some temporary bad bug in v2.


It will take me a while to collect all the notes for all the new things, but probably the biggest thing is the new browser which helps to work with batches of objects more easily.

You can open up the browser pane by clicking the new button at the bottom of the side pane (next to the Help button), and you can also switch the browser to be a section inside of the side pane rather than a separate panel, by going to Options / General / Scene browser position.

Currently the sections that work are "Objects", "Types", and "Styles".

Objects allows you to work on named objects. You can assign a name to a selected object (or set of objects) by clicking on the name part of the properties panel in the upper-right area of the main window, which shows up when you are in selection mode before running a command.

The types section allows you to work on all objects of a particular type, like hiding all curves, selecting all solids, etc...

Styles allows you to work on all objects that have been assigned a particular style. Styles in general are also a new thing. Currently to edit the styles list you need to select an object, then click on the new Style entry in the properties panel and there is an "Edit styles" button available on that flyout menu.

More info later...

- Michael

Nice to see the new beta... Just one moment after using it, I noticed this...

1. I make a circle and name it c1
2. I extrude the circle and name the solid s1
3. I change the circle by moving one point and the solid changes.
4. I check the name and I see that I have c1 but s1 doesn't exist, it is back to unnamed...

This is wrong, because practically the new solid is still s1 but it is corrected... the name is useless if it can't follow the changes of the object...On the other hand, when making a boolean op with two objects, the resulting object keeps the name of the first object...

No need to say that the object should exist even after boolean operations so that you can go back in history and change the object and the boolean should be updated accordingly...

This is my main wishlist item for modeling with MoI and I guess this will make it a great software... To be able to make any change, whenever you want, and the history will work as a database of operations in the background and the user can change intermediate operations to fine tune the result.


Please tell us something about styles... They are here for ....???? Something like colors, layers, groups or many of them together?

hi, Michael


But color solid object ????

I hoped in the color and the group of objects, instead nothing. I am very sad for this.'s been made since beta 4.

Thanks

Congrats on the new beta release, Michael.

Looking forward to the additional features!

-Will

Hi JTB, yeah that is a bug that the object properties do not persist through a history update, I think it should be possible for me to fix that up. Thanks for reporting it.

> No need to say that the object should exist even after
> boolean operations so that you can go back in history
> and change the object and the boolean should be
> updated accordingly...

Yup, I do want to make this possible in the future. It is going to take quite a bit of work to make it happen, I'm hoping to be able to make progress in version 3.


> Please tell us something about styles... They are here for ....????
> Something like colors, layers, groups or many of them together?

There are a couple of things that styles are there for - one is so that you have the option to organize objects into different colored categories as one method of working.

They also will be used to set up material assignments when exporting to a polygon format - this part is not quite set up yet.

They have some similarity to layers since the kind of traditional layer system also makes objects show up in the color of the layer it is assigned to.

Their behavior is a little different than layers though - one thing that is different is that a style does not have an on/off state that belongs to the "style" itself (the status that it shows is a reflection of the state of all the objects that belong to that style), they are just another way to work on a set of objects to apply some action like hide, show, select, deselect.

They don't have any more "weight" than any of the other methods of organization like organizing by object name or by object type. Each of those organization methods use different criteria for defining what makes up their set, but each of them has the same behavior that they let you apply some action to a batch of objects.

- Michael

Hi Marco,

> But color solid object ????
>
> I hoped in the color and the group of objects, instead nothing.
> I am very sad for this.'s been made since beta 4.

Please don't forget that this is a _beta_ release, not a finished release.

Many things are still in progress.

I didn't want to delay the release any further so this release is a bit more unfinished in many of the new features than previous releases have been.

But the main other choice I had would have been to delay the release by some more weeks while I continued to work on things like shaded colors.

Would you have preferred that I did not release it now and instead waited for some more weeks to do it? I don't understand why that would be better though. I wanted to get my current results out there for testing.

At the moment the colors will only show up in the wireframe drawing, for curves and edges. That's until I have a chance to work on adjusting the lighting for solid objects, without an adjustment to the current lighting setup it was just too dark.


> I hoped in the color and the group of objects, instead nothing.

If you assign a style to a solid, you should see its edges take on the color of that style, which is not nothing.... Do you not see that currently?

There are also 3 different methods that you can use already as methods to deal with sets of objects - assign an object name to make that name show up under the Objects section. This is a lot like a group it is just not hierarchical.

You can also work with Styles or Types as other ways right now to work on a batch of objects.

Marco, really I don't understand some of what you write - you ask me many times to hurry up and release a new beta, so when I do what you ask and release it sooner rather than later then you say you do not like it to be released soon? It is very confusing for me to understand what you would like for me to do.

- Michael

I just wanted to report on this since it was easy for me to uncover...

Create a rectangle, change the style to orange.

Extrude the rectangle into a solid and the top edge of the solid carries over the orange style. Clicking the default style for the solid fixes it.








Not a biggy but I figured I'd mention it.

-Will

Hi Will, thanks for reporting that, there will need to be some cleaning up of some things like that which will involve some tweaking of individual commands.

Please let me know if you run into other commands that have similar behavior, it is going to be a kind of case-by-case fixup for this stuff.

Also currently many things will not automatically inherit styles from "generator curves", currently things should inherit from pieces of the original object that are copied though.

Like a piece of a surface that is trimmed from another one should inherit the original's style, but a surface that is created from a curve will not fully do that yet.

Pieces that are newly constructed will currently get assigned to the "active style", which is the one that has the outline around its swatch (right click on a swatch or left-click with no selection to set the active style).

- Michael

Hello Michael,
thanks for this nice easteregg.
looks great.

I searched for a key to unselect. eg select all curves then deselect the red ones by ctrl click on the red style. that would be great.

But guess whats happening when you ctrl click on a style name IE pops up. funny thing

cheers,
Michael

Hi Michael,

Congrats for this new beta !

Just a little question,

If I draw a sphere, hide the faces, I can't select the edge from this sphere anymore.
However if I select the sphere before hidding the faces, then I can select/edit the edge as I expected.

Hi Michael,

> I searched for a key to unselect. eg select all curves then
> deselect the red ones by ctrl click on the red style. that
> would be great.

Yeah actually that is supposed to work exactly like you describe there.

You are supposed to be able to left-click on the name to select, right-click on it to "isolate select" (make it the exclusive selection and deselect other things). Ctrl+click to deselect, and Ctrl+right click to "isolate deselect" (make it the only unselected thing and select other things).


> But guess whats happening when you ctrl click on a style name
> IE pops up. funny thing

Hmmm that is pretty weird. What happens if you Ctrl+click on just any other UI like for example a line or circle button, does it do the same thing?

Somehow your system seems to be thinking that you are clicking on a hyperlink there I guess instead of what is supposed to happen.

I can't reproduce the problem over here so it is a bit hard to guess what might be wrong. One thing you might try if you have IE7 is this reset button as described here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/06/12/628499.aspx
Maybe something has gotten set up slightly odd in your registry that has this side effect.

If you give that reset button a try, please let me know if it has any effect for you or not.

- Michael

Hi PaQ,

> If I draw a sphere, hide the faces, I can't select the edge
> from this sphere anymore. However if I select the sphere before
> hidding the faces, then I can select/edit the edge as I expected.

Yeah, this is actually kind of an old problem - you should be able to reproduce the same thing in the earlier releases by selecting all faces (select one face then Ctrl+A, this would be on an object made up of more than one face not a single-face object like a sphere) and hiding.

Basically behind the scenes picking currently only relies on targeting faces to make the initial "whole object selection", and edges are only targeted after you have a whole object selection in place.

Of course now it is a whole lot easier to do something like hide all faces with one click, so it will probably be more of an issue now.

I think it should be possible for me to fix it up, but it is a somewhat finicky area to mess with, that's why I've kind of avoided dealing with it up to now.

- Michael

I tried the reset button. Things get even more worse.

If no IE is open ctrl klick on every button opens it. If IE is open nothing happens but if i ctrl doubleclick it works as expected for ctrl singleclick.

I just updated my laptop this morning to IE7 and XPSP3 to work in the garden (first sunny weekend for months). So if no one can reproduce this behaviour its my laptop and you dont have to worry about.

Michael

Hi PaQ, also a quick question - is the way that the Types show their status making sense to you?

You've probably noticed that some things are interconnected.

Like if you hide faces but not edges like you were describing, then Solids will show as that half eye "mixed status", since it has some of its sub-objects shown and some hidden.

Let me know if anything seems odd in how that part works.


The "Selected" sub-section is slightly odd to just play around with, because as soon as something is hidden it also gets deselected, so it then that section gets grayed out since there are no longer any objects that fit inside of it. But that seems to be working as it should, it is just something that is more useful for a particular targeted purpose and not just experimental clicking on.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I see you already have a barrage of questions.
I think I'll work on a project and follow the thread to get my head around this first, see how I'll use it because at first glance it looks like a highly flexible system, from basic use to advanced organisation.
Good job, thanks.

-

Hi Michael, I did a bit of poking around and it appears that there is some kind of nVidia utility program that has been sometimes known to cause similar problems in other places with Ctrl+click.

Does your laptop have an nVidia video card?

If so, you may want to give this a try - there is a utility program called nwiz.exe that may be running at startup, you can use Start/Run/msconfig , look in the startup section to disable it temporarily and reboot, see if that makes it go away.

Another one I saw mentioned is: "rundll32.exe nview.dll,nViewLoadHook" - if you see that in the startup section of msconfig, try disabling that one too and reboot.

Those are probably worth a try.

- Michael

hi Michael,
thanks, disabling the nvidea desktop utility did the job

sunny day
Michael

Thanks Danny! Yes that would be great to hear about how it feels in use.

Some basic quick tips and overview:

If you have a particular object you want to refer back to later on, you can give it a name and then it will show up under the Objects section. You can also assign the same name to several objects and then they will all be controlled by that one name entry.

If you want to do stuff that targets particular types of objects, like "Select all curves", "Hide all solids", things along those lines, then the Types section is where you want to go for those.

You can use Styles if you want to do organization by using colors, also I plan to make style assignments become material assignments in exported polygon files but that part is not quite ready yet.


So basic stuff right now is assign an object a name or a style and then you can manipulate it with the browser.

 

Then the way that the actions work, is that you can click on the eye to switch an item to be hidden or showing.

You can right-click on an eye to "isolate" that item which makes it the only shown thing and isolates all others. If you right-click on an isolated item it will un-isolate it and show everything.

You can click on the text part of an item to select it - left click selects it, ctrl+left click deselects it, right-click does an "isolate select" (makes it the only selected item), and ctrl+right-click does an "isolate deselect" (makes it the only deselected item, with everything else selected).

If you have a sequence of eyes that you want to all set on or off, you can hold the mouse button down and swipe over them.


Let's see what else - in Styles you can also click on the swatches to do some stuff - if you have a selection then left click on a swatch will assign the selection to that style (can also be done if the browser is hidden by the new Style entry in the properties panel), if you right click or left-click with no selection on the swatch it will set the active style to be that one. That's the one that will be used for drawing new objects it is the one that is marked with an outline around the outside of it.

If the text of an item is grayed out it means that there are not currently any objects that fall in that category.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> thanks, disabling the nvidea desktop utility did the job

That's great news! I'm glad that is resolved, it seemed pretty mysterious...

- Michael

Hi Danny, the other thing that I should mention that may be a little different than what you are used to is that these states are not persisting "modes".

The eyes will show you the status of all objects that belong to that slot, like if all objects are shown, if all are hidden, or if there is a mixture (with the half-eye).

But for example if you go to Styles and do a hide on Style=Red, you will hide all currently existing objects that are assigned Style=Red. But that does not mean that "Red is permanently off from now on no matter what", like if you were to draw a brand new object and give it a style of red, it would be visible and that Red status would switch to be mixed since there are now some visible and some hidden red objects.

This is kind of different than how layers usually work, so I wanted to give you a kind of heads up.

It will be good to hear how it works in practice - the general idea is that by avoiding that kind of "persistent on/off mode" and relying more on "batch actions" instead, it makes it possible to have some more flexibility and have several different kinds of batch categories that you can pick and choose between.

But it would be good to know if you miss some behavior from the "persistent on/off mode" kind of way of working.

- Michael