Here are the notes on what is new in the Apr-12-2009 v2 beta.

The biggest thing is the new scene browser functionality - the first batch of object organization tools!

Current sections that work are:

"Objects" - for dealing with objects that have been assigned a name
"Styles" - for organizing objects by grouping them into different colored categories
and
"Types" - for dealing with all objects of a certain type, like all curves, or all solids.

This allows you to perform some operations like hide, show, isolate, select, deselect on a batch of objects with one click. This can be useful to help organize a more complex project.

This is still a Work-In-Progress but there is a lot of stuff that is functional, some details on what actions are available are in this post:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2570.18

Some areas that are not finished quite yet are having Styles be exported as material assignments to polygon files such as OBJ or LWO. That will be coming in another upcoming beta.

Other stuff:

Enable numeric entry units conversion - you can now use a units designator when entering numeric values, either using feet and inches style such as 1'2" or by placing a units label at the end such as 5cm (one of:mm, cm, m, km, in, ft, mi). This will convert from the given units into the current unit system. So for example if you have your units set to centimeters, you can enter a value of 1' and it will convert it into 30.48 centimeters for you. This only has an effect if the current unit system is set to something other than "no units".

Add a new "First person" view rotation style under Options > View > Rotate/Pan/Zoom options > Rotation style. This rotation style keeps the camera point in the same location and pivots the target point around the camera. This style is similar to how a "First person shooter" type game works, and may be helpful for doing a more "walk through" kind of navigation rather than a "focused on specific object" type navigation which the other styles are oriented towards.

Added a "Flip" command which can be used to reverse the orientation of open surfaces. Currently there is no button for this but it can be launched by setting it on a keyboard shortcut or by using the new typed-in command launcher.

Update Filleting to handle small radius values better. Previously if you had a small radius value that approached the fitting tolerance value it would give bad results. Now the tolerance for the fillet operation is adjusted for small radius values to make sure it is accurate enough relative to the radius.

Added a "Show trailing zeros" option under Options / General. This option controls whether numeric values will show trailing zeros. For example with 3 decimal places set, whether a number is displayed as 5.4 or 5.400

Several fixes for meshing problems reported on the forum.

Major improvement for surface offsetting - previously the offsetter would only do a few levels of refinement and if that did not produce an accurate enough result it would bail out. This caused failures for surfaces that were somewhat larger and more curvy. This is now tuned up to allow for much more levels of refinement so many surface offsets that would previously fail will now work. Also previously offsetting of any general surface (other than blend/fillet surfaces) with a degree higher than 3 would fail, this is also fixed now.

Update Offset and Shell to use a relative tolerance factor for better handling of objects that are large in unit size.

Update booleans to use relative tolerance so that objects of a large scale will work better.

Make the mesh dialog work with auto-focus, so typing numeric characters puts values into the Angle field, and tab can be used to move to different numeric fields in the dialog.

Make Enter work as a shortcut for OK with the mesh dialog.

Add new "Constant distance" option for Fillet under the Shape: dropdown.

Made deleting faces faster, if a face was deleted that resulted in several disconnected parts and the model had more than about 1000 surfaces, it could take quite a while for the delete function to finish. This will now be a lot faster for models with many surfaces.

Fixed a UI bug where menu flyouts would not close if another application was clicked on while the flyout was open.

Fix a bug where Ctrl+M could not be used as a shortcut key since it was interpreted as an Enter keystroke instead.

Added a /showwindow command-line parameter that can be passed to moi.exe . If this is specified then the main window will be displayed when processing a script when in batch file operation.

Fixed a bug in chamfering curves where it did not work properly if the curves were located around 10000 units away from the origin.

Updated background images so they are scaled along with geometry if the unit system changes and scaling is enabled on unit system changes.

Updated SKP export - set flags on edges properly so that silhouettes are displayed in SketchUp.

Updated SKP export - export curves from MoI into SKP as "Curve" entities (a connected polyline) rather than only as individual line segments which was done previously.

Updated AI import - if after reading the whole AI file there were no objects found but there were some discarded paths, make another pass through the file and use those discarded paths. This helps to bring over AI files saved from Photoshop.

Updated AI import - fix a bug where rectangles with negative width or height values were not read in.

Fixed a bug where the Extend command would not work with small curves, it would previously only extend to a maximum of 20 times the curve's length.

Updated scroll wheel handling - avoid zooming a viewport in or out with the scroll wheel if the mouse is over a control that has a scroll bar.

Add a new "planar mode" for the pointpicker which can be activated by using a script on a keyboard shortcut:
script:moi.drawingAids.drawPlanar = !moi.drawingAids.drawPlanar;
When triggered while a point is being picked, this will cause the 3D view to keep the points to be on a plane through the first point, making things like curve drawing work the same in the 3D view as it does in an ortho view.

Add moi.ini option to disable auto-pan mode:
[View]
DisableAutoPan=y

Updated Italian language translation now included with this beta.

Update numeric text entry expressions - add rad() and deg() functions.
rad(x) takes a parameter in degrees and converts it to radians.
deg(x) takes a parameter in radians and converts it to degrees.

Fix a bug with the prompts not in proper order with the Arc3Pt command.

Fix a bug where extrusion could cause a crash if any of the curves involved had degenerate segments.

Enable mini command-line entry by typing in a command name into the XYZ coordinate entry box. Type <tab>, then the command name, then <enter> as an alternate way to execute a command or script file.

Add support for typing in "relative expressions" - when entering a numeric expression into an edit field that has been previously initialized to some other value, you can prefix the expression with one of these symbols: + -- * / to alter the existing value in the control by the given amount rather than inputting a completely new value. So for instance in a grid size input field you can type /2 to modify the existing value by dividing it by 2. This now works in any numeric input control.

Some other various small bug fixes.

- Michael

Long list of things there Michael!

With all the focus on the browser it's easy to forget how much has changed since the last beta :-)

Good stuff.

Hi Michael,

>>Added a "Flip" command

I looked on ''Petr's MoI page'' but didn't find it.

Awesome stuff Michael!!!

Is the planar option box for creating curves something that will come with the next beta?

Hi Paolo,

> >Added a "Flip" command

> I looked on ''Petr's MoI page'' but didn't find it.

It's included with the new Apr-12 beta, it isn't one that you need to download separately.

But there isn't a button for it yet, to use it you need to set up a keyboard shortcut with Flip as the command, or use the new command name type-in by typing <tab> Flip <enter>.

It's mostly of use for fixing up a polygon mesh export of open surfaces, if your polygon program does not have a way to flip polygons without losing the good shading normals.

- Michael

Hi Niko,

> Is the planar option box for creating curves something
> that will come with the next beta?

No, right now I'm not planning on having an option box in the UI for that - already when you draw in the ortho views (top/front/right), it will behave like that. That's basically the most expected way to draw planar things.

But if you want to draw a curve or polyline in the 3D view with a 2D-view-like planar behavior (where points are forced to be on the same plane through the first point picked), then it is now possible to set up a keyboard shortcut to turn that behavior on or off.

To use it, you set up a keyboard shortcut with this as the command:
script:moi.drawingAids.drawPlanar = !moi.drawingAids.drawPlanar;

- Michael

I think you're right when you want to create a completely planar curve, but what about a combound curve where 2 or 3 points of it for example have to be planar? There's occasions where curves like that have to be drawn in the 3d view for the skake of convenience.

Anyways the shortcut is nice, but i think an option box would be more appropriate given the frequency of that situation.

Hi niko,

> but what about a combound curve where 2 or 3 points of
> it for example have to be planar?

That seems to be a pretty infrequent situation for the majority of users.

You can already do the same thing there as well, just switch to the ortho view to draw the 2 or 3 points that should be aligned with that view's plane. But now there is a new option that you can use by setting up a shortcut key.

Are you constructing some specific kind of models that has that kind of a thing come up often? If you could post an example that might help me to understand.


> but i think an option box would be more appropriate
> given the frequency of that situation.

As far as I can tell right now it seems to be a pretty low frequency thing...

I generally try to avoid putting a whole lot of advanced or specialized stuff into the main UI, otherwise it tends to make the whole program more difficult to use for everyone.

That's when having the function available on a keyboard shortcut works well - then the advanced user can have easy access to it, but the beginning or casual user does not need to be confronted with a complex UI.

Basically one big reason why MoI is easy to use is because of this careful consideration to try and avoid overloading the UI with too many things. That's something that I am trying to be careful to preserve as new stuff is added.

- Michael