Hi Mark I'm glad that the new scene browser in v2 is working well for you!

One thing I wanted to mention - there is a collection of all the release notes on new stuff that is in v2 so far here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/doc/V2releasenotes.html

- Michael

Just a quick note to say thanks Paolo and Michael for the help. My model and images are now scaled just fine at 1:100 and set to millimeters.

Hi Mark,

My compliments for your website,
you are a true artist.

Cool images on the site indeed!

Hi Mark,

I found another method to scale (silly me answering to fast)

Pick first reference point and type 171/219 as scale factor.

Thanks guys for your kind words about my website :)

Thanks also Paolo for the alternative scaling method. I wouldn't have thought of that.

And thanks Michael for adding Sketchup export to MoI. Without the Sketchup export I wouldn't be able to unfold the 3D for paper modeling, so add that as another reason the V2 upgrade will be essential for me.

About the only other thing I would like to see in MoI is the plugin interface. How do you envision that working Michael?

Hi Mark,

> About the only other thing I would like to see in MoI is the
> plugin interface. How do you envision that working Michael?

Well, there will probably be a few different layers - you'll able to write things that automate existing tools with a combination of HTML for the UI and Javascript for the logic. In fact several people have already done that to make some custom command plug-ins already, check them out here: http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/

Then there needs to be another kind of component that can be created using C++ code for some more "back end" type heavy calculation stuff. At the moment the interfacing mechanism for this part is not exposed.

Unfortunately documenting and also supporting this stuff is a lot of work, so it may still take a while before that area really gets going. The current priority is still much more on making basic tools that work for "regular" end-users rather than developers.

- Michael

Many thanks for the reply Michael.

I'm not a great programmer and not a java programmer at all but I'm always full of ideas!

I've been considering what the future options for unfolding of surfaces within MoI might be. I would be happy with something that works much like the Ruby script does in Skoogle where you click on a face then on an adjacent face and the second face is basically rotated to be in the same plane as the first. This of course works on polygonal objects only. What I would like from Skoogle's ruby script is a bit more automation. I'd also like it to allow overlaps as sometimes I want them.

MoI has first rate polygon mesh generation (I've been relying on it heavily throughout this paper model project) but it generates these polygon meshes only as output to some other format, like .skp. Would it be possible to generate these meshes as editable geometry (straight line "curves" and flat surfaces, basically nurbs "polygons") for re-use within MoI (similar to what your obj wireframe import script allows)? If so then I'm thinking that MoI's current tools such as "rotate" could be scripted to do much the same as Skoogles ruby script.

Chances are, none of that made any sense....

I've had a look at some of the Java from the site you pointed me to (already using some of those and they are excellent). I think I could manage some simple scripts.

Hi Mark,

> Would it be possible to generate these meshes as editable geometry
> (straight line "curves" and flat surfaces, basically nurbs "polygons")
> for re-use within MoI (similar to what your obj wireframe import script
> allows)?

Usually it is not so good to make NURBS objects out of a tremendous number of tiny facets.

NURBS have a very general purpose trimming mechanism, with the concept of an "underlying surface", which also includes 2 chunks of stuff for every trim curve, a UV curve that lives in the parameter space of the surface, and then also a 3D curve. All this structural stuff tends to be why NURBS are good at booleans - when you boolean 2 NURBS solids, the underlying surfaces of each get to stay exactly the same and only new trim curves have to be calculated. This tends to avoid fragmentation into a bazillion little slivery pieces which is what happens with polygon-mesh booleans - that is one reason why polygon mesh booleans just do not tend to work very well...

However, this kind of advanced and generalized structure for trimming is also heavier than the edge structure of a polygon mesh object.

NURBS can be nice and lightweight in data size when you are using them as they were originally intended - which means for example having a sphere represented as one sphere surface.

But if you instead try to make a sphere made up of thousands of tiny facets, that is not really how NURBS are designed to be used, and in that case the NURBS structure becomes quite memory consuming, since you now have quite a large number of trim curves.

So to make a long story short - although it is technically possible to make a conversion like you are talking about, it can result in a structure that is not really suited well for NURBS and can consume too much memory.

That means it would need to be a kind of special purpose thing, not really a general tool to use in normal circumstances.... That's why I did not make it as a built-in type thing, not yet anyway.

- Michael

Hi Mark, also I should probably mention that most likely the real solution to what you are talking about, like being able to rotate or manipulate polygon data in MoI, will be to have MoI support polygon data as a separate kind of object in addition to NURBS data.

But I haven't tried to do that yet though, since it kind of opens up potential for a lot of confusion for how those different kinds of data should interact with one another.

It has helped to keep MoI's interface nice and streamlined by having it focused on dealing only with NURBS data and not polygons yet.

Right now I kind of expect that if you need to work on polygon data that you would use a different program than MoI to do it, like for example Silo or Modo.

- Michael

Thanks Michael,

MoI keeps on getting better and better!

Jesse