Hi Mark,

Can you be a bit more specific in the type of Engineering the firm you work for does, Mechanical, product, building, Machines?
It'll give us a better idea in answering, I'm sure someone on the forum would be using or would of used MoI for similar projects, for example, I have used it for plastic product design and some mechanical engineering and I can compare it to other packages and as Michael says it is a great companion to other more mature packages, that's until MoI catches up with some of the features and when that happens the other 3d vendors should be worried :)

Cheers

Hi guys,

Sorry for my very slow reply. Have been a bit busy.

Thanks Michael. I'm going to forward your reply to my boss.

Danny, the company I work for mostly supplies spare parts for machinery used in the mining industry. Most of these parts are not off the shelf but are made to customer drawings as required or at times to drawings created in-house. Drawings are sometimes redrawn by our drafting office to take into account modifications required by the customer. I believe we mostly use Autocad & Solidworks. My boss was impressed with the screen captures from MoI and I was curious how MoI might fit into our workflow.

I saw your thread using the silhouette feature for parting your moulds. Neat stuff!

Hi Mark,

>....the company I work for mostly supplies spare
> parts for machinery used in the mining industry.

I feel MoI as a companion to Solidworks would work great for the mechanical engineering side of things, I use Siemens NX6 (Unigraphics) and importing models from MoI and back again works fine, not that I do it for work on a day to day basis, but what I have tried works just fine, actually if I have an assembly in MoI with each part named and export as step, NX converts the step file into individual parts (files) corresponding to their name and then assembles them as they were in MoI and shows up in the assembly tree, I'm not sure, but I think Solidworks would work the same way, you'll have to try it.

Also as you've already seen here Ralf showing off the mechanical work he does and it looks like MoI does a great job.

I think you'll just have to use it on some projects and work out a system between MoI, Solidworks and Autocad, on the plus side the boss doesn't have to fork out for another seat of Solidworks, and get almost the same work output if he did, with a sub $200 investment.

Hey Michael, do you need an Aussie agent, I sound like a rep ;)

Cheers

Hey Mark,
Just put MoI on a usb stick and walk into his office and launch MoI from the thumb drive and make something cool really quick. Watch his eye's light up and buy everybody in the company a seat. (Do your modeling on the plane, in a boat, while at lunch and afloat. Do your modeling, in the car, in a hotel or a bar......Doctor!!!!!!

Burrman,
I think you have a little Dr Seuss in you!! :)

One of my favorites!

My two cents guys,

I use MoI almost every day at work off of the USB stick. I could not do without it!

Love the work Michael G.!

Thanks for a great tool!

Michael T.

Hi there

I use Moi as a companion to Mastercam and a 7 axis milling machine.
Moi is great for modification of geometry, and creating sections and checking the shape of things.

The new 3d silhouette function is fantastic for pinpointing undercuts!
I find it really useful.

Best,
Fredrik

Hello,

I am agree that MoI is suitable as combination with another MCAD software.
We wish Michael can also improve MoI in the future for this area :

- 2D Drawing + Detailing
- Advance Assembly Tools

Time will tell :)

Thanks !

In my opinion, there are enough of 2d drafting tools out there.
I would rather like to see a continuation of new 3d features that you don't find very many other places, like the silhouette, sweep with scaling rail, N-gon meshing.
A feature I could imagine be useful is a kind of "ridge detector", that would draw a spline on the areas of highest mean curvature.

Se pic of meancurvature from rhino. Here I used Rhinos Meancurvature to find ridges. A feature that could single out convex and concave ridges would be helpful for building models from 3d-scanned objects (meshes). I think it can be useful for planning how to build a nurbs model from a mesh in general. The ridge areas tell you where to start and end fillets ans small blend surfaces that often define edges of objects.
This might be a silly idea, and it may also require a lot of effort to make it work properly, but I think it can be useful.

Will be fun seeing what Michal has up his sleeve. I am at least always surprised by the good features he continuosly adds, - things that just seem natural and simple to use once they are there in that sleek UI,..

-Fredrik

That's a great idea, and talking about scan data I believe that is along the lines what Rapidform and Geomagic uses in their reverse engineering products when you're semi-automatically rebuilding the model. Fully automatic is just a kind of dumb random layout I think that just gets the job done.