Hi michael,

at the moment I'm frequently using the 'vertex/surface point'-tweak funktions a lot and it turns out, that especially when it comes to scaling

it would come in handy, if MoI had something like a 'transform-widget' (...or whatever else we call it) and/or a symetri-option.

I'm as curious as to aks you, if you already think about something like it.

couriously

klaus

Hi klaus,

> it would come in handy, if MoI had something like
> a 'transform-widget'

For MoI v2 one of the new features is an edit frame that goes around the outside of objects in the 2D views to allow for quick rotation and scaling, it looks like this:



It works similar to the edit widgets in 2D illustration programs.

You can also grab on the rotate widget at the top to do rotations, and if you click the rotate widget instead of drag on it you will get a wheel where you can adjust the center of rotation:





Probably in the future there will also be some kind of 3D manipulator for point tweaking in the 3D view but surface point tweaking is not really a fully finished area in MoI at this time.

- Michael

hi michael,

that sounds and looks promising already.

surface point tweaking and shelling of polysurfaces are the functions that
I for my part use most, since especially shelling of polysurfaces is not at all
available in rhino4 (its though coming in rhino5 as I could see).

When tweaking points in MoI the guide-lines come in very handy but
for future versions it would be more comfortable to be able to switch between
'normal', 'screen', and 'world'-mode as well.

By the way - did you talk to the makers of 't-splines'? If you could get 'MoI' and 't-splines' connected,
that would become quite an attractive advantage. (Talk to Matt Sederberg if you intend to make contact.)

Probably mainly a GUI-challenge?

Working with MoI is a pleasure...I allways wonder, why rhino does'nt support or have your graphics engine...
I'm really missing the antialiased quality of MoI when I have to switch back to rhino.

best

klaus

Hi klaus, I'm glad that you enjoy using MoI!

> I'm really missing the antialiased quality of MoI
> when I have to switch back to rhino.

One other thing that has improved a lot in MoI v2 for the display is a new lighting engine that helps to illuminate your model much better.

See this previous post for some details:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2843.1

It adds a lot of richness to the display in addition to the anti-aliased curves, here's a demo of it in action:




> By the way - did you talk to the makers of 't-splines'? If you could
> get 'MoI' and 't-splines' connected, that would become quite an
> attractive advantage. (Talk to Matt Sederberg if you intend to
> make contact.)
>
> Probably mainly a GUI-challenge?

Yeah I actually have met Matt Sederberg already, and talked with him some.

But it will be a big task to integrate a sub-d modeling workflow like t-splines for example into MoI - doing the GUI will definitely take a whole lot of work so I don't really have any idea currently when I will be able to start on that.

There are other more "regular" NURBS oriented tools that I still need to cover first I think before trying to branch off in a completely different style of modeling.

If I try to do too many different things all at the same time it tends to diffuse things and make for not as good quality.

The initial focus for MoI is more to try and make the more traditional NURBS toolset (stuff like extrusions, sweeps, booleans) available to artists with an easier to use UI than a regular technically-oriented CAD program.

- Michael

>> The initial focus for MoI is more to try and make the more traditional NURBS
>> toolset (stuff like extrusions, sweeps, booleans) available to artists with an
>> easier to use UI than a regular technically-oriented CAD program.

This is why I bought it - keep up the good work Michael :-)

Hi
Check out this article and website on "Sketching and Composing Widgets for 3D Manipulation"
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~rms/pubs/SketchWidgetsEG08.html

Cheers,

. Diego .

Hi Diego,

> Check out this article and website on "Sketching and
> Composing Widgets for 3D Manipulation"

Very interesting!

But these systems that use a variety of special gestures seem fairly difficult to learn initially - for example most people would just not intuitively know to make a "pigtail" gesture to turn the manipulator into a special mode.

There seems to be many special gestures like that in that system - use a double line for one thing, pigtail for another, pigtail with a longer stem for another, L shaped for another.... It's something that would need a level of training and time spent learning how it would work before it would be possible for someone to use it at all. I think it is hard to justify putting something basic like scaling and rotating tools into that kind of situation where nobody just sitting down at the software for the first time would even have a chance at knowing how to use it without doing some training courses.

MoI's edit frame in contrast looks like this:




There's just much more chance with this system that someone is going to know to drag on the corners of the frame to scale, and drag on the rotation one to rotate. There is some additional functionality to be learned such as having additional options when you click on one rather than drag on one, but the very basic stuff is handled in a very intuitive way which is good.

Having intuitive operation really helps people that need to use multiple programs, where they may not have a whole lot of time to learn some specialized UI gesture scheme that is very specific to just one program.

- Michael

Diego that is not a bad suggestion But the authors are working for autodesk and are also responsible for some other UI goodies like the ViewCube, 3D Orientation Indicator and Controller which are patented.

On the other hand I personally prefer Michael's way :)