How many people out there are using MOI as a bridge between their CAD programs and their 3D modelers? I have many 3D TurboCAD files that I would like to make into Lightwave models. Is this a good use for MOI?

I would output the CAD files as Rhino files, once I get the Rhino addon for TurboCAD.

Hi Drakon, yes there are quite a few people who are using MoI specifically as a file translator tool like that.

MoI has a much nicer mesh generation mechanism in it than is normally found in a CAD program. Actually right now I believe it has the best conversion that is available anywhere, really.

You tend to get more regularly shaped meshes (like nicer structures on things like spheres, cylinders), and also one of the things that makes it popular is the ability to generate n-gon polygons to get a cleaner and more simple generated wireframe rather than having everything break down only into triangles which is much more typical.

Yes, it should be a good workflow to save out from TurboCAD as a 3DM file (that's the Rhino file format and also the native one used by MoI as well), then open that in MoI and then save out to a LWO file.

In MoI v2 which is getting close to being released there are a lot of improvements to this area as well, especially a huge boost to the speed of the export mesh generation.

- Michael

I do that too. Nearly every day. I work as 3D-Artist at a carpenter.
Very often we get floor plans as pdf. I only got Moi and Cinema 4D.
So i load the pdf into Moi. Clean up the plan - delete things i dont need.
That's very good to do in Moi. Better than in Cinema.
Sometimes i extrude some walls in Moi. But most of the time i only export
the floor plan as Adobe Illustrator. And then i import it into Cinema.
Sadly the exportetd AI-File dosen't got right measurements(don't know why)
so i have to scale it in Cinema on the right size.

Hi Janne,

> Sadly the exportetd AI-File dosen't got right measurements(don't know why)

What unit system do you have set when you do the import into MoI?

Try setting the units to either millimeters, centimeters, or inches before doing the import.

When you have the units set to one of those choices, the AI/PDF importer will attempt to preserve the units in the file into the current unit system.

If you have units set to something else like "no units", then it will do a more arbitrary scaling of 1/20 the size, because the units used in PDF files are natively in "points" which can tend to have somewhat large numbers used, like x = 1552.23, y = 2785.12 , stuff like that, that tends to come in at a rather large relative size in MoI if just taken directly.

- Michael