While I like the idea of Moi-centered/priced version and would probably buy one, I'm under the impression that Moi uses the standard nurbs file format, which also works with Rhino etc. As such there's no native Moi file format, is there?

Exactly.

"the price of the normal Version (that is excluding the direct NURBS ray tracing, i.e. "normal" triangular only) will be roughly around 800€ - the price of the Pro Version including the NURBS is still in discussion with our reseller partners."

And how much will that be? €3,000? Without Nurbs, it is useless for MoI.

Hi candide,

> I'm under the impression that Moi uses the standard nurbs
> file format, which also works with Rhino etc. As such there's
> no native Moi file format, is there?

Yes, MoI does not have a special proprietary "MoI only" file format, it uses the 3DM file format (same as Rhino) for its primary format.

- Michael

I downloaded the 0.9.5 Alpha and still no trim curves. I created a simple cube minus sphere and tried importing various file formats (3DM, IGES, etc.), and nothing would render the trim curves.

Yes, 0.9.5 is quite old and many changes have been made since.

From what I can see, 0.9.5 isn't actually useable, but the new Beta (whenever it comes out) should be.

Do you really think that a company who intend to sell the "Normal" version at 800EUR are going to make a special build of the advanced version and then sell it for approx 230EUR(price of MoI). IMHO, Its just sounds like a ploy to get MoI users beta testing their product lol.

Hey guys,

first of all: yes the 0.9.5 *ALPHA* version is quite old and does not support trimm curves! The beta which will be released on September 1st, i.e. very soon, of course does support trimming curves and works very well with various dialects of IGES, STEP and 3dm!

I just now learned, that MoI uses 3dm as file format, which is a good thing, since we should be already compatible then. It would be great if maybe someone could send me a model or two saved by MoI so that we can check this. It doesn't need to be something extraordinary cool and we will use it internally only (unless you ask us to make it available as a demo scene within our software :) ) If you have something just send it to info@numenus.de

Considering the pricing: The Pro Version will most likely end up somewhere between 1500 and 2500 EUR. I see that this is quite a little bit much in contrast to the MoI price tag itself. That is why I would like to come up with an idea how to serve the MoI community and at the same time not cannibalizing the "standard" Pro business (and by doing so our resellers would seek out to kill us :) ).

Any ideas? Maybe a rendering plugin would be a clever solution. Is MoI actually pluggable?

Best regards,

Oliver

Hi Burrman,

>>I read that as a typo and think they mean 1,900.00 Euros which is roughly $2,500<<

Looks like you are correct. Have you insider info on this LOL.

Hi Oliver,

> Is MoI actually pluggable?

You can write script extensions for MoI but not a complete C++ type plugin yet.

I do want to open that up in the future, but doing all the documentation and also support work to help other developer is a very time consuming area of work.

Right now I'm still focused on working on more "end user" type features for MoI first before I'll be able to turn attention to developer-oriented stuff like a plug-in SDK.

- Michael

personally I do not get it, MoI has a great mesh exporter...why should we pay extra for a render that support NURBS? what are the benefits?

@neo

Well because rendering NURBS directly is always better:

> Perfect geometric precision, reflections look so extremely good and real, which you cannot achieve with triangles
> Even huge files load fast like hell (since no tessellation is required)
> Remove an error source. Errors you see are really in your model not in a conversion

Regardless of the NURBS support RenderGin is an awesome renderer on its own. While I understand that MoI is a really cool modeling application (which we don't even want to be) I believe we can help making the best out of those models: perfect presentations!

Well, Michael, would you consider adding a proprietary export format to Moi that only works with RenderGin?

That seems like a solution that would solve both problems, and would allow Numenus to create a MoiRenderGin that only renders Moi3D models.

-TS-

Hi TwinSnakes,

> Well, Michael, would you consider adding a proprietary
> export format to Moi that only works with RenderGin?

That could be possible, but it's actually quite a lot of work to come up with a totally brand new format.

It could be possible instead to do some detection of whether a 3DM file was written by MoI or not, for example MoI writes a different message in the header description label of the file and has a couple of MoI-specific chunks of data that are normally skipped by other programs reading the geometry out of the 3DM file.

It would probably be pretty easy to detect 3DMs written by MoI by looking at that stuff.

- Michael

Hi,

I agree that the idea of some new or modified file format sounds like a good solution. I agree that adding a new proprietary file format would be a lot of hassle not only for Michael but also for us. However, modifying the header of a 3dm file would be easy, but just too easy, since you could easily go around this and change the header of every other 3dm file as well.

Another thing that might be worth considering is adding the ability to MoI to directly save into our own proprietary file format. If possible we could work together on this. Writing out just the information we need (i.e. NURBS and material) should not be too much work indeed.

- Oliver

Hi Oliver,

> However, modifying the header of a 3dm file would be
> easy, but just too easy, since you could easily go around
> this and change the header of every other 3dm file as well.

Well, in addition to the header you could also look for a couple of pieces of "user data" that MoI writes to the file to store some of its specific information. The user data will have a particular UUID identifier on it.

You're certainly not going to get any other CAD program that will write out the same combination of header text plus specific user data that MoI generates.


> Another thing that might be worth considering is adding the
> ability to MoI to directly save into our own proprietary file format.
> If possible we could work together on this. Writing out just the
> information we need (i.e. NURBS and material) should not be too
> much work indeed.

That could be a possibility, but in my experience anything dealing with file format support can easily end up to be a lot more work than initially expected. To do a good job with it usually involves quite a lot of testing.

Also since MoI version 2 has already been released, if we went this way you wouldn't be compatible with the current version of MoI and would only work with a future version I guess...


If you use the other method of identifying a 3DM file that was written by MoI, you would actually be compatible with both the current MoI v2 version as well as MoI v1.


- Michael

Also, if the goal is to make a special version offered to MoI users, maybe instead of focusing specifically on restricting file format support you could do something like only make it run if MoI is installed or something like that. Just another possibility.

- Michael

I prefer Maxwell because of its quality. I think any possible mesher advancements should be prioritized over specific formats.
Just my 2c.

Sorry but I don't understand what Augenblick has to offer compared to something like Air for Rhino ... the price is really scarry :S

Sorry for the late reply, but we were quite busy inishing the beta. I opened up another thread for the public beta release, but for quick reference, the download link is http://www.numenus.de/download_en.html.

To answers:

@Michael: okay sound like a good idea. I would say we'll have a look what MoI users think about the software and if it is liked by at least some (or many) then we should think about the next steps. I really would like to see some special MoI version, since I believe we are a really cool addition to MoI.

@PaQ: I did not have a close look at AiR before, but I downloaded the demo and gave it a shot this morning. I tested it only for 10 or 20 minutes, so its not really a thorough testing, but I couldn't see anything groundbraking. What do you like about AIR whats missing in RenderGin/Augenblick? From what I have seen I would say we have strong advantages in rendering speed and of course NURBS quality, since we do not need to tesselate. We also support a lot more file formats and our OBJ support (which they also have) is far superior in terms of speed and quality. I also don't like their user interface, however I know that this is a matter of taste (and I might not be thaaat obective :) ). And maybe more important: workflow. When you open a model in RenderGin is look cool instantly and it is very easy to assign new materials backplates envmpas etc...

Cheers,

Oliver

Hi Numenus,

Well actually air also support nurbs very well (reyes dicing, so you don't have to worry about meshing) ... and well, it's a renderman compliant renderer.
But for sure it's not realtime ...

So far I haven't get any success with the superior obj RenderGin import, (maybe rendergin dont support ngones ?) ... and I have to admit I don't have the
will to beta testing stuff for the moment. Looks like I can't import nurbs either in demo mode, so it's not easy to evaluate the software ;)