">Simply use the 'put on ground' button: select object and you see it at right"

ycarry, thank you for the tip-off, it was indeed simple. I spent quite some time poring over the interface to find something like that (TurboCAD has the equivalent so I thought Kerkythea should) but I never noticed the ground, stack and center buttons floating there at the right.

However, my argument - which I don't want to develop here, because this is a forum for MoI - is that it needs to be even easier. My argument is not that these packages are incapable of stunning images in experienced and diligent hands: the galleries show that is possible. My argument is that only one of the half-dozen renderers I have tried is intuitive for a beginner to use, a problem that restricts demand to those who have the time to dedicate to mastering a renderer. Keyshot picked up my model, retained the materials, put the objects on the ground plane, lit them with sensible default options and put the whole thing right in front of me looking impressive. Nothing else did that. Why not? I'm staggered! When I was a student I was money-poor and time-rich and I thought nothing of spending weeks learning a new piece of software. Twenty years later I'm money-rich and time-poor. I literally cannot afford the time to spend weeks battling with software that doesn't want to help me. So at this point it's looking like Keyshot: Luxion wins the competition for my $995 and everybody else loses.

Returning to MoI, I handed over my $195 to Michael Gibson and will be paying more for the upgrade to v2.0 the instant it is released because I was making useful images with it 10 minutes after I started using it. Visio engendered the same "Aha!" moment in me when I tried v4 in 1995 or 1996 and that's why I labelled the thread "the Visio of 3D". Like Visio, MoI has a lot of depth but the UI focuses on reducing the time investment required to do something useful with the software. For $295 it seems like a bargain.

Regards
Dan

Hi Dan,
The reason that KeyShot is fast/simple and produces great results is "That's what it was designed for". Simple fast photo realistic output.

The others have user definable areas that dont exist in Keyshot. This is the tradeoff. I can get basic results with keyshot. The others have more user control and definable properties.

You pretty much explained that pretty well. If keyshot had all that built into it also, you would have to spend a bunch of time digging through it also, to find what you were looking for.

It's kindof like, render a ball with keyshot = 2 click's. But try to render a "TREE" with keyshot.

I agree completely BurrMan; rendering Avatar might be a bit beyond Keyshot ;-)

It really is horses for courses. That doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is that there is so little software that is aimed at interested beginners. After all, by the very nature of things, there are far more people who might be somewhat interested in 3D modelling and rendering than people who are very interested in 3D modelling and rendering, just as there are far more people who are casually interested in cooking than there are people who are interested in taking professional cooking qualifications. By analogy the rendering software market at the moment requires you to sign up for a 20-week course when all you want to do is learn how to throw together a chili for the Monday night game. No doubt this will change.

Dan

Hi Dan, yeah unfortunately making something that is easy and friendly to use is perversely quite difficult from a UI design standpoint.

That most likely has something to do with why you are not finding a lot of renderers without any learning curve. It's something that is really easily lost just simply by adding in a bunch of things without a careful initial plan for maintaining simplicity when it all comes together.

- Michael

Hi Dan,

> What surprises me is that there is so little software that is
> aimed at interested beginners.

Another way I'd put it - one reason why there is so little software that fits into this category is because it is actually more difficult to design that kind of software...

I wish it was easy to design things that are powerful and that were also easy to use, but as far as I can tell it is exactly the opposite - it takes a much greater amount of effort and skill to do that.

Then the other unfortunate thing is that often times your reward at the end of all that effort of targeting beginners is that your software can be derided as a "toy"...


One way that I look at it though is that making things simplified and having a smooth and fluid workflow is actually not only beneficial to beginners, but also advanced users in quite a few cases as well, because getting some kinds of things done very quickly can actually be very useful to advanced users.


- Michael

>>>>>What surprises me is that there is so little software that is aimed at interested beginners.>>>>

Perhaps why Keyshot is such a popular and successful renderer! A 1 day learning curve. Though it's UI is horrible.

>Then the other unfortunate thing is that often times your reward at the end of all that effort
>of targeting beginners is that your software can be derided as a "toy"...

Sounds like the voice of bitter experience. But hey, leaves more of the market for you, right?

Dan

Incidentally, I notice that when rendering MoI models in Keyshot they come out fine, but when using Kerkythea the model appears to have "fallen over" into a different plane. Do different modellers have different Z or Y directions? In something like a 2D Excel chart Y is always up, but in MoI we seem to have Z is up, X is left to right and Y is front/back depth. Is this normal in modellers or is MoI unusual?

Dan

Yes, it varies sometimes so all the professional 3d programs I've seen allow you to change those settings on export. Also, I was still working on your question about 3d rendering because it's something that has always interested me. I've got a few renderers of the pro level even though I'm a hobbyist, but I always keep my eyes open for something I can recommend to a friend. I was just looking at pov-ray again after years. The renderer is still excellent but is only command-line. While looking for a front-end for it I discovered that Pose-ray still works well in windows xp. It is a kind of kludgey interface, but it does exactly what it says. You install it and pov-ray then point poseray to the pov-ray executable. It imports .3ds .pov and .obj well. I tested it out and the only thing I couldn't get was the ground plane and global illumination. It's an extremely simple setup. I really liked it. I'm going to look for other pov-ray front ends, and maybe I'll post a test here if I can get it working to my satisfaction.

P.S. Michael, that seems to have fixed the posting problem. It looks right so far. Thank you.

Hi Dan , yeah different applications can use different axis directions for the "up" direction.

For exporting out of MoI to OBJ format, there is an option you can set to adjust this here:



If you flip that "Orientation" option to the other setting before you export to Kerkythea that should automatically rotate the object and solve the problem. Switch it back again when you want to export to Keyshot.


> In something like a 2D Excel chart Y is always up, but in MoI
> we seem to have Z is up, X is left to right and Y is front/back
> depth. Is this normal in modellers or is MoI unusual?

Historically, for both mathematics and most construction industries, the method MoI uses is more common - that's where X and Y have a 2D sense as in a blueprint laying flat on a tabletop, and then Z is the elevation or "up" direction.

But it is not unusual for programs that are focused on bitmap image generation rather than on actual physical construction to use a different layout with X and Y meaning 2D on the computer screen and Z going inwards to the screen.

In MoI v2 you can change the axis labels to something that you are more comfortable with if you want, by going to Options > View > Axis labels. That allows you to view and type in x,y,z coordinates referring to whichever axis directions you want for each one. This axis labels setting does not have any effect on import/export though, it just changes how coordinates are displayed in the UI and how x,y,z typed inputs are interpreted.

- Michael

Mine was in Carrara if of interest
Brian

Brian, what can I say?! Your lattice is a heck of a lot bigger than my lattice!
Did you effectively just copy and paste that together? In my smaller version I used copy en masse for the sticks but added the balls (atoms) by hand using copy later.

Dan

Thank you Michael, that worked very well for exports to Kerkythea.

Dan

Hi Dan,

Although not exactly what you're after as a "Render program", figured I'd do a very quick render for you using my V-Ray for Rhino.
The model I've used is the one that BurrMan had posted earlier on within this thread.

regards Colin

Dan
I used a lot of arrays/revolves etc!
After, first, a lot of mind twisting exercises and experiments!

A very mind broadening experiment!

Brian
ps--please!---dont ask me to repeat it!!!!! (I was so surprised when a result worked so much that I forgot what I did in detail!)

Just couldn't resist putting in my 2 cents on alternative means of constructing some of the geometry in this thread using MoI.

Here's a version of a lattice created procedurally:



And here is the MoI script used to generate it:



Although it might be a bit of a challenge to create such as script initially, the advantage is that it is very easy to tweak things once you have it working. Here are two more variations of the original, with the only difference being that the first line of the script was changed to "n = 13;" and "n = 25;" respectively:





This particular script also has support for changing the radius of each sphere type, the radius of the connecting rods, the distance between the lattice points, and the style colors for each of the different elements, in addition to the overall size of the lattice.

BTW, for the n = 25 case, it took about 13 seconds to run the script to create the lattice. But at this point we are definitely getting outside of MoI's normal "comfort zone". Zooming and rotating the model to take the screen shot was initially extremely sluggish (nudge the mouse, then wait 3 or 4 seconds for the screen to update). I tried setting the Meshing angle to a much higher value and that seemed to help quite a bit. I could actually rotate and zoom the scene much more normally...

Sorry I don't remmember how launch this sort of script concretly?
With a normal shortcut? (put the text code in the second column? or inside another script ?)...

Sorry, forgot to mention that the script uses an unreleased procedural library, so you can't run it at the moment. Maybe someday. It was meant more as an example of using the MoI programming API rather than something you could try yourself at home...

Michael, if you could just finalise the API Dave used, polish it to a high sheen, add a nice little front end, document the whole thing in detail and release in time the weekend, I'd be grateful.

Thanks
Dan

Dave!

I was wondering about the procedural script just the other day...

Release one :)

It'll be so handy!!