Hi all,

my second (fun) project, where i used MoI, is almost finished now!
It's a Jem 555 electric guitar, originally designed by Steve Vai and Ibanez.
In this 3D design even the texture map of the neck inlay was done with the help of MoI.
Renders were done in Vue 8. I also put some Images to the gallery.











Matthew
www.matthiaskoenig.com

Hi Matthew, it turned out awesome! That is a really great job.

That's pretty cool that you're using MoI for 3D modeling and also for some 2D texture work as well.

- Michael

Rocks stars!

Thanx,

it was a lot of fun doing it with MoI. For the texture part, one Moment i was thinking about using inkscape for that, but i'm not very familiar with it, so i followed my Inspiration doing that step with MoI, which was a good decision. There is only one thing that could help to make that kind of workflow easier: svg export. Because i don't have a Program that can read MoI's ai exports. So i had to export obj and rendered it in Vue to get the texure :-)

Matthew
www.matthiaskoenig.com

awesome guitar. The detail work is fantastic. I'm feeling rather jealous about now :)

I checked to see if I could read moi's ai format in some graphics programs I had and came up with the following:

Can't read - XNView, Inkscape, Paint Shop Pro X (error: This PostScript file is either not valid or contains unsupported features.)
Can read - coreldraw 12, xara xtreme 5, zoner draw 5

These were all of the 2D graphics programs I could think of that would import an ai file

And yes, I know that I am a graphics program addict ;)

Hi Matthew, I do want to add SVG in the future.

In the meantime a good way to get your MoI AI exports into SVG is to use Mayura Draw: http://www.mayura.com/ - it's a shareware illustration program with just a $39 registration fee.

Mayura Draw can load in AI exports from MoI and then write out to SVG format.


MoI's AI export is based on the older AI format from Adobe Illustrator version 8 and below. In versions of Adobe Illustrator after that, the AI format was changed a lot to be the same as a PDF file which is actually quite a bit more complex.

But some programs only expect the PDF style versions now.

- Michael

Awesome Job. I draw acoustic guitar parts in MoI and cut them on my DIY cnc machine, but my models aren't anywhere near as nice as yours. I'm still having trouble with shapes like the belly cutaway on an electric or the heel of an acoustic neck, but I've only been messing around with modeling for less than a year. Not to hijack, but here's a pic of a short scale acoustic I built with the help of MoI. The neck, fretboard, inlays, rosette, bridge and some internal parts plus all the necessary forms and molds were all drawn in MoI.

Again, great job on the JEM.




Bob

Matthew - for a free alternative right now. I believe that the old Creature House Expression 3.3 had excellent ai import for old and new ai versions. Microsoft bought the company and discontinued the software, but they did offer the program for free. I think I still have the link if you're interested. Also mayura draw had an old freeware version 2.04 that should still be available somewhere on the net though I don't know where. I can go over my notes and find some other freeware alternatives if anyone is interested? Expression 3.3 is something like 60 mb or so, I don't remember the exact size of it, but it's large ... but awe inspiring and well worth the download.

P.S. I found the link that doesn't go through Windows Live registration
http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/5/d/a5d625a5-2e3d-4e9c-8608-6de48d7b569f/CreatureHouseExpression3_3.exe

Yeah Expression 3.3 can read AI files from MoI fine, and has a lot of cool stuff in it as well too.

It pre-dates SVG format I think so it does not have an SVG export but it can do a PDF export which would also work for transferring to Inkscape.

- Michael

Here's another one.... my Epiphone Les Paul.
stopped for a while, busy with work.

I cannot get the neck right... can somebody take a look ?


Ceasare

Great guitar ! I get the neck right :)

Hi all,

thanx again for comments und suggestions.
@BobK, must be great to hold a real guitar in your hands after creating it in MoI, and yours is really looking good, congratulations.
I'll better don't try that with the Ibanez, can't afford the lawyers ... and of course there is still enough inaccuracy in this model which would make it difficult to make a real thing of it.

@Michael, that will be great, to have svg export directly in MoI, although my workaround wasn't to hard to go.
MoI is easy to use for the 2d stuff as well as for 3d, so why not doing it in the same programm.
Meanwhile i tried the ai workflow with Expression 3.3, thanks to omac12 for the link, there is a way to import MoI's ai and you can choose
between several ai versions to export, also including the new pdf-style version (9).
So it works that way, but it's good to know the limits:
If you just export curves from MoI, everthing is fine like expected, but if you export surfaces instead, you don't see anything in Expression 3, after a "select all" you see the curves, but if you fill them with color, somehow orientation about inside / outside got lost (like it can be seen on the attached image).


And at last, here is one more image of the Jem, revealing yet unrevealed details ;-)


Matthew
www.matthiaskoenig.com

Matthew, I didn't check surfaces before I recommended Expression so I apologize. :(
I'll keep my eye open for another freeware alternative that does it right.

Hi omac12,
Expression was for shure a good recommendation, maybe that's a common behaviour of the export of surfaces, what do you think, Michael?

Matthew

I made three planar surfaces. One I made with the polygon tool and the other two were freeform closed blobs. I exported as ai, and even though I had several programs that could pull it up so they 'looked' right I noticed that the only surface that could be filled was the one made with the polygon tool. The others looked right, but could not be filled. I have a hunch they would have to be traced first. Here is an ugly results picture.

Hi Matthew,

> Expression was for shure a good recommendation, maybe that's
> a common behaviour of the export of surfaces, what do you
> think, Michael?

Yeah, well actually surfaces themselves are not even exported at all currently, only edges of surfaces are exported and they are treated the same as any other curves in the model.

If you are taking a Top view of something like an extruded solid, you probably are ending up with something like 2 curves stacked up right on top of each other, one for the top edge and one for the bottom edge, which may have something to do with what you are seeing.

So to avoid that if you are going from the Top view instead of the 3D view, you may want to not try to export the solid and instead duplicate one of its edges by copy/paste (or use the original curve you extruded) and hide the solid, so that you are controlling more exactly what you are exporting and avoiding duplicates.

- Michael

Hi omac12,



Could you please post the 3DM model file with the 3 blobs in it so I can take a look?

I guess my question would be why are you making planar surfaces instead of just exporting the curves directly?

Maybe you are also running into a duplicated curves issue - if you have drawn a planar curve, then built a planar surface from it, and then do an export of both the original planar curve as well as the planar surface it will result in both the original curve as well as the edges of the planar surface being written to the AI file. So you'll actually have 2 curves in that place stacked exactly on top of each other.

If you want to export 2D curves, I'd recommend just creating curves only and not building planar surfaces from them at all.

- Michael

My blobs experiment was just a follow-up to Matthew's message nr. 12. Where he indicated that he had surface problems. Michael, you just answered it though.

And yes, I did experience the stacked duplicates issue. Thanks for the resolution.

Hi omac12, I just wanted to make sure.... I just tested exporting a closed smooth blobby curve from MoI and was able to fill it without any problems in Expression. So that made me wonder if there was some problem that was specific to the particular shapes you had, or if it was a duplication issue.

In the future if you run into any problems with filling what look like closed curves, please also post the model file as well instead of just a screenshot so I can examine what is going on, that helps me to be more sure about what is happening.

- Michael

Hi, now it is clear to me:
If you create a closed curve with the freeform line-tool and fill it, the ai export is kind of identical, no matter if you export the curve or the surface edges, you see closed curves in Expression.
If you, instead, create a "closed" curve by connecting several curves and fill it, the export of the curve is a closed curve in one piece, while the export of edges is one "object" containing the pieces of curves. I would not call that a problem, you just have to know about.