Ok,

need to go thru all tutorials and tips :).

Thanks,

-d3-

Hello,

Just purchased Moi a few days ago and continue to appreciate its' value and abilities. I use Solidworks as my main design tool and all but depend on the ability to drag 2D shapes through a solid, resulting in either a boss or a cut depending on where you stop. A great improvement to Sw was the development of 'Instant 3d'. I increasingly work interactively with clients, refining their ideas in real-time and they love the ability to 'see' shapes emerge and change in this fluid fashion. Could some version of this be incorporated into a future release of Moi?

I have been using Moi to fine tune Sw geometry for import to modo for rendering (as the Sw importer is horrible), but am finding it ever more useful for geometry development as my familiarity grows.

thanks for the good work Michael

KennD

Hi KennD, I'm not really familiar with exactly what "Instant 3d" is in SolidWorks, do you have some example or description of it that you could point me towards?

Is it about "direct manipulation" like grabbing an existing face of a model and moving it up or down?

If so then that is something I want to try in the future but it can take quite a lot of work to make that function well, it is not really something that comes in a totally "natural" way with NURBS objects, it involves a lot of stuff like analysis of the shapes involved.

Also it is not really an area that is handled already in the geometry library that MoI uses, so it would involve writing much of that from scratch which is possible but will involve quite a bit of work.

I think it will probably be something I can add to MoI in the future but it will probably be focused on pretty basic situations and it may take a while before it will happen.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I have attached a little AVI, captured this morning, to show some of what can be done with Instant 3D. Solidworks has had years of development and more than one coder to get to Sw2010. It is a very good tool but I find it still buggy, slow and I've spent over $15,000 on I over the last 5 years.

This is the last release I will buy as the 2012 release will be a cloud based model that provides (in my opinion) no real new functionality and much restriction.

Drag-changing model geometry this way is of great benefit and any incorporation of this functionality int Moi would be great.

best
Kenn

Hi Kenn, thanks for the illustration of Instant3D.

But yeah that will take quite a bit of work to make stuff like that happen, it is not something that is covered by the geometry library that MoI currently uses.

Probably in the future when I try to make a stab at it, it will start out just focused on moving a planar face around like when you dragged the cylinder face up and down.

Doing things like pulling part of a shape and having fillets remain the same requires even more sophisticated "feature recognition" type analysis of the shapes, that's going to be pretty difficult to achieve in MoI. Before that happens I would be more likely to have a deeper "parametric history" type method of working on stuff first because that is generally more straightforward for those kinds of edits, although still quite a lot of work itself.

- Michael

Hi Kenn, also have you looked into SpaceClaim?

It has a lot of focus on working in that "direct dragging" type of way, it could be a good fit for you.

I think that the recent versions of SpaceClaim also support copy/paste of objects back and forth between MoI as well, so it can be used in combination with MoI pretty easily.

- Michael

Moi3D and Spaceclaim and the drafting capasity from SolidEdge.
What else do we need?