I am really impressed with MOI thus far.
I have been playing with it a bit on the side, and it is very intuitive.
Congratulations on the OBJ export engine, i found it to be much better implemented than that in Rhino,
this alone makes MOI really good !

Now the question:
Will Layers be supported at some point, hopefully soon?
There needs to be a way to manage complex scenes with many objects.

Keep up the great work,

Hi Okapi, I put a lot of effort into the OBJ export, so I'm really glad that it is working well for you!

Thanks!

> Will Layers be supported at some point, hopefully soon?
> There needs to be a way to manage complex scenes with many objects.

I do expect to add some scene management tools, probably not exactly layers but something similar.

But it's going to be pretty involved work, I don't think it will happen for the V1 release, which I hope to put out in not too long, maybe in a couple of months.

I think it will probably be more around May or June this year when I will be able to work on this.

So it is definitely coming up, but not extremely soon. I kind of want to nail down some more pieces for doing simple things first (+ bug fixes), before focusing in on stuff for complex scenes.

- Michael

< probably not exactly layers but something similar

he he! cool teasing, maybe a new concept? :)

> he he! cool teasing, maybe a new concept? :)

Maybe... :) probably nothing extremely new, more just a combination of a few different things (groups, named selection sets, layers) into one single mechanism.

But it is not completely designed yet... Just some ideas.

I want to make it kind of a bit looser than layers normally are - traditional layers are kind of strict where each object can only go on one layer, which kind of locks the possible organization down a bit much.

- Michael

Very appetizing :)

But "quid" of the compatibility (when Obj export realized), with the other layers' program organisation?

> But "quid" of the compatibility (when Obj export realized), with the
> other layers' program organisation?

There may be some problems in this area, but they can probably be solved by voluntarily using a more strict organization (each object on just one group/layer/... ) if you know that preserving the structure into another program is important to you.

- Michael

>> But it's going to be pretty involved work, I don't think it will happen for the V1 release, which I hope to put out in not too long, maybe in a couple of months.

So, time to save some money and prepare the credit card... ;-)

I have been an AutoCAD user for more than 15 years. I always thought layers is the only way. Then, I bought Revit and I was amazed to see that grouping and categorising is easier. After that, I saw MAX where naming and handling the list of objects has many advantages too. Layers are a well tested system, it works but there are others too.
Also, the power of modifiers, the history tracking and changing and the properties dialog are some of the greatest benefits of today's 3d modeling apps.
If MOI can use and adopt this logic it will be a best seller.

AutoCAD is so general that everyone and nobody needs it 100%. The same with MAX. MoI (so far) has very effective tools, not 1500 commands like most of the apps do. I guess many other commands will be added but I believe that the menu system and the navigation buttons make our life easier.

So, I guess Michael will have to come with some difficult decisions on how to combine all these ways of handling objects.

In my opinion, the new release of Cinema4d (r.10) is a also a very good exemple for scene management.
It combines a layer system with a scene / hierarchy tree so you can use either or a combination of both to keep things organised