I have tried Moi3D (very cool and promising software), and i have some remarks:

Some tools like a "zoomed window" would be usefull when connecting lines/curves. (after some hours of deleting/connecting curves, i figured i got some curves badly connected, had to zoom manually the "scramble zone" to correct it)

When Lofting/Sweeping some color could be used to show outer/inner sides (i means from a surface normal point of view).
after exporting to .3ds, i needed to swap some surface normals (hopefully a MoI NURB is translated into a 3DS Node/Object).

For Lofting/Sweeping, since the curve extremity selected is meaningfull, perhaps a hotkey (middle mouse click) when on a curve to swap the extremity selected. thus it would avoid to cancel the lofting/sweeping and re-start another time.

I am awaiting a lot surfacing capabilities with networks of curves :)

Hi Bjone, thanks for your feedback!


> Some tools like a "zoomed window" would be usefull

This one is available in the view controls panel that is at the bottom of every viewport - use the "Area" tool:


> When Lofting/Sweeping some color could be used to show outer/inner sides (i means
> from a surface normal point of view). after exporting to .3ds, i needed to swap some
> surface normals (hopefully a MoI NURB is translated into a 3DS Node/Object)

I should be able to add this in eventually, it will probably be a while for the color thing though. In the meantime, make sure that you join surfaces together at their common edges. This will make sure that their mesh points are aligned along the shared boundary, and also the orientations will be consistent between joined pieces.

When you have surfaces that are just sitting next to each other but not joined, MoI doens't know that they are supposed to be glued together and that will make things a bit messy.


> For Lofting/Sweeping, since the curve extremity selected is meaningfull, perhaps
> a hotkey (middle mouse click) when on a curve to swap the extremity selected.
> thus it would avoid to cancel the lofting/sweeping and re-start another time.

This is something that I'd like to re-work pretty soon. Instead of making the pick point important, I'm thinking of switching this to an automatic alignment every time, and then having some way to flip segments around inside of Loft.


Thanks!

- Michael

Thanks

Sorry to haven't tried the Area tool (lol RTFM like we use to say :D)

Other remarks (that i forgot last night :D):

- Would it be possible to implement Curves/surface boolean operations ? or creation of points on intersection ?

- Possible to add some form of triangle preview ? (like the one you see when exporting to .3DS) thus to check visually the distribution of triangles. (not a tremendeous feature, but might be usefull to adjust surfaces early when you intend to use low res meshes for games)
perhaps since the rendering is triangle based, just a button to toggle triangle edges.

- Possible to add an auto-mirror ?
* just virtual (only drawn symetrically from an axis, but not maintained internally) at first glance (to see the global feeling of the mesh)
* an another way: put a symetry axis, and when moving a control point on one side of the axis having MoI select and move the symetrical control point.

however i am not experimented at all on modeling and specially nurbs modeling (but i like the MoI approch), but perhaps some of my remaks could lead to some efficient feature.

By the way is it possible to get nighty builds ? (just exe/dlls when you add a new feature)
For example when you will have some "alpha" builds of MoI featuring surfacing with a network of curves, i would be happy to try it out.

Hi,

>>* an another way: put a symetry axis, and when moving a control point on one side of the axis having MoI select and move the symetrical control point.

There is already some kind of "symmetry modeling" in MoI. You could mean something else by it, though.




Petr

Oups, sorry, thanks a lot, so that's clean on this point. ;)

would it be possible to have a button when mirroring so that mirrored geometry is automatically flagged ?

> would it be possible to have a button when mirroring so that
> mirrored geometry is automatically flagged ?

Yes, something like this should be eventually possible. In the future I want to provide better support for symmetry, something that will do it automatically as you draw, etc...

However it will be a while before I'll have a chance to work this. Maybe near the end of this year or so...

- Michael

> - Would it be possible to implement Curves/surface boolean operations ?
> or creation of points on intersection ?

Yes, I think this isn't too far away, maybe 2 betas or so.


> - Possible to add some form of triangle preview ? (like the one you see when
> exporting to .3DS) thus to check visually the distribution of triangles.

This one is a bit of an awkward fit - the regular rendered display is designed to show at a high density to give you a smooth graphic display where you don't really notice the triangles. It also uses a different style of meshing than the one for export - the display one is really focused on making a larger number of polygons very quickly. The export one is set up to do things more carefully but is slower.

One thing you can do with the current version to make things a bit easier is to set up a keyboard shortcut that does an export to .3ds so that you can get a low poly triangle display up on the screen with a single keystroke.

To do this, shut down MoI, and open up the moi.ini file with notepad, which you can find in C:\Documents and Settings\[your login name]\Application Data\Moi\moi.ini

Inside there, go to the [Shortcut Keys] section, and add this:

[Shortcut Keys]
Space=SaveAs c:\test.3ds

Make sure you edit the moi.ini with the MoI program closed.

With that enabled, you can now push the space bar at any time to get the mesh dialog and mesh display up on the screen, and then cancel out of it.


> By the way is it possible to get nighty builds ? (just exe/dlls when you add a new feature)
> For example when you will have some "alpha" builds of MoI featuring surfacing with a
> network of curves, i would be happy to try it out.

Nightly builds would be pretty awkward for me to do for several reasons - one big one is that I need a few days of testing things over here first to catch the most obvious bugs before sending stuff out.

It works a lot better for me to send out new builds somewhere around every 3 to 4 weeks, that way I get to maintain a high level of quality for the beta releases which makes things easier for everyone in the long run.

- Michael