PILOU wrote:
...As Moi is used principaly without the keyboard insert Text of name of Object will be painful

My opinion is:
The ability of using tablet PC with MoI cannot possibly change the fact that MoI is a CAD application using NURBS. There could never be a decent CAD application without text writing, editing and formatting capabilities. Also dimensions will probably need some editing too.
I understand what you mean PILOU but there is another way to minimize keyboard entry... Automatic naming for curves and predefined solids, for example circle1, circle2, box1, box2 etc...There will be a way for all others, I'm sure. After all, what is important is the ability to change and re-model the objects, not selecting them or naming them... Names are important when other things are involved, like bill of materials or quantity schedule for example.
Selecting the object [solid3245] you will be able to see [circle74] and the [rectang35]. Then by changing the diameter of [circle74] (two clicks or a simple slider) you have a new [solid3245]
Now, if for a reason you want to rename [solid3245] to [main connector] for example, it is up to you.
I can't think of a faster way of modeling and re-modeling an object.

@Pilou

>Agree with you if you not consider MoI as a speedy "Pre Modeler"
I think you see MoI as it is right now, I am thinking of how it will be as a future version. I believe that Michael is not preparing a Pre-Modeler, and Rhino for example is not at all a pre-modeler...
I can understand your problem with too much use of text but the automatic naming can be a solution. After all, every program I know has some kind of object naming, so it will be easy to find a way on that.

BTW, the idea with the boxes was very original!

I don't think that this is the way to go.
We run out of quickly identifiable colors very quickly.
As the number of the objects build up so will the similiar colored groups and
that will be confusing.

And besides it starts to look very "toy" like this way.

Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com

@JTB
< and Rhino for example is not at all a pre-modeler...
Of course yes!
But maybe you can see MoI as a pre Modeler for Rhino for example :)

@Fitz
< it starts to look very "toy" like this way
Of course I drew some colorful objects :)
Life is not also a sort of "Game of Life"? So...;)

Serious pieces can be colored too :)

Pilou:

Naming objects and groups of them though is a important part of organizing. If I'm modeling a castle, and want to hide everything but the north tower, having a name allows me to see this, and in a heirarchy tree, I can show it, and hide the others. I don't have to remember that the North tower is the green box 4 levels down.

Colors are cute, but it's easy to run out of them. In a complex scene, and the fact selecting currently changes the color of the item selected, how many objects till "Pumpkin" becomes indistinguishable from "Orange"? It can quickly become difficult to tell closely related colors apart, especially since silo has shading. So "Orange" in the shadow may look like brown.

Minimizing keyboard interaction is good, but I want labels.

I want my tank model to have a "Barrel" group, and a "Turret" group, and a "Tread" group. And I may want to assign a custom color. And I want my reference image, and starting curves assigned to a different layer so I can hide/show them as needed.

And trees of heirarchal boxes leads to box shuffling hell, as you move them up and around, and organize them. Anyone who has dealt with filesystems knows this.

yeah, what he said:)

Maybe you right It was just my 2 cents:)

sorry for my ignorance, but what all falls under the "pre-modeler" blanket?

with great interest, i have been looking at as much response to MoI as possible. something i do everyday is look to improve the tools i use, with great respect to what tasks they are best suited. i want to emphasize what has great appeal to myself as i use MoI: simplistic GUI with little or no need to touch the keyboard during the modeling process. i believe i have only pulled up to the keys to type a file name. if there was a popup keyboard on screen, i wouldn't even have to do that. just to clarify, i do a lot of 2d/3d cad design which i would gouge your eyes out if you made me work without a keyboard, but what MoI seems to be geared for is a less device dependant environment, where your primary interface is either stylus (appears to me as the goal) or mouse alone. I am still diving in to the overall response, but this is what i have found so far.

following with my conclusion the intent is for a stylus/minimalist interface approach, to better attain the "moment" without obstruction of names and extended hierarchy until after the "moment" has developed, i give thought to the PILOU'ian attempt to allow a method of quickly grouping/layering without an extensive compromise on order. no, i'm not sure what to suggest as a solution, i just now have begun the thought. i merely wanted to re-express the direction i understand to be the inceptual intent. PLEASE correct me if this is errant.

is MoI best suited for large assemblies and/or intensive mechanisms, or is it tooled for conceptual yet developable components, or the organic characteristic, or is it to be all and more? the application will drive the implementations. our purpose is to seed the process.


cheers.

Well, if speed is the case,
why not an auto naming feature that is activated with the object selected and hitting a specific key stroke.
the software will automatically create a group of the selected object(s).
then if you want to, later you can call up a floating window that has the project object list/tree whatever.

Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com

> i merely wanted to re-express the direction i understand to be the
> inceptual intent. PLEASE correct me if this is errant.

Hi MadTooler, you've definitely got the inceptual intent down there.

Initially MoI was created to fill a gap that I perceived in the CAD market, where reliance on the keyboard, right and middle click and the scroll wheel caused existing CAD programs to be frustrating to use with only a tablet. As far as I could tell, there just did not exist any CAD software that worked well in this situation. So that provided an opportunity to do something a little different than anything else out there, which is good because I didn't really want to spend a lot of effort in just trying to make a clone of already existing stuff.

But during the development of a UI to fill that niche, I discovered that removing reliance on those elements also just greatly simplified the UI overall even with a mouse, since less stuff tends to be hidden and things are activated more with just simple left-clicks.

This increased general purpose ease of use, and a focus on fluid ease of use and quick results has kind of become the more dominant intent now. But it is not at odds with the use of the stylus, it encompasses that too.

As time goes on, it will be a goal to add additional power and capabilities to the design tools while still maintaining the fluidity and ease of use. This will happen kind of gradually and carefully in certain areas - object grouping and organization is one of these.


> is MoI best suited for large assemblies and/or intensive mechanisms, or is it tooled
> for conceptual yet developable components, or the organic characteristic, or is it
> to be all and more? the application will drive the implementations. our purpose is
> to seed the process.

Right now the toolset is more suitable for somewhat less complex models, quick designs, kind of early stage conceptual work. As time goes on I expect for MoI to be more applicable to larger chunks of the design process, although still slanted more towards the earlier stages. This will be an ongoing and slow evolution though.

Does that give you some more of an overview of some of the design philosophy and history?

- Michael

So how will this thing be solved....are we going to see usual layres in the next beta or something different...

Hi Kreten, I don't expect to have anything in this area for V1, it is something that I want to tackle for V2.

The usual CAD layer system has some limitations that I don't like. Like for example since each object goes only on one layer, you can't very easily have organizations like having a car where one wheel is on a layer "wheels", but also the 2 front wheels are on a layer "front half of car", as one example.

I want to have something that isn't limited in that manner. Also I don't really want to have separate systems for both groups and layers, they are performing similar duties so from my view it is bad to have totally different systems for them.

But I haven't had time yet to design a system that accomplishes these things, it will be very time consuming to design a good system for this, so that's why it is not going to be ready for V1, I just don't want to delay V1 for this.

- Michael

< and things are activated more with just simple left-clicks.
is not the dreary user of the mac users? :D

Are you thinking of something like tags and filters?

I don't care if silo provides some color based nameless grouping behaviour for quick-n-dirty visual grouping.

But having worked on a few moderately complicated models, I can tell you I do want the ability to name/label these groups as the complexity increases. Colorspaces can run out especially quickly before you start getting duplicate colors, or at least colors that look duplicate to the human eye.

I think that its safe to say that we all agree on the color system as not being the way to go.

I actually think that selecting objects and hitting a keystroke that automatically creates a group and adds this new group to the
project tree wth a default naming system could be a nice way to go.

> Are you thinking of something like tags and filters?

Yeah, something a bit along those lines.

I think would be good if you could take whatever was selected, and then add that as an "object set" that will show up in a browser list. An object should be able to belong to multiple sets, which is a lot different than layers - AutoCAD style layers is pretty restrictive in comparison because each object is assigned to only one layer.

- Michael