Hi 2kemon, well MoI is not polygon based, so there isn't really any concept of a poly limit in it. Objects in MoI are made up of NURBS surfaces instead of polygons (although polygons are used for the display since that's what video cards know how to render).

There is not any predefined limit on how many NURBS surfaces you can use in a MoI model, but also NURBS surfaces are a different kind of thing than polygons like for example 1 NURBS surface could be a really big complex curved wavy thing.

Of course eventually if you have enough surfaces you will run out of memory.

One thing you can do on heavier models to increase the display speed is to hide edges (display of the curved edges actually takes much of the redraw time on complex models), and also you can dial down the display mesh density to 25 degrees (the setting is under Options > View > Meshing parameters > Mesh angle), which will help conserve display memory on heavier models (at the expensive of a coarser looking display). But you have to get to a pretty complex quantity of stuff before that is necessary.

If you look through the gallery you can see some examples of some pretty detailed models, here is an example:
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=147

- Michael

And just to give you a general idea - on my kind of old (6 year old) main machine with an old video card in it, SketchUp's display seems to get bogged down a lot more easily.

Often times a model that is workable in MoI seems to be sluggish in display speed when converted over to SketchUp.

But I think that they've made progress on the display speed in SketchUp in their recent releases though, and I have not messed with those very much.

- Michael

Thank you for your detailed and informative answer Michael. I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions.
I knew MoI is a NURBS modelling app, but I didn't realize that polygons are a "non issue". I thought it was a way of bending and twisting the polygons, in order to fit a curve between point A and point B. But now I know better ;)

I am seriously considering buying MoI. I love what you've done here, and you deserve all the credit in the world for it. Unfortunately I'm under a tight budget at the moment. So until I win the lottery, I'm trying to figure out the pros and cons of the different softwares out there.

Another question comes to mind: Sketchup isn't using newer hardware to its full potential, and this also leads to the dissapointing performance. 64 bit proccessor technology is not utilized, and google has failed to upgrade it openGL engine.

How does the corresponding situation look with MoI?

To save Michael a job (I hope) , MoI is 32 bit. However, the only difference between a 32 bit app and a 64 bit app is memory addressing, not the actual processor performance. If you run a 32 bit app like MoI on a 64 bit system, MoI should be able to address 4GB of memory.

As for OpenGL, Moi doesn't use it. It uses DirectX.

Hi 2kemon,

> How does the corresponding situation look with MoI?

It's fairly similar actually, because one nice feature of MoI is that it runs well on modest hardware, for example you can run it on a basic netbook computer and it does not require a huge powerhouse workstation just in order to function.

However, MoI v2 will take advantage of multiple CPU cores when creating an export mesh to polygon file formats, including creating an SKP file. Previously in v1 that was a pretty slow process.

There are some other areas where I do want to try and leverage multiple cores as well, in v3 I will be trying to experiment with that some more.

re: 64-bit version - currently MoI only has a 32-bit version and that probably won't change anytime too soon, since it takes quite a bit of work to maintain multiple versions.

- Michael

...again. Thank you very much for your answers. Your clear and precise answers have eliminated my doubts. When the money roll in again, I'll be buying MoI ;)