A new Feb-9-2007 beta release is now available from the download page at http://moi3d.com/download.htm .

New stuff:

Updated background images - you can now move or scale background images. To do this, click and drag on either the image or the corner scaling grip while inside of the View/Image command.

Undo for selection - if you make a selection mistake you can now hit undo to recover the previous selection.

Undo now works to remove the last picked point in the curve and polyline tools.

New polygon star command.

New elliptical option for arc center.

New setting in mesh dialog that allows "Divide larger than" to also apply to planar faces.

New point order options for arc through 3 points.

A right-click on a viewport's "Reset" button will now do a reset all.

New red rectangle warning indicator when you have curve control points stacked up (stacked up points tends to cause various problems with intersections and some other stuff).

Updated crash handling - the crash dialog now has a button you can use to save your model data in the event of a program crash.

Added cap ends option to revolve and rail revolve.

Tuned Direct3D display engine to reduce peak video memory usage, this solves some problems on devices with lower amounts of video memory.

Made opening a file by double-clicking a .3dm file in Windows Explorer work, once you have set MoI.exe as the program to handle .3dm files.

Updated revolve so that cases where you pick the revolve axis down the center of a curve will work, it now automatically trims the revolve profile by the axis if the curve crosses the axis.

Added a new option in moi.ini to keep OBJ export with z-up coordinate system:
[OBJ Export]
SwapAxes=n

Plus quite a bunch of other bug fixes...

- Michael

French version :)
Unzip and put FrenchStrings.txt in C:...\MoI beta Feb-9-2007\ui

Ps @ Michael all accents in the FrenchStrings version "inside" were transformed ! :)
Publicity now :)

> Ps @ Michael all accents in the FrenchStrings version "inside" were transformed ! :)

Hmm, strange... I'm not sure how that happened.

Luckily you are able to supply the fix right here!

- Michael

Yes I use function Research / Replace with sleight :)

>>Made opening a file by double-clicking a .3dm file in Windows Explorer work, once you have set MoI.exe as the program to handle .3dm files.

Hi Michael. This will only happen if we purposely assign Moi to be the default program to open 3dm's right? Is there any way you can set it up so that a file saved in Moi will open in Moi. And a file written by Rhino will not open in Moi unless we purposely choose to?

thanks,
jonah

> This will only happen if we purposely assign Moi to be the
> default program to open 3dm's right?

Correct. Currently it does not set anything up for this, you have to set it using right-click and "Open with" or Tools/Folder options/File Types in Windows Explorer.

This just fixes a bug so that if you do set it up it will work, previously it didn't work.

Eventually I do plan on setting up a file association automatically, but not if there is already something registered for .3dm .


> Is there any way you can set it up so that a file saved in Moi will open
> in Moi. And a file written by Rhino will not open in Moi unless we purposely
> choose to?

Hmmm. I don't know of any way to do this short of something that drastically hooks and changes the default Windows behavior.

The way that the Windows shell normally determines which app to open is totally driven off of the file extension alone.

- Michael

About that I have a little problem
I wish associate a 3Dm file (created by Moi fev 2007) to Moi of Fev 9 2007
That seems impossible : it stay to version of Jan 2007

If I associate the icone of this file 3dm (created by Moi fev 2007) to another prog (Amapi for example) that work !
If I re modify the associate to Moi of Fev 9 2007 of this same file it stay always to version of Jan 2007!!!

Crappy windows system :( maybe i miss something but...)

Ok ! I have found something :Just rename the Moi janvier in Koi Janv, so the icone don't find it, and then I can associate with Moi Fev :)

But the renamed Koi Jan must stay renamed if then that restart :D :D :D

What jumble for nothing :D

Ps Now your new associate file works fine by clicking on icone :)

great stuff. thanx a lot michael ;)

Hi,

thanks for the new beta. :)

The updated german translation is available on my site.

MfG
sk2k

Thx for the update Michael.

Updated Dutch translation:
Unzip and put DutchStrings.txt in C:...\MoI beta Feb-9-2007\ui, or wherever your ui folder is.

Kind regards.

JTB wrote:

> So,next big priority is....???

The next big one is a reworking for how some of the more complex and time consuming commands work, such as fillet, chamfer, booleans and shelling. I'm going to try to get these set up so that they can be canceled in mid calculation, and also set things up in such a way to provide for greatly increased stability in these commands.

The result of this work won't really be immediately apparent, since they will appear to work the same on regular simple cases. But an increase in stability in this area will be a pretty big benefit, together these are by far the most unstable area causing the most program crashes right now.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Nice update ! The new star tool is cool. Used in combination with other tools it permits to create complex curves and shapes very easily. The new option for arc is nice also.

Now, for me the best thing is the : "New setting in mesh dialog that allows "Divide larger than" to also apply to planar faces" and maybe some tweaking you've done in the OBJ export. I can now import some "problematic" models in Modo without problems :-)
Probably the problem was that Modo can not import NGons with "too many" vertices...
Here's an example with the gun by Steph3D...
Really cool !!! ;-)

Michael,

Still planning to have Illustrator import export before release of V.1 ?

Hi Bernard, I'm glad you like the new beta!

> maybe some tweaking you've done in the OBJ export.

I don't think that there were any changes that would effect this model - there were some bug fixes but they were for some more unusual situations, with trim curves that are partially collapsed, and for some edges where some control points of the edge were squished together into a single point.


> Probably the problem was that Modo can not import NGons with "too many" vertices...

That's possible... I think it's likely that complex concave ngons are the big problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concave_polygon) - those are the ones where it is pretty easy for a triangulation of the ngon to get messed up, unless your program code has handled things quite carefully.

By dicing them up into smaller pieces you also will break up complex concave trims into smaller bits, where it is much more likely that each polygon will just have a corner clipped off of it so that it will be convex. It's harder to mess up the triangulation of a convex polygon because no matter which points you connect on it, you can't make a line that goes outside of the polygon.


But that's a great tip that will likely help other people who want to bring stuff into Modo.

- Michael

> Still planning to have Illustrator import export before release of V.1 ?

Yup, still planning on it. I think it will happen pretty close to the end since it is pretty self contained and doesn't effect other commands or much UI.

If you have a few sample Illustrator files for import, can you please zip them up and e-mail them to me at moi@moi3d.com ?

- Michael

>> If you have a few sample Illustrator files for import, can you please zip them up and e-mail them to me at moi@moi3d.com ?

Which Illustrator version ? I'm asking because for example Amapi can not import AI files if they are saved in a version above Illustrator 3. I've no clue what the differences ares between the various version...

> Which Illustrator version ?

Well, any version that you wish would work! :)

Actually just a random variety of different versions would be the best.

Adobe's file format documentation only currently goes up to AI 7, I'm not sure if the most recent version is a lot different from this or not but I guess I will find out.

- Michael

Well, MoI's stability is very important since there is no autosave feature yet.It is a good choise to fix or improve these commands...

Cool!!! I just recently nought Modo, and I'm glad to see this new option helped the import issue. I haven't had a chance to try this out myself, the wife is yelling at me to shut off the computer... :(

jonah

See Michael! Wasn't my request for Moi to subdivide large planar areas a good idea? ;)