Just created this skid loader to practice using MoI. I sure like using MoI and the overall results.

One tool I could have used and could not readily find a solution for was one I have come to really like in TC. It is called the Circle Tangent to Entity tool. With it you can select your first two entities to go tangent from and then enter a final radius or diameter to complete. The tool also has options to use through points in conjunction. Is this possible in MoI?

One other thing that I have found when using MoI is that if an object is thin, say .5 " or 1", etc., the lines behind bleed through (Sreen0015). Has anyone else noticed this? Perhaps it is due to my graphics card (Screen0014), but I hesitate to update it since doing so has caused me issue in other software over time. I removed the bleed through lines in my image editor for the 4-View.

Hey Don,
Try use the circle tan-tan tool:



If you run that command, then you pick 2 points and then just type the radius number and hit enter.

>Try use the circle tan-tan tool:

How could I have possibly missed that? I am so sure I tried that tool several times, and never saw the radius field. Very embarassing!

Hi Don ..
Yes, I have had that bleeding situation .. If I do a rendering it does not show through but I have had to move objects occasionally to get good illustration in native MoI.
My graphics card is an Nvidea so I doubt that this is a problem with your card.
cheers,
eric

Must watch the turbo entabulator video more!!! :o

Also, just typing it outright enters the radius.. You dont have to use the "feild" (but you can also)

As far as the line bleedthrough, I dont know myself.. You'll notice as you move in, they stop bleeding through, but as you go out, they can appear.. I'll look for michaels explanation on this, to better understand it myself, if there is a way to limit it, or if it's just a function of the mesher... A cheat would also be to hide those edges???? (Hardly practicle)

Hi Don, your skid loader turned out great!

Re: Circle tangent - it looks like you've got this figured out now thanks to Burr. That command in MoI will let you do a few different variations within in - you first pick points on 2 curves you want to be tangent to. Then with the 3rd pick you can do some variations - if you pick a point somewhere on another curve it will calculate a circle that is simultaneously tangent to all 3 curves. If you pick a point somewhere not snapped on to another curve it will do a circle tangent to those 2 curves and going through that point and if you enter a radius or diameter value for the 3rd step instead of picking a point it will do a circle tangent to the 2 curves with that given radius or diameter. To switch between radius and diameter click on the label that has the little cycle arrow on it.

By the way if you always want to use diameter entry rather than radius, you can switch a setting in moi.ini to make those various radius prompts default to diameter instead, that's in moi.ini under:

[Commands]
UseDiameterDefault=y


> One other thing that I have found when using MoI is that if
> an object is thin, say .5 " or 1", etc., the lines behind bleed
> through (Sreen0015). Has anyone else noticed this?

This is not a problem with your video card, it's actually a normal display artifact from the way MoI's graphics currently work.

When the edge curves of a solid are drawn, they are pulled forward towards the eyepoint so that they don't end up getting submerged in the display mesh of the surface. Right now it kind of errs a bit on pulling too much which can cause bleed through in thin areas.

I do have some ideas that I think will improve this in the future, but for now it's just a display glitch that you just need to ignore. It would be easier for me to avoid this glitch if MoI drew edges only using the surface's display mesh, but that would have a different kind of side effect of making edges look kind of like jagged polylines instead of looking like nice smooth curves. The way MoI currently does it, it refines each edge and curve to be totally smooth looking on the screen but that also means it doesn't quite have an exact match to the shaded surface display mesh, so that's why there is that "pull forward" bias factor added in.

In general there are a lot of tricks and compromises that go into any realtime viewport display using the video hardware that can lead to various kinds of visual artifacts, so that's just something to not focus on all that much. A full rendering is done with much less of that stuff but is also much slower.

- Michael

Hi Burr,

> I'll look for michaels explanation on this, to better understand
> it myself, if there is a way to limit it, or if it's just a function
> of the mesher...

It's really a function of the curve display in the graphics engine. If it didn't pull edge curves forward towards the eye for their zbuffering you would instead see a different kind of problem where the edges would be "stippled" - looking kind of partially submerged and pieces of it hidden by the surfaces that they were skimming along.

Stippling is a worse problem than bleed through because stippling would happen on every single edge being displayed while bleed through only happens on stuff with thin walls.

I have some ideas that I will be working on in the future to try and reduce the bleed through though.

For now it's just a display artifact to ignore...

- Michael

Thanks Michael, for the input and explanations. I am glad I asked my questions as I learned some new (to me) tricks. I really appreciate being able to swap to diameter input by default.

I am also glad to to learn that my graphics card is not at fault.

Keep up t he great work.