Hi Michael,
a few things that have come up for me.

In 3D could we have rotate about mouse pointer rather than 0,0 which wizzes things off screen when zoomed in.

Could we have a buttton that centres a new object on 0,0 I know we ought to do it right but I don't always.

I keep going back and forth between Construct and Transform, I notice that there is a bit of room at the bottom of that section, any chance of having them both on screen at once?

For us jewellers Grid Snap is a boon, but when you get down small (1/10mm) you have to switch it off, I know someone suggested that a 1/10mm grid appear when you zoom up large , perhaps a flagged reminder on screen that this has happened?

If I create a solid inside another but with a surface level with another , I find the smaller one hard to select, how should I do this?

regards Tim.

Hi Tim,

One way to select a smaller object inside a larger object is to
do an Edit>Copy of the larger object, then delete it. That will
give you free access to pick the smaller object.
Then you can click Paste and bring back the larger object.
Hope this helps.

Michael,

I'd like to ask if there is a way right now to script the arrow keys and up and down keys to move an object. Last night, I brought a model from MoI into Rhino so I could render it... The arrow keys were really helpful in positioning lights.
By using the arrow keys, you can nudge things along the world axes. Since it's not viewport dependent, you can keep your eyes in the perspective viewport.

This is just a quick preliminary rendering of the project.

Thanks,
Jesse

Thanks Jesse,
hadn't thought of that, sometimes these solutions are a bit devious!
regards Tim.

Hi Tim, thanks for the feedback!

> In 3D could we have rotate about mouse pointer rather than 0,0
> which wizzes things off screen when zoomed in.

This one would maybe be a bit difficult. The rotation point needs to be a 3d point in x,y,z space. Your mouse pointer is normally only a 2d location on the screen. There are different ways that can be used to calculate a 3d point from the 2d mouse cursor location, such as intersecting it with the grid or snapping on to a nearby object, but these normally happen during drawing commands where you have a lot of feedback for where that point is while you move the mouse around. For rotation this wouldn't happen, it would need to suddenly generate that 3d point without doing a bunch of tracking around of it beforehand. This would probably be somewhat confusing and hard to control.

The rotation center point doesn't have to be 0,0,0 - that's just what it starts out to be.

The easiest way to change it is to select some objects and use the "Reset" button that appears on the panel at the bottom of a viewport. This will zoom to fit the selected objects to the screen, and it will also place the rotation pivot point at the center of the selected objects.

So after a "Reset", you should be able to easily rotate around the selected objects without going off into space somewhere else.

The other method is you can use the "Area" zoom on that bottom panel as well - that lets you pick a point and drag a zoom box around it. The point that you pick can be snapped on to any point you want, and that point will become the new rotation pivot. So if you want to focus in on the corner of a box for example, do a zoom area and snap the center point to the corner of the box and drag a rectangle around it a little bit. Now when you rotate you will pivot around that box corner.


> Could we have a buttton that centres a new object on 0,0 I know we ought
> to do it right but I don't always.

If you need to center it later on, try the Transform / Align tool. You can use 2 applications of that and switch between horizontal and vertical centering and snap the target point on to the origin and that should do it.

If you can identify a center point of the object to grab, you can also just drag it to the origin and it will snap there, make sure you have Object Snap enabled, it should be highlighted in orange on the bottom bar. Sometimes the Transform/Move command can give you a little more control than dragging since it allows you to more explicitly pick the base point.

But the best way is to just draw the object centered from the very beginning!


> I keep going back and forth between Construct and Transform, I notice that there
> is a bit of room at the bottom of that section, any chance of having them both
> on screen at once?

I want to reserve that area for some future expansion.

Which Transform commands do you find yourself using the most often? I have some ideas that I want to try for version 2.0 that should make it easier to do some types of transforms without needing to go over there.

If you are frequently using a particular transform, it might help to set up a keyboard shortcut for it. Let me know if you want some help setting this up.


> For us jewellers Grid Snap is a boon, but when you get down small
> (1/10mm) you have to switch it off, I know someone suggested that a
> 1/10mm grid appear when you zoom up large , perhaps a flagged
> reminder on screen that this has happened?

I'm kind of wary about automatic changes to the grid, even with flagged reminders. It's kind of dangerous in a certain way because normally the grid gives you a distinct sense of the scale you are working on and lets you guarantee point placement at specific values, but if it changes just in response to view manipulations, you no longer have those guarantees.

One thing that you might find useful is a keyboard shortcut that would step the grid spacing up or down on a keystroke. Paul has a script for that here: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=509.1

Also Petr has collected some other useful scripts here: http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/

Let me know if you need any help setting these scripts up.


> If I create a solid inside another but with a surface level with another , I find the
> smaller one hard to select, how should I do this?

Probably the easiest way is to hide the larger one.

Another way is to use the area select - this is the rectangle that you can use for selection when you click and drag in an empty area. If you drag starting from the right side and moving towards the left, you will get a dashed rectangle and anything that intersects the rectangle in any way will get selected. if you drag from the left going towards the right, you will get a solid rectangle and only things that are completely contained inside of it will get selected. You can use this "complete containment only" mode to capture a smaller object if you drag a rectangle that only contains it and not the larger object.

You can also sometimes use Select / Invert to help get a selection onto a difficult object as well - select everything else and then do Select / Invert and it will flip the selection.

- Michael

Hi Tim,

<If I create a solid inside another but with a surface level with another , I find the smaller one hard to select, how should I do this?>

I often work with two versions of MoI open at the same time, one for the job I'm designing in & one for "Copy & Paste" of various parts.
I can then use the "parts version" to store various pieces in their correct position, while I continue to work in the "design version".
It's also handy for those designs where you get a "second idea" while working on the first one or when you've got a lot of parts to "Boolean Difference".
In the "design version", I can then Hide or Delete those various parts knowing that I can just Copy & Paste back from the "parts version".

Hope this makes sense, Colin

Thanks aal,

these are really good suggestions, just what I need1
regards Tim.

Infinite grid in the 6 views (if it's too hard for the 3D view) (for steph) :)

> Infinite grid in the 6 views (if it's too hard for the 3D view) (for steph) :)

I guess I still don't understand why this is a problem.

If he wants the grid to be larger, why doesn't he make it larger in the grid options?

I should be able to do an infinite grid in the ortho views eventually, but since it is so easy to increase the grid to a larger size like 2000 or 4000 sections, it just hasn't been a priority yet.

Does he need it larger because he has it still set to the original default, or is he doing something where 2000 or 4000 is not large enough?

- Michael

He has habit to begin to modelize without constraint :)
For example for his "background" of "watches" start to modelize for the 0,0,0 in the defaut mode
but following inspiration arrive to the end of univers' grid because not think of the limitated size !
For architecture and urbanism!
And seems the other 3D prog has also ortho view infinite!)

Some restraint is actually helpful.

The way floating point mathematics works on computers tends to cause a loss of numeric precision when larger numbers are mixed in calculations with smaller numbers. Just simple operations like addition and division sort of get rounded to coarser values.

So it can cause problems when objects are located farther and farther away from the origin.

I'm not sure of an exact number, but things should probably generally stay within coordinates of -5,000 to +5,000 or so to get the best results.

Placing objects that are farther out in space or larger in size than that will tend to generate additional failures especially in complex commands that do a lot of calculations like booleans.

- Michael

> but following inspiration arrive to the end of univers' grid because not think of
> the limitated size !
> For architecture and urbanism!

That would be nice, but generally such unrestrained and unlimited size to objects will cause numerous calculation problems....

Beyond the calculation problems, MoI version 1.0 just isn't envisioned as a city planning tool, it is more oriented towards modeling individual objects.

- Michael

Sure :)
we can't have more than 2 numbers visible after the decimal point on the tool barre bottom?

> we can't have more than 2 numbers visible after the decimal point on the tool barre?

You can have more - go to Options and set "Decimal places to display" to a different number, just the default is 2.

But several things such as intersections are calculated to a precision of 0.001 units. So unless you stay away from operations that involve tolerance (Boolean, Intersections, Fillets, Offsets, ...), it probably won't do you too much good to look at many more decimal points in the UI.

You generally need to pick a proper unit system and scale for your object such 0.001 units is smaller than the smallest detail that you want to represent, and your object should generally be less than 5000 units in overall size, otherwise there will tend to be problems in areas that require complex mathematical calculations such as Booleans and Fillets.

- Michael

thx I had seen before but don't refind it : Syndrome of the The Purloined Letter. by. Edgar Allan Poe :D

So If I have good understand
With a "Kilometer" unit "best" maximum precision can be the meter? :)
You say 5000 units max so 2500 "grid section" or admit 5000 "grid section"?
because in previous post you say -5000,+5000
so 2500 kms or 5000 kms with "snap size" 0.001:it is yet not so bad!

Hi Pilou, keep in mind these are just general guidelines to help avoid problems with commands that involve more sensitive calculations. Some commands are less sensitive to it than others. Booleans, Fillets, and Shelling tend to be the most sensitive.


> or admit 5000 "grid section"?

Yeah, I think that would probably be a pretty good limit.

- Michael

< Yeah, I think that would probably be a pretty good limit.
So a square surface of 10 000 kms with a precison of meters
(with Snap Size 0.001 and 3 decimal point in the barre bottom---> (or a precision of 1/ 10 000 000 with no unity):)
It's not so bad!)

Hmmm, setting snap size to 0.001 might not work very well. Since that is the fitting tolerance, basically you don't want to create curvy details that are at that size - that's sort of more the lower limit.

Setting snap size to 0.001 might encourage you to draw details that are around that same size... So something like 0.01 for the lowest snap size would probably be better.

It's even better yet to create objects that are not so near to these limits at all... I almost didn't want to include kilometers or miles as units at all because they kind of encourage pushing things to larger or smaller numeric values like you're talking about.

- Michael

Of course!
But you can if you want insert precise measures (even in kilometers with the 3 décimal in the tool barre box or read it under the mouse movement! :)
Not obliged but a possibility :)
Sure at this scale 0.001 precision is an hard work on the Mouse wheel :D
And "snapping" is only good on the helpers and curve's points not on the grid itself!