At my job I am often given scan data of a robot, or car, etc.
I import the .obj file into MoI with the converter.
Now the mesh is a thick tangle of black edges.

I really need to be able to shade this rather than see the edges.
This way I can then rebuild the robot within the viewport while
using the import layer as reference. Rhino is able to do this, but
I would rather use MoI. Will V3 have this ability?

Thanks.

EDIT.
In addition, this would boost the power of MoI greatly.
Artists like me really need to be able to import decimated
ZBrush sculpts to then add too it. For example I would
import a female head and then create perfect sun glasses
to fit the model. Or import a low resolution human body
and then, with MoI, create a perfect jetpack.

About the ZBrush low poly object you can yet only make this

Use this Obj23dmWireframe converter
http://moi3d.com/resources

This enables bringing polygon data in an .obj file into MoI to use as a construction guide. Unzip it to some folder, and then you can run the Obj23dmWireframe.exe program. It will prompt you for the name of an .obj file to read, and after that the name of a .3dm file to create. It will read all the polygon data from the obj file and convert the edges of polygons into line segments, and then write those line segments to the 3dm file. You can then load that 3dm file into MoI and use those line segments to snap on to.

Thanks Frenchy, but I already use that converter.
I want to know if MoI V3 has improved so that I can
have the mesh shaded - not line segments.

Hi blackhoney - importing mesh objects tends to bring about a large cascade of various UI issues, since they have a much different structure than NURBS objects, so it is difficult to have the existing toolset work directly on them (stuff like booleans, trimming, etc...).

That leads to a situations where you could open an file, and see that it appeared to open correctly, but then not have any of the regular tools work on it. That can tend to cause significant confusion - people think: hey this file seems to have loaded ok but now why does it not behave normally, is it a bug?

So I'm still not sure at this point about implementing that in a near time frame - it still needs more thought about how it could be implemented without leading to that kind of confusion about not being able to do regular modeling actions on the imported data.

It's hard to give a time frame on issues that may need to have a good UI design around them to prevent confusion. That could pretty easily not fit in to the v3 time frame.

In addition to this issue, just implementing importers in general tends to be a fairly time consuming area of work so that's an additional complication.

- Michael

> Or import a low resolution human body
> and then, with MoI, create a perfect jetpack.

For a low resolution mesh, you could use a workflow of import the low res mesh into Rhino, convert it to a NURBS model using Rhino's MeshToNurb command, which will convert it to a faceted NURBS model with a trimmed plane for each original polygon face. That faceted NURBS model can then be imported into MoI.

That can work for low polygon models but it isn't very good for higher polygon counts because the way NURBS models are structured they don't deal well with a huge number of little triangle facets instead of having larger smooth surface patches.
See here for some additional explanation:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4247.76

- Michael

Thanks for the replies.
Photofly is coming out from Autodesk. It is in beta.
It is very powerful, enabling anyone with a camera to 'scan' objects, shoes, rooms, or entire buildings
into the computer. This process creates meshes that have textures and great detail. I can see a greater
need for what I am suggesting fairly soon. I work in the entertainment industry. Getting real life scans
into the viewport is important. Thanks again.

Hi blackhoney - just in general the focus for MoI is on drawing things from scratch and not so much on reverse engineering scanned model data, if that helps explain why that has not been a priority so far.

I can understand that it would be helpful for various situations, but I've got to figure out some way to integrate it so that people don't get confused and wonder why their just opened file behaves totally differently than something that they drew.

If you have any ideas on how to implement this without that kind of confusion happening, that would probably make it more feasible to develop this area in a shorter timeframe.

I think it probably would have to go on some other kind of entry point than just File > Open, something more like a special "open reference model" type command but I'm not sure where to place something like that in the UI. Maybe importing a reference image (currently the View > Image command) could be grouped with it somehow, but I don't have a clear idea yet of how the UI for that would be organized.

Uncertainty in the UI design tends to mean that a feature will take a while to develop.

Long term coherence and good UI design are important goals for MoI so if the UI for something is not clear yet it tends to mean that it won't be developed yet as well - in general with MoI I'm trying to avoid just slapping together a bunch of features and ending up with a bloated and messy UI.

- Michael

Maybe changing the 'image' button to 'reference' and give the choice to load it there.
It could behave in the same manner of an image, with tranparency, etc.

Marc

Hi Marc, I'd kind of like to find a better place for Image as well - it seems that fairly often people don't think to go to the View tab to find it when they are first starting out with MoI.

- Michael