Hi Michael,
I bought moi3d back in august , to be honest I've left it to one side as think I have some conflicts going on in my computer set up.
Getting very odd results (see attachment) . At the moment I cant even follow the most basic of tutorials without something not happening
as expected .The fillet tool seems the main culprit for me. Also getting gui errors with icons not appearing until I roll over that area. I've tried
moi3d v3 beta trial and that seems to be working much better , but I still get errors just less of them. I'm on an imac i7 , ati 4850 running windows 7
64 bit . What would be my best way of resolving these issues / complete uninstall of all moi3d packages and a reinstall? should I just download and use the
demo version (of v2) and enter my key? or is there another package I should be trying.

Thanks

mg

From what I know Photo, sometimes Fillet is really fickle around the seams in things, especially when they cross with other things you are trying to fillet.
Try to rotate that sphere around to get that seam line in a different position.

But also, I've had disappearing icons and a messed up UI due to whenever my Internet Explorer crashes or has been way out of date.
So on your Mac system, make sure that M$ IE is updated.
But Michael will have better knowledge for ya.

Good luck.

Hi MG -

> At the moment I cant even follow the most basic of tutorials
> without something not happening as expected .The fillet tool
> seems the main culprit for me.

The fillet tool is quite sensitive to the edge structure of your model - if you have something like a little edge coming away from the one that you want to fillet, the fillet will fail if it would cause that other edge to be entirely consumed away.

Could you please post the 3DM model file of that same file that you are showing the screenshot for? Then I could take a look at your particular file and give you some better advice for that particular situation.

Also for doing filleting it will cause problems if you've got something like several edges in sequence there but you didn't select all of them when going to do the fillet.

There are a variety of different things that can potentially go wrong with filleting so it's a bit difficult to diagnose just from a screenshot, if you can post the model file it would help a lot.


> Also getting gui errors with icons not appearing until I roll over that area.

That's something that seems to be some kind of glitch introduced in Internet Explorer version 9 - if you roll back to IE version 8 that will probably go away, and also when that is happening it seems that just maximizing the MoI window will also make it go away.

So the easiest thing in that case is to maximize your window and leave it maximized when you close MoI as well so it will start up maximized - does the problem then go away?

MoI v3 does not use Internet Explorer any more for it's UI so it won't be affected anymore by changes in IE behavior like MoI v1 and v2 were.

- Michael

Hi MG, so also just in case it wasn't clear - a reinstall isn't going to clear up any of these things, the UI issue is due to something not working right in IE9 and you can probably clear that up by either uninstalling IE9 and going back to IE8 or possibly just by maximizing the MoI window so that it starts maximized initially.

The fillet problem is also not going to be related to an installation issue - it's just a sensitive tool and there are many things that can prevent successful fillets. It's hard for me to know exactly which thing it is in your particular case there without seeing the file.

But in either case an uninstall/reinstall of MoI isn't going to make any difference.

- Michael

Hi Michael,
many thanks for getting back to me . I have managed to uninstall explorer 9 , which windows doesn't make very easy for you as it doesn't show up in installed programs only updates . This has
caused ati catalyst control centre to now stop working (not too pleased about that to be honest).Is there another solution that doesn't involve unistalling explorer? as I'm tempted to use system restore to get back my ati control panel. My concern with my installation was that fillet that failed in version 2 did work correctly with no issues in v3 beta( but my license is for version 2).So I will have to re do that snowman tutorial to supply you a 3dm as I had undone the fillet and carried on in v3 beta. I will re do this later today. Is there some documentation that explains all of the possible variations when a fillet will fail ? I've had a look at the wiki files and it seems limited in that regard. More documented examples would be great for a noob like me : )

Anyway thanks again

Photo

Hi photo,

> Is there another solution that doesn't involve unistalling explorer?

Yes - as mentioned above just maximizing the MoI window may prevent the "blank initial UI" problem from happening, even when IE9 is installed.

You just need to maximize the window and leave it maximized when you close it so that it starts up maximized.

Did you try that and it didn't work?


> My concern with my installation was that fillet that failed in
> version 2 did work correctly with no issues in v3 beta( but my
> license is for version 2).

The Internet Explorer thing only has to do with the "UI initially blank" problem, it doesn't have anything to do with filleting.

It's probably likely that you just happened to avoid the particular problem you ran into in v2 when you were testing v3.

Like for example maybe you missed selecting one small edge piece before doing the fillet in v2 but didn't miss selecting any when in v3.

It's hard for me to know for sure what you ran into without having a file to test with though.



> Is there some documentation that explains all of the
> possible variations when a fillet will fail ?

Not really - there's quite a lot of different things that can cause problems - surfaces with messy control point structure, self intersecting surfaces like ones that wrinkle or fold over themselves, having a complex corner structure with too many edges branching out from a single shared point so that the fillet engine doesn't know how to form the corner patch between them, not having enough space for the fillet to fit, making a fillet that would try to completely eat away all of any other other edge or face, not selecting the full sequence of edges, and I'm sure plenty more things...

There are so many different possibilities that usually the best way for me to help is by seeing the model file where you are currently having problems - being able to see the actual example (the 3DM model file, not just a screenshot) allows me to give you much more specific advice.

Maybe in the future at some point I'll be able to create some additional documentation that goes over all of these different problem areas, but it takes quite a bit of work to make stuff like that. Right now your best bet is to post a model file.

- Michael

Hi Michael ,
thanks again for your replies. I'm going to attack that tutorial again tomorrow , I was hoping to get to it today .
I think that's the best way forward to show you what I have been experiencing. Please don't take any of my posts the wrong
way , as I know this a great piece of software. Which I'm just struggling to tame, and that these issues I'm having are probably
due to my own user error. I'm just struggling to figure out why.

thanks

Photo

Hi photo, don't worry I'm not taking anything the wrong way, I know it's confusing when something doesn't work like you expect it to!

Filleting just tends to be a particularly sensitive area and there are just so many different possibilities that it's hard for me to know what happened in your particular case without being able to see the actual model.

It's not unusual to need to do some extra steps like maybe rotate a sphere a little bit to position it's seam edge to be more friendly to the fillet limitations and stuff like that.

Anyway, definitely when something is not behaving as you expect it really helps to save the 3DM model file and post it too and not just a screenshot, because I can't do stuff like rotate around and zoom in and stuff like that with a screenshot like I can with an actual model file to actually see more details about what is going on with the model.

- Michael

Hi Again,
going fullscreen on startup seems to have got rid of gui errors : ) you were absolutely right that the bevels weren't working due to how the seam edge on one sphere was hitting another accute angles gave me an error.I'm now getting something unexpected using the arc tool and sweep . If I use the freeform tool to make a curve it seems to work, but I'm unsure why it does not work with the arc tool.

Thanks

Photo

I'm not sure why that doesnt work either.. If I select the bottom edge and copy and paste it, then run flip, it will sweep like expected.

is there a cfg file for moi? coming from modo when I have issues I trash the cfg file and restart the program.That seems to resolve a lot of oddities in that program. Does something similar work in moi?

There is an ini file for MoI, but you wouldnt think of it in those terms... You wouldnt delete it and it wouldnt have anything to do with this. Best we should wait for Michael to get a look and a better explanation.

Hi photo - re: cfg file - MoI doesn't really get messed up by corrupted cfg files like Modo seems to have an issue with. That's something that's specific just to Modo.

Like Burr mentions there is a moi.ini file that contains various settings in it but there isn't really anything in it that has anything to do with particular commands working or not working, stuff like that is going to be something to do with your geometry or maybe a limitation in how a command works or maybe a bug.

I'll take a look at your problem to see what it is in this case.

- Michael

Hi photo - so the sweep in that case is behaving odd because it's getting "auto place" mode activated.

Auto place mode is a method for using sweep where you can have the profile curve drawn just flat on a world plane somewhere away from the path curve and then Sweep will move and rotate the profile on to the rail curve for you.

The way that auto place mode is turned on is that sweep looks at the profile and if it totally outside the bounding box of the rail then auto place mode gets enabled.

I've been meaning to add some control in to make it possible to turn auto place mode off because sometimes like in your case here it gets enabled when you are not expecting it.

For now if you move the arc curve just a little bit to the right you should find that it then works like you were expecting.

Some other things you could do would be to make a slightly longer arc so that the whole arc was not totally to one side of the rail's bounding box, or use offset on the rail to make a larger rail running more down the middle of the arc, or you can also use Rail revolve for something that pivots around a central axis line like this instead.

There's some more description of auto place mode in the six legged pod video here:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/pod.htm


Let me know if you are still stuck.

- Michael