Well, I'm currently doing a piece with 3200+ 1.1mm diamonds and I'm tired of arrays and other tools aha (specially when you need to change 1 little thing to the stone setting and duplicate it 3200+ times)

When does MoI gonna get Rhino Blocks or Instanced geometry ? Or even referenced 3dm files ? Xref ?

*cry*

Hi DesuDeus, I'm not really sure yet when MoI will have instances and blocks and particularly xrefs are probably even further out than a basic instance mechanism.

MoI is much more focused on being a drawing-ish tool, and just in general those features are somewhat more oriented towards assembling some large repeated pattern or assembly. It's a bit different kind of a thing than "drawing a shape".

If your current project needs such a large repetition in it, you probably are best off using some other program like Rhino to do that particular project instead of trying to do that one in MoI.

Eventually I do expect to have an instancing mechanism but I don't want to rush into it and end up forever locked into a possibly kind of antiquated system. So it's going to require quite a bit of planning to get it done, and things that require a lot of planning and design work are difficult to know when I will be able to get them done.

- Michael

Basically the Rhino block mechanism is just copied directly from AutoCAD and I'm not entirely sure if it's a totally great mechanism to follow exactly in MoI.

There's a lot of various quirks - like for example in Rhino you can't just select a block as input to regular command like doing a boolean with one, so if you wanted to use blocks as way to set up some pattern that you then want to cut into an object and then do some update of the block to update the cut pattern that is not possible to do in Rhino.

I'm not entirely sure though if that case is better dealt with by a history mechanism instead or whether that kind of sub-object component thing is really needed to be directly a part of the block mechanism or what.

So that kind of uncertainty pushes blocks off for a bit as well in MoI.

- Michael

Yeah but once you used MoI then Rhino feel so old... I can't even load one of my model into Rhino while I can load it perfectly in MoI !
So it's kinda hard to do everything in Rhino at the same speed than in MoI :)

Hi DesuDeus,

> Yeah but once you used MoI then Rhino feel so old... I can't even
> load one of my model into Rhino while I can load it perfectly in MoI !
> So it's kinda hard to do everything in Rhino at the same speed
> than in MoI :)

:) Sure I can understand that.

But really one big reason why MoI has that whole feeling to it is that I try to avoid just sticking a ton of features into it without carefully considering how they fit together and how they'll behave in the long term.

Instances is a really big feature area - implementing it will involve stuff in the display engine, probably stuff in selection, UI and workflow to design to manage them, and probably will impact file I/O in several ways as well.

So it's a really big feature that requires work in an unusual number of different areas.

When doing a really big feature like that, it needs to be planned really carefully so that I don't end up doing it in a wrong direction.

I do expect to have it eventually, but I'm not sure exactly when.

- Michael

just wanted to express my wish for instancing as well... (in a way that the original can be reworked and all the instances update)

I guess this is not too easy to implement, but every now and then it might be really helpful.

Instancing would be great :)

(obviously)

Is it on the V3 or V4 list?

Hi NightCabbage,

> Is it on the V3 or V4 list?

It's on the big list, but I'm not sure when it will happen for sure, there is quite a lot of work involved for it.

In the more nearer term stuff for v3 I'll most likely be more focusing on more surfacing and model construction type tools as a higher priority first.

- Michael

Cool ok :D

I imagine it would be a lot of work to implement something like that :P