Hi Joe, thanks for the feedback on MoI!


> Sometimes in the middle of a movement, say along Z, it may switch for a moment to
> Y, ruining my movement.

For this particular one really the best solution is to rotate your view a bit so that the z line is not too close to the x or y axis on the screen.


> Or because I am not dragging perfectly straight it may slip off of the axis.

For this one, it sounds like you probably want a different setting for how close you have to be for straight snap to be active. To adjust this setting, go to the "Straight Snap" button at the bottom of the screen, and push the little arrow that pops out over top of it, then choose "Straight snap options".

There are 2 settings there - "Activate distance", and "Keep active distance". The first one is the distance in pixels you have to be from a straight snap line for it to initially activate. Once it is active, you only have to remain within the "keep active distance" while you are tracking along it.

Try moving these up to something like Activate: 12, Keep active: 24 and see if that maybe behaves better for you. If that snaps too much for you, maybe try Activate: 6 and Keep Active:24 or 30 - that will keep it the same as the default for the initial activation, but let you be a lot looser for tracking along it once it is active.


> 1) Is there a way to lock object movement to an Axis once MoI has
> guessed correctly and snapped?

For everything except for dragging objects there is a way which is to use a construction line. You get a construction line if you click and drag instead of click and release, when MoI is asking you for a point. For example when you are drawing a line, click and drag instead of click and release - this will create a construction line and once it is defined, the "on" object snap onto the line will have precedence over the straight snap.

However, this is awkward for use during object dragging, because your mouse button is already down when you drag - you can still create a construction line but you have to move your cursor off the viewport to release it, then move back in the view and drag out a line. So that's why I mentioned the other solutions first because those will help you out more for dragging objects as well. I haven't really figured out a very natural way to trigger a construction line for the dragging case yet.


Please let me know if you need any clarification on any of these things.


> 2) Is there a way to force a subcomponent selection type? Sometimes if there are many
> Lines/Curves around a surface I want to select it is hard to select the surface I want.
> Zooming in very close helps, but the process can still be frustrating.

For version 2 I expect to add a selection filter that will let you explicitly control what is being targeted. But this won't be ready for V1.

One trick though is that once you select a certain type of sub-object, like one face, then it will go into a mode where only other faces of that object will be selected and not edges, including with other operations such as area select, select all and invert. So because of this, one way to assist in selecting a difficult face is to first select the largest and most accessible face of your object first, to put it into face mode. Then after you have selected your real intended one, go back and click on that big one to deselect it.

If there is a lot of stuff getting in your way, you can also use hide to temporarily hide edges or faces to help as well.


> 3) Are there any additional selection tools options I may be missing beyond the
> click selection and area selection tools?

Well, there is also Select All, Desl All, and Invert on the Select tab on the side pane.


> For example can I force the area selection to select anything the boundary intersects,
> or only objects it fully encompasses?

This is controlled by the direction that you drag the area window. If you drag from the left to the right, you'll get a solid area rectangle, and only objects fully contained within it will be selected. If you drag from right towards the left, you'll get a dashed rectangle and this will grab anything that intersects it in any way.


> Or are there additional options such as Photoshop's Lasso or Polygonal selection tools?

Nothing for these yet, these are also going to be for a future version.



Re: sweeping around corners - hmm, let me fire it up and take a look at some recommendations for that one. I'll continue on that one shortly.

- Michael

re: Groove on a box

This is an interesting problem - sometimes it is pretty difficult just from a design standpoint to imprint something smooth onto something that is not smooth.

The examples that you show are definitely grooves in the object, but I think the part that you don't like is the juncture where they join up.

Basically if you want a smooth looking result, you're going to want to try and model a smooth sweep to get it.

I've attached here one model that shows a workflow which seems to be ok. One thing that seems to be important is you probably don't want a groove that bites out exactly half a circle's worth of a chunk, because that magnifies the sharp areas in the transition zone. If you only cut a more shallow portion of a circle out of your base object it seems to be closer to what you might want.

So to start with I draw a box and half a curve. Then I mirrored the curve, and offset the box by a little bit. I offset the box so that the sweep that I generate will intersect the original box in a more shallow manner.

Trim the larger box with the curve and join the pieces back together, then extract the edge curves. There are a couple of methods for edge curve extraction - you can select them and do a ctrl+drag on them to duplicate them, or select them and do copy + paste.

Then I drew a sphere at the corner, and duplicated it to the other corners using Transform/Copy.

Trim the curves with the spheres to cut them back a bit and discard the corner spots. Now do blends (select near the ends of where you want to blend) to create one smooth continuous path and join that all together. Now sweep your groove along that and boolean it out. You can also apply a fillet to the result to round things further, it looks like the maximum it will take is around 0.25 before some pieces start to run into each other (which prevents the fillet from working when that happens).

I think it may make sense to have offset the box even a little bit more, or use a smaller radius circle for the sweep, to make the groove even just a bit more shallow.

The other thing that can really make it easier is if you fillet the box first so that there is a round edge there instead of a totally sharp edge, because otherwise this corner piece here:




is kind of hard to get rid of - that is the one that gets magnified if you have a half-circle groove instead of a more shallow one. I guess it might be possible to do another sweep of a piece that kind of grazes the edge there to try and boolean off that corner with another operation...

Anyway, hope this gives you some ideas...

- Michael

Wow, thank you for the fast and helpful reply! I love how MoI is so simplistic and easy to get into, but deep as well. My fiancee is a SketchUp user and is already asking be how to get her stuff into MoI so she can detail it.

The UI and selection options you mentioned for me to try out are all great solutions to the questions I had. The way you have MoI designed I may never have to touch the keyboard during the modeling process, and as a Wacom user that is a huge improvement on other apps.

Thanks for the tips on sweeping. I have no problem with modeling out my sweeps, I just wanted to make sure I was not missing out on some simple workflow I had seen someone else use. I am also reading up on Rhino tutorials to getter a better feel for the nurbs modeling workflow. It seems a lot of it will carry over well to MoI.

Getting some better results now.

Great! That looks pretty good now. It's a lot easier to get a better result along the filleted edge of the box rather than a sharp edge.

- Michael

> My fiancee is a SketchUp user and is already asking be how to get her stuff
> into MoI so she can detail it.

Unfortunately SketchUp to MoI is a difficult direction to go, since SketchUp is Polygon based, and MoI doesn't work on polygons, only NURBS.

You can go the other way because MoI has a method to dice up NURBS surfaces into polygons.

But going polygons to NURBS is a problem. It's kind of like trying to go from applesauce back to apples...


> The way you have MoI designed I may never have to touch the keyboard
> during the modeling process, and as a Wacom user that is a huge improvement
> on other apps.

Great, I'm glad you like it! Yes, the ability to model without touching the keyboard is a pretty unique feature of MoI. It was difficult to get it set up, it meant I had to throw out a bunch of typical conventions, especially for stuff with modifier keys like holding down shift, etc...

But not having to touch the keyboard opens up some nice possibilities - you can have different postures, like leaning back in your chair, or also use different devices such as a TabletPC.


> I am also reading up on Rhino tutorials to getter a better feel for the nurbs
> modeling workflow. It seems a lot of it will carry over well to MoI.

Yes, definitely a lot will carry over. Some of the specific details will be different, but the overall strategies will carry over well.

If you have other questions, please post them here.

- Michael

Hello Michael, Hello all friends of MOI,

since two weeks i play around with MOI, MOI is very great !!!! the best software of accurate 3d-drafting i have ever seen!!
until now i have made only a few sketches. Import from Sketchup via Amapi 3D 6.1 iges works. But only edges were import, no faces.

I LOVE MOI !!!!!!!!

Cheers!

Hi Trudel - thanks, I'm glad you like MoI!

> Import from Sketchup via Amapi 3D 6.1 iges works. But only edges were import, no faces.

IGES is mostly designed to hold NURBS surface data, not polygon data. So when you try to export polygon data to an IGES file, Amapi decides to put the edge curves of the polygons into the IGES file so that there will be something in there instead of nothing...

It is difficult to try to bring the Sketchup data straight into MoI because Sketchup works on polygon data, and MoI works only on smooth surface data. So the basic type of geometry that each program works on is sort of different.

MoI is able to export smooth surfaces to a polygon format by dicing the smooth surface up into facets. But it is difficult to go the other way - from facets to smooth data, that is sort of like trying to go from applesauce back into apples again...

- Michael

> Unfortunately SketchUp to MoI is a difficult direction to go, since SketchUp is Polygon based, and MoI doesn't work on polygons, only NURBS.

For some reason after trying out SketchUp a while back it felt like a nurbs system. The workflow of being able to draw on surfaces and push/pull them with nice smooth curves felt foreign to a poly/subd modeler like myself, so I assumed nurbs where utilized underneath the hood. Of course my point of introducing my fiancee to MoI is to wean her off of SketchUp, because she wants to create more detailed work. Her concept art for environments, buildings, and objects are very often organic and flowing, which once she attempts to create them in SketchUp end up with a boxy, unfinished feel that leaves her unsatisfied. I think MoI would be a great next step for her.

Also, I think people are getting the idea that I want to convert poly objects to nurbs objects, but I am not actually interested in that workflow. For example, I have a Mudbox sculpted character that is almost complete and I would like to create armor for him using nurbs, because as far as I can tell I could get extreme detail without resorting to displacement maps (the Brazil renderer does not utilize displacement maps). So if I could just import it as an .obj or .3ds to use as reference it would be great, no need to convert it to a solid first.

I guess I get this workflow from my poly/subd experience and studying Blur Studios' Brazil renderer workflow. For example, create a hi-res sculpted creature/humanoid mesh in something like ZBrush or Mudbox, then bring it into 3ds Max as reference and retopoligize it using a tool like PolyBoost to create a much more efficient medium-res, animation friendly, subd mesh. Now if I could drop that mesh in MoI and use it as reference to build any hard surface parts, say a robotic arm, hi-tech armor, or weapons, I think that would be great because as far as I can tell Max's nurbs tools are lacking in comparison and trying to create hard surface objects in subd or Mudbox is hell for me.

> But not having to touch the keyboard opens up some nice possibilities - you can have different postures, like leaning back in your chair, or also use different devices such as a TabletPC.

It's funny that you mention this because last night while modeling a sci-fi techy looking door I caught myself leaning back with my right arm behind my head! It was a shock, because as a left-handed Wacom user I'm usually hunched over my desk, left hand on the stylus, right hand hovering back and forth over the keyboard and mouse, shoulder and wrist sore... and if it is a hard surface model using subd modeling... stressed out.