Hi Oskar, yes currently MoI does not read block instances from 3DM files, so you do need to explode them in Rhino like you did in order for them to be seen in MoI.

There are also various other kinds of things that Rhino can store in 3DM files as well, like mesh objects, spotlights, annotation dots, etc... - MoI does not work directly with that stuff, it only works with regular NURBS objects from 3DM files.

In the future I want to add instance handling into MoI and then at that time I will probably get something in place to deal with block instances coming from Rhino.

- Michael

I love it (MOI)! It is very easy to use. Except for the points allocation. What ensures the surfaces do not fit (gaps).
I know now how it works in order to avoid such gaps (Always build on existing geometry).

OBJ - EXPORT
At first I thought that "Moi", divide the geometry only on export by a separate calculation, making the distribution and ignoring the points themselves.
Now i often use the function "show point" to check them ;-).
Extra: Resizing the window (bad performance) also when i open the app the window is only filled half.

Here are a few pictures

Hi blankidea, I'm glad that you are liking MoI and those are some great results!

> What ensures the surfaces do not fit (gaps).
> I know now how it works in order to avoid such gaps
> (Always build on existing geometry).

You're talking about OBJ export here too, right?

If you've created 2 surfaces that are sitting right next to one another, make sure that you use the Edit > Join command to join them together so that they share a common joined edge between them.

MoI does extra work on joined edges to make a "watertight" mesh that has the same vertex structure along the joined common edges so that there are no holes in the mesh. If you have separate surfaces that were created individually and just happen to be sitting next to one another then they get meshed separately and the vertices may be different where they touch. So make sure they are joined together to avoid that.

Note though that the meshes for each surface can have different UV Quad structures, the underlying quads for the mesh come from the UV space of each surface, see these previous posts for some more information on vertex alignment:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1536.30
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2102.45


> Extra: Resizing the window (bad performance)

Yup, this is one of the last remaining areas I have left to work on.


> also when i open the app the window is only filled half.

I think this one may be solved by some fixes that will be coming for the next beta but I'm not entirely sure. Please let me know if you run into it again when the next beta is out.

I'm not quite sure yet when the next OSX beta will be out, sometime pretty soon but I'll be out of town for a week so if I can't get it out tomorrow it won't be until sometime the week after next.

Thanks,
- Michael

Your are great :-) looking forward for the next beta! Did you plan a early bird sale (pre sale)

Thanks for your answer and your tip! I still need to learn, but its easy to get result. In fact the motivation is higher then in other 3d programs because you don't have to think in and like a quad :-). So MoI is perfect for technical stuff... and to get the shape you want faster. So in my case I use MoI to create hardware pieces and import them into cinema 4d for further modifcations.

I have a other question: I was trying different shapes and test how fast they can be merged (Union)
If I "bool" the rips of a tire piece by piece its much faster then selecting all together to "bool" them.

Or did I make something wrong?
PS: Sorry for my english

Hi blankidea,

> looking forward for the next beta! Did you plan a early
> bird sale (pre sale)

Right now I don't have any plans for that, it's just more simple to only have it for sale when the full release is all ready.


re: technical stuff - yup, that's definitely where MoI is strongest in! For stuff like organic shapes or character models those are usually better done in a poly modeler, but mechanical type shapes where a lot of the design can be driven by 2D curves and boolean operations can be really convenient and quick to do in MoI.


> I have a other question: I was trying different shapes and
> test how fast they can be merged (Union)
> If I "bool" the rips of a tire piece by piece its much faster
> then selecting all together to "bool" them.

This can sometimes happen with boolean union depending on the order of how all the objects actually end up getting processed. If it ends up trying to boolean together many of the pieces that are not actually touching each other that basically makes for a more complex multi-volume intermediate result which is more complex.

In order to try and counteract that boolean union tries to sort the objects and process the biggest one first, but I think in your case here that is getting confused because the underlying surfaces on your tread pieces is fairly large.

The "underlying surface" is the full surface that is underneath all the trim curves, trim curves mark areas of surfaces as cut away regions or holes. If your original surface that you trimmed or booleaned was fairly large then those underlying surfaces can be large too and that may be throwing off the size sorting mechanism.

You can see this "large underlying surface" if you take one of your tread objects and then use Edit > Separate on it to break it into individual surfaces and then turn on surface control points with Edit > Show pts.

You can shrink an object's underlying surfaces down to be right to the size of its trim boundaries by using the ShrinkTrimmedSrf command (either hit tab and then type in ShrinkTrimmedSrf and then press Enter or set it on a shortcut key).

So for your case here try running ShrinkTrimmedSrf on the tread objects - does that then perform better than before?

- Michael

> Right now I don't have any plans for that, it's just more simple to only have it for sale when the full release is all ready.

Too bad really ;-( but I understand you

> ShrinkTrimmedSrf
Thanks again for your tip. Works great a few second and the boolean operation was done. Even if I don't know what the operation does...
because I saw no difference on the object itself (show points was on), but again it works great. I bind the command now to a hot key.

Sorry to bother you! I have to read the manual

Hi blankidea,

> Thanks again for your tip. Works great a few second and
> the boolean operation was done. Even if I don't know
> what the operation does...

Check out here for some more general information on how "underlying surfaces" work with NURBS objects:

http://moi3d.com/faq#Q:_Why_does_show_points_work_for_some_objects_but_not_others.3F


But it might be better if boolean union used some different method to get the bounding box rather than one that included the full underlying surface size - the reason why it uses that one right now is because it's very quick to get it.

- Michael

Hi Michael Gibson,
By the way I forgot to tell you that CMD+V does not work on the input fields.
I use the script to get the "length of a curve" and try to paste the value into the input field.
Only the right mouse button work, but you also loose the size because you change it when you come back with the mouse
into the drawing viewport.

Also I install a script called (redefine Curve) which I have to install directly into the application (by right click on the app icon "show content").
Normally you use the Library folder for the user but this one is not working.

Thanks for your overwhelming support :-)

Hi blankidea,

> By the way I forgot to tell you that CMD+V does not work on
> the input fields.

For the moment use the Ctrl key instead with Ctrl+V and it should work, but that is something that I will fix up for the next beta to make Cmd+V work for text pasting like you were expecting.


> Also I install a script called (redefine Curve) which I have to install
> directly into the application (by right click on the app icon "show content").
> Normally you use the Library folder for the user but this one is not working.

This part probably won't change for the 2.5 release - it's the same with the Windows version where you install scripts into the application's commands sub-folder and not into a centralized location like the Library folder. I do want to improve this in the future to work like that but I do not expect for that to make it into the 2.5 release though.

So to install a plug-in command into OSX MoI now you will need to right-click on the app icon and then pick "Show package contents", then go to drive_c/moi/commands - that's the place where you will need to copy plug-in command to in order for MoI to recognize them.

In the future I want to overhaul the whole plug-in installation process so that there will be some kind of UI that handles it for you and you won't need to drill into specific folders but that's how it works currently.

Thanks for the additional bug reports!

- Michael

Hi Michael,

first of all a BIG THANK YOU for providing this OSX-Beta! Unfortunately I was kept very busy the last 2 months preventing me to test drive and give comments earlier... but finally...
It runs quite well even on my old MacBook with the problematic GMA X3100 graphics chip. A bit slow for more complex projects, but this is really more than I thought with this "old 2D-card".
Apart from the already mentioned slow resizing and incomplete filling on initial application's opening (see screenshot) I only found one additional thing: the icons for the new deform tools don't show up. But taking a closer look I guess you just haven't cooked them up yet... :)

I really enjoy playing with MOI and look forward to running the final release on some newer Mac hardware....

Again thanks for this great program!
Chyman

Hi Chyman, thanks for testing it!


> It runs quite well even on my old MacBook with the
> problematic GMA X3100 graphics chip.

That's great news! But yes this card just does not fundamentally have the same amount of GPU horsepower as nVidia or ATI cards, so you may only be able to get to a medium level of complexity with it. But you should actually be able to get quite a lot of projects done with it, especially if you only deal with different parts of the project at a time instead of everything all in one single big model.

Also if things start to bog down on a more detailed model, try adjusting the "Mesh angle" settings under Options > View as described here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4643.2

Setting the "Mesh angle" to a rougher angle like 25 degrees and unchecking "Add detail to inflections" will make for a somewhat rougher looking display but also lighten up the density of the display meshes and that can help boost display performance by quite a bit.


> Apart from the already mentioned slow resizing

Yeah this is one of the last areas that I have remaining to work on before releasing a new beta.


> and incomplete filling on initial application's opening (see screenshot)

This one I hope will be solved by some updates and bug fixes to the Wineskin system that will also be included in the next beta, but I'm not entirely sure. Please let me know if you see it again with the next beta when it is out.


> I only found one additional thing: the icons for the new deform
> tools don't show up.

Yup, that's normal for the time being - those tools are new for v3 and still need a bit of attention to be finished up. Finishing that area will probably be the last step before rolling out a final 2.5 OSX version, it won't be quite finished still for the next beta.

But I'm glad that MoI OSX is able to run on those Intel graphics cards now, I wasn't sure at first if that was going to be possible. But also someone else has tested it on the oldest GMA 950 and it works there too now, so MoI OSX should work on all Intel Macs I think, including the very first ones.

Thanks,
- Michael

Thank you for your comments and the "Mesh angle" hint (that is a good performance parameter).
Indeed your OSX support turned out quite complete after all, well done!

Hope I can come up with some nice output soon...
Chyman

I have "MoI v3.2 trial.app" in my Applications folder. When I run MOI I get
"ERROR! cannot write to info.plist, there are permission problems, or you are on a read-only volume.
This cannot run from within a read-only dmg file."
What do I need to do?
Is there a search function for this forum?

I have found the search feature.
I have found previous posts that describe my exact error message. However, they suggest a fix I have already done. So, I still need help. Is there a trial of version 4?

Hi statfi,

re:
> "ERROR! cannot write to info.plist, there are permission problems, or you are on a read-only volume.

This is due to a new security mechanism in recent Mac OS versions that forces app bundles to be read only if they have the "quarantine" flag set on them which they will if they have been downloaded. This interferes with MoI v3's operation, resulting in this particular error message. Usually this happens if you try to run it directly from the Downloads folder and goes away if you move the app over into the /Applications folder. But it's a fairly brittle mechanism, the operating system will only clear the flag if you move it using drag/drop in Finder, not if you move it by some other means like by command line. Is it possible that applies to how you moved it?

The security mechanism is called Gatekeeper path randomization and there is some more information on it here:
https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2016/06/29/sierra-and-gatekeeper-path-randomization/

Another way you can probably solve it is by manually removing the quarantine extended attribute from the app, like this:
https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/clearing-the-quarantine-extended-attribute-from-downloaded-applications/

This won't happen anymore in v4, the Mac version for MoI v4 has been significantly rewritten and restructured so it no longer needs to modify the app bundle's info.plist file and isn't troubled by being read only. Currently v4 is in beta release available to existing v3 users. There won't be a trial version of it until it's finished and the final release is available. I'm not exactly sure when that will be yet, maybe something like Fall this year.

- Michael