Hi Jesse,

thanks for the reply, I can see that with ever more complicated designs that doing multiple booleans is inevitable. I only get a small amount of tome to spend learning all this , I do get sidetracked by having to earn a living!! But I am getting there. Using MOI has finally made me understand Rhino, I have played around with other software but I have waited for Rhino4 to come out before buying, I will still buy a copy of MOI when it comes out ,it is developing so fast, and Michael is so responsive to requests!! Congratulations Michael!!

I am using Modela Player for generating toolpaths, and I have bought a Fourth Axis attachment for my MDX-20 so I am learning to use their FARM program, ( which lies to the computer and says it is an MDX-40 plus a bit more). Up to now I have mostly been doing reverse engineering for my hand wax carving. I have tried Artcam pro, I went on a short course and i did like it but I can't justify the cost.

I said that about 0,0,0 because I found that if you build a ring around it you keep using it as a main reference point and in the end it gets buried under lots of geometry, if MOI had layers it would not be a problem , it was just a thought

regards Tim.

<< I said that about 0,0,0 because I found that if you build a ring around it you keep using it as a main reference point and in the end it gets buried under lots of geometry, if MOI had layers it would not be a problem , it was just a thought>>

As a work-around until there are layers, you could try saving your model in stages, and only importing
the parts that you need as a reference to build the next stage.

As in the tutorial I did of the signet ring, I've sometimes drawn squares off the grid, in the lower
right corner of the front viewport to use as "job boxes" to hold the various stages of a model.

That way, you have a copy of everything, so if you wanted to delete the stuff at the origin and just
work on one thing at a time, you could. It's not that hard to select a box of parts and copy it from the center of the box to the origin,
but I'll admit it takes some extra modeling discipline to actually do it. :-)

(The boxes would work for most rings and jewelry in general, however, with more complex scenes,
it might be difficult for the display to shade all the parts if you had a lot of boxes).

Another thing you can do to make it easier to work on a particular area, is to select the parts you need to look
at and then do an <invert> and <hide>, which temporarily hides the parts which are visually blocking you from doing your work.

Did someone come up with a shortcut key that does invert-hide as one task?

-Jesse

Maybe this can help you :)

H ----> hide invert selection
I ----> Invert selection
Space----> object visible : Select all / Deselect all
(if letters are not used for other shortcut else just change the letters)
And at last you can use the icon "Hide" when you are lost :)

you can add folowing (3 lines)
in the .....\Application Data\Moi\moi.ini in section
[Shortcut Keys]
H=script:moi.geometryDatabase.invertSelection(); moi.geometryDatabase.hide(); moi.geometryDatabase.selectAll();
I=script:moi.geometryDatabase.invertSelection();
Space=script:var selection = moi.geometryDatabase.getSelectedObjects(); if ( selection.length == 0 ) moi.geometryDatabase.selectAll(); else moi.geometryDatabase.deselectAll();

Have fun combinatory selections :)
Very powerful before some system of manage objets :)

Re: the clock alarm video, am I missing something? I wait and wait no video. Just a bar going across the bottom. I have no problem playing other movies.

It works fine, just seems you have not the codec !
And yes you must wait the complet loading!
but sorry I don't remember the codec name :(
I will try to refind it !

Yeah ! it is this one !!!
http://www.3ivx.com/
Have fun learning!

Thanks!

-jdk