Hi, I've been working on a complex car body composed mainly of compound curves. MoI has proved much better at doing this than other applications I have tried (Modo, LightWave, C4D) but I have run into a problem which is of my own making:

Somewhere along the line I have cut and paste an object while zoomed in and not realised that most of the car body was also selected. This is a big problem because I am not just talking about the outer surfaces here. All the framework around the doors, grills and so on was duplicated too. It isn't difficult to see where this has happened because selecting a panel that has two instances creates a weird visual effect and the second panel can be removed but it's a long process and could take hours to complete. I tried selecting the whole thing but just end up deleting everything!

So - has anyone written a script to help with this kind of thing? I know that when I export the model to Modo for rendering I can merge overlapping geometry (lines, vertices) but it would be better to sort it out in MoI. There is still a lot of work to do and the model is already around 125Mb (MoI v2 is working very well by the way with this on a dual core 32bit machine).

I guess that while I am here I should say that, as much as I love MoI, I do have a love hate relationship with the object selection strategy it employs. I understand why being able to click on multiple objects and have them all stay selected is good for when you are working with a pen and tablet and there are times when I wish I had the option in Modo to do the same. However, the convention on Windows machines (don't know about Macs) is to hold down shift first and then click to select multiple objects. If I consider the time I spend working with MoI, I realise that a great deal of it is spent going back and undoing actions because an unintended object remained selected somewhere. Perhaps I am just being clumsy or careless but, for me, a great enhancement would be to have the option in preferences of switching over to the conventional method of multiple selection - using the shift key.

The other thing I am missing is the ability to limit selection to certain kinds of object: surfaces or edges. That might be in there somewhere and I just haven't found it yet but I would love to be able to hold down a hot-key (say... e for edges or s for surfaces) whilst clicking to restrict selection to a particular object type. Just a thought.

I want to end by qualifying all of the above. MoI is brilliant and now my application of choice for modelling. It has enbled me to put onto paper ideas I have have in my head for 30 years but struggled to realise with other applications going as far back as Carrara v1 for PC. That may just be a reflection of my limited abilities :-) but that fact that I can now do these things is fantastic.

Mark

Hi Mark, there isn't any built in way to detect duplicate surfaces and unfortunately it's not something that's really feasible for a script to do on its own since it would involve some low level access to the surfaces which is not currently exposed to script.

So the main method to do it will be to select a surface, delete it and see if there is another one underneath it. If there is then you just removed a duplicate. If not then do an undo and you can then hide that surface which you know is a single one to get it out of the way.

Of course it is by far better to not make such duplicates in the first place and also another thing that can help is to not keep your entire model as a bunch of individual surfaces for too long, try to join pieces together where they touch so that you have larger structures, those will be generally easier to manage in things like this. You can break things down into individual surfaces for some time while doing some particular kinds of work but then rejoin them before going onto the next stage of work.


> The other thing I am missing is the ability to limit selection to certain kinds
> of object: surfaces or edges.

There is a new filter mechanism in v3 which can do this - hold down Ctrl and click on the selection dot area of any scene browser item (it's on the far right side of the item) and a filter icon will appear there - while that filter is active it will limit any new selections to only that category of things (note already existing selections are not modified, so you may need to clear the selection before that which is a MoI working habit that it sounds like you have not gotten used to yet). You can find categories for edges or surfaces under the "Types" section of the scene browser and you can also use the same thing under other sections like the style section to limit selection to only objects of a certain style as well. When you are done with the filter push Escape once to clear the current filter.

You can also set multiple filters active at the same time, so for instance setting a filter on Types > Curves as well as Styles > Red at the same time will limit new selections (either by mouse clicking or by actions like select all) to only red curves.


- Michael