Hello,

If you'd like that sort of push / pull behavior you might want to check out Spaceclaim Engineer. That said I find myself coming back to MoI as my go to application and fill in the last 10% with Rhino 5/VSR and Spaceclaim for some complex surfacing tasks or featuring. I'm guessing that over time MoI will end up taking a larger chunk of the modeling tasks as features are added.

So looking at the attached image, just for the sake of the moment of inspiration, why wouldn't I just want to create a face with the circle and just push it up when i need it to?
I understand how "nurbs" modeling works, or so I think I do, but this could be several operations combined working in the background to make it convenient for me as a user.

Also if I just want to quickly indent a shape into the flat rectangular part of the object, why do I have to go through a lengthy process of first creating a box, then putting it into position and then subtract it from the object? By the time I've done that, my inspiration is out the window. And that's exactly the advantage of SU and why it became so popular, because it's convenient. Unfortunately SU is very messy and organic modeling is a trip.

And as far as I researched the history of MOI it was intended to be a simple tool and easy to use, not so much weight on it strictly following NURBS modeling rules, or else we could of stuck with Rhino, right?

Yes space claim is a awesome tool that way, I am attending a webinar tomorrow to have a closer look, unfortunately it's way overpriced.

Michael,

yes that would help tremendously. I really like the clean look of your software, good job!

< Unfortunately SU is very messy and organic modeling is a trip.

but with the Artisan http://artisan4sketchup.com who is yet exist, you can transform Sketchup in subdivision Organic program !
(new version in end september)

It's a little funny perversion but works fine! :)

Not Zbrush but very sufficient for some many things :)

All images by Solo

Hi Solo, thanks for your reply, I actually have this tool for SU. You're samples look amazing to say the least.

Hi DesertRaven,

> So looking at the attached image, just for the sake of the moment of inspiration, why
> wouldn't I just want to create a face with the circle and just push it up when i need it
> to? I understand how "nurbs" modeling works, or so I think I do, but this could be
> several operations combined working in the background to make it convenient for
> me as a user.

That kind of editing by moving faces around is definitely something that I'd like to add in the future. Ideally it would just be integrated into the regular Transform > Move command and not need to be set up as a totally separate push/pull command though.

But unfortunately with NURBS geometry the sequence of operations that you're referring to that need to happen behind the scenes are pretty fancy, they involve doing extensions and offsets, those are not particularly strong areas of the geometry kernel that MoI uses right now, so that's one big reason why I have not attempted to do it yet, it would likely just make messed up stuff a lot of the times except in very basic situations.

So I'm sort of waiting for more support on that from the authors of the geometry kernel before being able to really undertake that style of editing.

Like you've already seen, SpaceClaim has done a lot of specialized work to focus on that type of stuff, it may be a better fit for you if that's of high importance to you.


> And as far as I researched the history of MOI it was intended to be a simple tool and
> easy to use, not so much weight on it strictly following NURBS modeling rules,

That's certainly true - but I cannot make the pretty advanced geometry operations that are required to do some of that kind of editing (where offsets and extensions are involved) just appear out of mid air.


> Also if I just want to quickly indent a shape into the flat rectangular part of the object, why do I have
> to go through a lengthy process of first creating a box, then putting it into position and then subtract
> it from the object?

Basically because that's the most elemental and basic sequence of things that actually need to happen in order to make an indentation.

I'm certainly not opposed to streamlining that area, and in fact if you need to cut a hole all the way through an object that process is already optimized since you can do a boolean with a solid and a 2D curve and internally in the boolean it handles the details of punching out the 2D curve into a solid cutting object for you.

For making just an indentation instead of an "all the way through" cut that is not similarly streamlined yet, it's a more complex case since you need to control the depth of the indentation which means more UI is required. I'm usually quite conservative about jumping into things that require more UI since adding in lots of UI all over the place is pretty much how bloat and complexity happens to software.

One of the things that's kind of held up this area a bit is trying to consider which particular approach to take, whether to try to do something closer to SketchUp which could involve modifying how all the drawing commands work by having some mode for them to embed and slice up what they are drawn on directly (pretty "heavyweight" solution involving many changes) or whether it's better handled by some additional options in a couple of key commands.

Probably for MoI it's better to be handled by some additional options in existing commands - I've thought before about having it in the Extrude command to make it so that you can do an extrude and have it automatically protrude or remove material from an existing solid right in the extrude, and also to have it within boolean difference as well to make an option for a 2D curve to have a "depth limit" to how it cuts an object rather than only cutting all the way through.

Those things have not quite bubbled up to the top of my list yet, but I may be at a pretty good point to undertake those in v3 pretty soon.


Please keep in mind that MoI is still a work in progress and I am still planning on a lot of improvements to it - it is not in a "100% finished" state right now by any means. The things that you are mentioning would definitely be improvements, but it takes work to implement all these various things and there are only 24 hours in the day you know! :)

The basic development philosophy for MoI is kind like "consider carefully before adding in things that need new UI", which is how the UI stays slim and pleasant. But one thing that goes along with that strategy is that sometimes I let things percolate for quite a while before pulling the trigger. This particular area for making it more streamlined to do indentations and protrusions has been in the percolation stage for a while.

- Michael

Hi DesertRaven,

> And as far as I researched the history of MOI it was intended to be a simple tool
> and easy to use, not so much weight on it strictly following NURBS modeling rules,
> or else we could of stuck with Rhino, right?

That's basically correct - definitely it is a focus for MoI to make NURBS modeling more accessible than it has been in the past.

But some kinds of things are not necessarily an easy fit with NURBS and may require quite a lot of fairly fancy processing in order to achieve, and editing by yanking faces around basically is one of those.

Things that require a lot of work may correspondingly not appear in MoI for a quite a while, like I wrote above there are only 24 hours in a day and I do not have any superhuman ability to make complex functions just appear instantaneously...

- Michael

Michael, you are defiantly doing a great job with this tool. Also I appreciate your response and communication with the community.

I'm sure it is lot's of work and I understand you want to think things through and keep the integrity of your software at a high standard.

I'm looking forward to future improvements and in the meanwhile am totally happy to work with what is there already. Please don't feel pressured.

Raven

Hi Raven, well I'm glad that you brought it up because an improved indentation/protrusion mechanism has kind of fallen off the radar a bit, it just hasn't been mentioned all that frequently, you can see in this "top 5 requests" thread that it's not really mentioned often:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3628.1

There's been a lot more requests there for stuff like instances, groups, and deformation tools.

That's pretty much why it hasn't percolated up in the priority list more rapidly.

But I think it will be a good time to give it some attention soon here for v3 (for Extrude combining with a solid automatically and depth limiting for booleans with curves, editing an existing face by push-pull is more complex).

Hopefully the result should be more convenient than push/pull in batch situations, for example I'd like the "depth limiting" curve cut in the booleans to make a set of 2D curves and a solid like this:






That would be for doing a boolean difference with a solid and the curves. Right now you can do the boolean with a solid and curves but it will make a cut all the way through the object, the "depth limiting" mechanism would be the new ingredient. Then maybe for a protrusion rather than a cut you could use the boolean union command with a solid and curves selected.

That's the other thing - I try really hard to combine functions into a smaller number of commands when possible since that helps avoid UI bloat. Sometimes it can take a while before figuring out the details for how to combine things though too.

- Michael

Hi Michael ... That looks interesting to me, that resulting image is more accurate to my brains interpretation of a "Solid", rather than a skin, so I will add a big yes please for that! :¬)

Martin

> And as far as I researched the history of MOI it was intended to be a simple tool and
> easy to use, not so much weight on it strictly following NURBS modeling rules,

For what it's worth, have Blender and SU and DAZ Hexagon (all currently FREE :) ) but I'm saving my coins for a MoI license, has a new user (to 3D modelling) I just find MoI to be the easiest to use for the models I'm creating, which are pretty basic and could be easily be done in Blender, SU or hexagon.

For me, MoI would be complete if I could import STL models (not try to convert them to Nurbs ) just preform basic function like move, rotate and scale, so I could place them where I want and export the lot to STL.... now I go the other way , export in OBJ from MoI into hexagon, import the stl object and export the lot back to STL.

Hello,

Each individual will have to do their own evaluation concerning what an application is worth to them. For some that absolutely need some of the specialized tools that Spaceclaim has it may be worth ten times the cost of MoI. In my experience Spaceclaim is a good conceptual modeler but is not a great organic modeler. I started with SU before they were consumed by Google, and while I appreciated the ease of use and the push/pull way of doing things it didn't take me long to run into workflow roadblocks that got me looking at MoI in a serious way. It will take a bit of rewiring of process in the brain to appreciate how to create models, but in my case the journey is worth it.

If you're worried about not being able to model faster than the idea escapes something I like to do is have a bunch of scrap paper around and keep sketches. I also think sketching programs like Artrage are great to quickly capture ideas and then import those for refinement in MoI. If you have Rhino something like TSplines or Clayoo might work well for you. For advanced surfacing I use VSR in Rhino, it saves me from dealing with Autodesk (Alias) and it fits my requirements.

I think what cannot be discounted is the great assistance and education that is provided by the creator of MoI as well as the MoI community. That kind of support and attention to the user base is quite rare in the computing world today.

------- Hopefully the result should be more convenient than push/pull in batch situations, for example I'd like the "depth limiting" curve cut in the booleans to make a set of 2D curves and a solid like this: -------





That would be a cool feature Michael..

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

The problem Michael will have with a combined extrude cut is that the complexity of the command can be high. Inventor and Solidworks do this already but there are a LOT of options to consider e.g. is the end face of the extrude flat or the same as the original surface, is the extrusion parallel, drafted or perpendicular, what do you consider the terminating surface to be, etc, etc. Effectively, you are combining a host of simple commands in to one, with a host of options.

The advantage of doing this in Inventor or Solidworks is that they are parametric, and this type of combined command only creates one feature in the history tree, making future manipulations, such as variants easier, and can be driven by variables that are common across the tree. As MoI doesn't have a parametric history tree or variables, I'm not sure what would be gained.

Hi Steve,

> As MoI doesn't have a parametric history tree or variables, I'm not sure what would be gained.

The primary thing that it would be oriented towards would be just increased modeling speed for just initial creation of some kinds of objects.

I'd be shooting for something pretty simple - possibly just if you select both a solid as well as a curve it could then boolean the result of the extrusion away from that solid.

There are already existing options for controlling whether an extrusion is parallel or drafted so I don't think anything extra would be needed for that in particular.

But yes, definitely combining things can lead to more complexity inside of a command, that's one of the tricky aspects to balance. Yet at the same time it tends to be good for the UI as a whole to have more complexity under the surface somewhat more rather than having it all sort of hammering you in the face right immediately from the very top level.

Anyway the primary goal for this for extrude would be mainly to just basically bundle doing an extrusion and boolean together optionally so that you could save some steps and just make a simple indentation or protrusion more quickly.

Then I think that it will be possible to have some of those additional options in a "limit depth" option for the booleans for another way of getting a similar result.

We'll see how it works out, I think it should be possible to get something that will make some model construction just flow along more quickly though and it's pretty hard to view that as a bad thing, right?

- Michael

The result of the push pull would in my mind depend on the geometry / face it was derived from, like a flat surface makes a perpendicular extrusion or indentation, a curved however would make a perpendicular extrusion like an outline in 2d of a curved surface. As a reference have a look at the joint push pull tool in SU.

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=6708

Raven

Hi Raven, for it to take on the characteristics of the surface it means that the surface has to be actually cut up - I don't expect to have that part included directly in the Extrude enhancement stuff that I've been talking about but it would be a part of the "limit depth" option in the booleans though. Well, maybe it's possible for extrude as well, I'll think about that some.

You can actually have Extrude work like that currently though if you cut the base surface up using Trim - you can also extrude individual surfaces, not just curves. See here for an example: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3024.4

There are 2 different ways you can thicken an individual surface like that into a solid currently - Extrude will make an object that goes out straight in one single direction, while Offset > Shell thickens an object by doing an offset operation which makes the other side follow the shape of the surface staying perpendicular to the surface at every individual piece of it (more like a "slab of even thickness everywhere" which is different than an extrusion shape).

See here for a comparison of Extrusion versus Shell and the different results that they make when thickening a surface into a solid:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4791.13

- Michael

"Cut up" or better recreated based on the curves that get outlined in an n value n= extrusion height. In other words, the curves drawn on the surface get moved and scaled away from the original surface then create a new surface in the offset distance plus add 4 (or how many describe the shape in question) new resulting surfaces around this offset surface to close the mesh back up. does this make sense? I'll try and make a graphic of the above soon.

Hi Raven, yeah a sketch graphic of what you are talking about would help me understand more clearly what you are trying to describe.

There are probably some difficulties with what you are describing there... One is that on a non-planar curve it's quite difficult to create a good surface going through it just from scratch as you seem to be describing - there is not just one immediate solution to such a surface and so usually it's more practical for something like this to actually slice up an existing surface since that is better defined.

The main thing that I would be shooting for would just be something like trying to make it easier to get the same kind of result shown here just with fewer steps involved:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3024.4

Is that basically the same kind of thing that you're talking about or are you thinking of something fairly different from that?

- Michael