Hi Jay - thanks I'm glad that you like MoI!

MoI is not 100% Qt based, it uses Qt mostly just for hosting WebKit for the UI, there is still a lot of Win32 code in MoI for a lot of various things. So it's not simply a matter of just a recompile which it sounds like you were thinking of.

MoI v3 will run on Linux under Wine though, as long as you have a good enough video driver. But that's the big problem currently with Linux - it's very common for systems to have unstable and generally poor quality video drivers when it comes to 3D accelerated functions. MoI depends on good quality video drivers in order to be able to work at all, so that's a significant problem.

If I were to try to seriously target Linux it would probably require a huge constant effort of testing a whole lot of different video cards and different video drivers and continuously giving out advice for which drivers people should use with which particular video cards. There would be a significant amount of support work involved in that. And really it's not all that frequently requested.

So with a general cost/benefit analysis, it's something like "lots of cost involved, high support burden, small benefit gained". I'm only a single person doing all the work for MoI so it is vitally important for me to work in a completely opposite manner to that - I need to try to generate high value for a smaller amount of effort, not spend enormous effort to deliver smaller value. So that makes it unlikely to be a target anytime too soon.

If you do have a good enough video driver it will be possible to run MoI v3 using Wine already though, so there is actually a way you can run it without any separate huge porting undertaking happening.

Sorry for the bad news,
- Michael

Hi Jay, I know where you are coming from with trying to escape from the Windows environment, and I have tried Linux several times in the past, but lack of decent modelling software that supports NURBS kept driving me back to Windows and all the problems associated with it. Wine will run and is supported in Ubuntu and as Michael says, MoI3d will run happily within that environment.

NVidia also support Ubuntu Linux with official drivers, but that does mean that you will only get support for the graphics cards that NVidia have decided are still worth supporting, I don't know what their policy is for the support lifespan of a product, but as long as you have a recent graphics card you should be good for several years and will probably be supported with updates longer than what it will take to outgrow the cards performance.

ATI Cards are sadly a different kettle of fish with very few cards being fully supported under Linux of any flavour.

If you are fully Intel based, the alternative route is the one that I have taken (for now) and am still testing. But check your motherboard support for OSX and you can possibly make a Hackintosh. I do not endorse this method unless you know your hardware really well and it's a task not for the faint of heart, but it is do able, and you then get true native support on the Mac platform. You are then left with the dilema of getting a good render engine, which the OSX platform has but a few. This then applies even more so to Linux.

My experience with Linux render engines of any decent quality, all seem to want be either scripted through the command line interface, a slow and painfully tedious task, or that they piggy back on Blender as a plugin. Once you are into that situation, you are then at the mercy of Blender and how it strips the mapping and voxels (please correct me if i am wrong) from imported models forcing you to do all the editing and topology changes yourself in order to get good quality renders, which then means a huge learning curve if you have not used Blender in the past.

However Cinema 4D and Keyshot are available on the OSX platform. As are some others, I was looking at Shade13 and decided to purchase a basic licence but goofed up on their ordering system and now have a windows key which I am waiting to see what they will do about, as of yet (3 days) they have not replied with any intended actions. At least you wont get that level of ignorance here with MoI no matter what platform you decide upon.

Hope this helps you come to a decision.

Martin Spencer-Ford

Hi Jay


Have spent the last 25 years working has a system engineer/admin, currently managing 200+ servers (windows,linux,netware) and 600 deskstops in my real job, got sick of the having to manage a windows platform at home, have tried Linux many times over the years, starting with slackware 0.9 (I think). last year when the kids PC died, I gave them my PC and decided to try a mac, brought the cheapest mac mini I could get, upgrading it to 8GB ram, (third party ram) , just love it, MoI runs great on it and for me the other main interest is photography , and I used DxO Pro Optic, for processing my raws, and DxO provide both a windows and Mac license. The only time I fire up a windows box, is when I want to run Zsurf, even then I fire up a VirtualBox virtual windows XP on the Mac.

My $800.00 dual core i5 , 8GB ram, Mac Mini processes 14Mbit raw images in around 15sec, my work laptop, top of the line HP, $3500 quad core i7 with 8GB ram windows 7 64bit does it in 12 secs, using the same version of DxO. I find that I can push OSX much harder for longer then Windows 7 it just seems to handle RAM/swap a lot better than windows. the only complaint was when an Apple update broke X11 , but Michael had a fix for MoI real quick :)
Also run Simlab Composer (uses keyshot render engine), ViaCad, netfabb, meshlab, vuescan all native OSX apps.


Cheers, Steve