great requests for the surface continuity features. One thing to add:

MoI is in a class "all by itself".....

There is nothing else like it. Nothing.

A quick view of the history update in MoI, as seen in one of the Catia Video's:

to BurrMan
"great requests for the surface continuity features. One thing to add:

MoI is in a class "all by itself".....

There is nothing else like it. Nothing."

What do you say you say about this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dkq9Q8gwLA&list=UUTvlWV6F8hA_mHSAfmxcuPA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4h9DJ3q6oA&list=UUTvlWV6F8hA_mHSAfmxcuPA&index=30


here on the Forum no fanatics, here are people who contribute constructively solve the problems with the tool, and are not satisfied with the battles and holivars. Do you have concrete suggestions for optimization? Michael me constructively and understood but explained what can and cannot be done, and your comment about anything.
I too like Moi, otherwise I would have here on the Forum did not write

Hi guys, please let's not let things get out of hand with "flame wars" and such.

The main thing that Burr's talking about with "nothing else like MoI" is not about just some set of features or list of capabilities but more the overall focus on ease of use and fast fluid operation.


> What do you say you say about this:

It's got a lot of capabilities. But the big difference would be - try to sit a person who has never done CAD before down in front of that software and down in front of MoI and then see which one the person can actually figure out how to use! :)

That's the big difference with MoI - there is a huge focus in MoI on making the tools flow well and have the UI stay out of your way - it's the kind of thing that involves lots and lots of little details in the UI and so it does not show up so well on some itemized list of features. This is the area where yes it is not any exaggeration to say that there is nothing else like MoI.

The examples that you have been showing have screens totally full of tons of buttons and require a lot of effort to learn. It can be difficult to really appreciate how arcane and difficult to use many of the things you are showing are for a first time CAD user to try and figure out.

This ease of use factor is not something that you can understand from looking at a demo video that shows an expert demo jock who has spent years refining their skills with the software... It's similar to watching a video of an expert artist pick up a pencil and draw a great illustration. What you're seeing is more the result of the artist's hard won skill and not something really built into the pencil very much.

- Michael

Hi Dmitriy,

> How do you like this idea: you leave it as is, but do the continuity and other tools, and sell
> more-and this one product. But for those who want more features you add more features to
> the zebra crossing to analyze the surface curvature, but bet the price is more expensive-
> and this is the second product, a class above. Thus you will cover all the needs of users.

It's a great plan! But before getting too excited about it, please do not forget that I'm only just one person working on MoI and that puts quite a bit of limits on what I can actually get done.

I think in the future it might happen that there would be some kind of "basic" and "pro" version, but it's probably quite a ways off. It would only be very easy to do that once I could sort of peel off the basic version and call it done forever and not really worry about developing it much more - that's because trying to maintain multiple streams of active development across multiple versions adds complexity to the development process itself.

Right now there are still a lot of things that I want to improve even at the "basic" level, and so this kind of separation into 2 versions is quite a ways off I think.


> Your product will benefit not only budding artists, but also professionals in industrial design.

Actually I've found that there is a strong class of professional users who appreciate the fluidity and speed that MoI gives you in drawing basic shapes.

I think it's a big misconception that professional designers are always 100% involved with making organic high continuity swoopy shapes all day every day - sometimes it's nice to just be able to draw things very quickly even if the results do not have perfect continuity. MoI is useful in such a capacity right now. There are plenty of people who use it just for 2D curve drawing for example...

Anyway that's the main reason why MoI's user base does already include a wide variety of professional users in addition to beginning artists already.

But certainly some more features involving continuity would be welcomed by a lot of different people, that's why I've been working on that area and it is definitely an area that I want to improve. But continuity can be a finicky area in general - often times just having continuity does not automatically mean things look nice if the curvature is bunched up in a small area and not distributed very evenly.

- Michael

I was forced to work in CATIA, before that made models of the Moi, so I will say that the MoI is similar to the module in the CATIA which is called Freestile , it is designed for industrial design, and in the Moi and Freestile convenient to work with the Moi and in Freestile few buttons. Here we have a picture of the number of all the buttons of this module Freestile note here the key is not only modeling , and analysis, so the buttons for modeling, still smaller than in the picture:

Hi Dmitriy,

> Here we have a picture of the number of all the buttons of this module Freestile note here
> the key is not only modeling , and analysis, so the buttons for modeling, still smaller than
> in the picture:

That's a good example of a UI that's really quite difficult for a beginner to get started with - just lots of pretty small icons everywhere, no text no labels no labeled categorziation...

Just icons themselves do not convey enough information for a beginning user to really have much idea what they do - when a beginning user browses over that screenshot that you just posted, they don't think "oh that's the function I need", it's more like they're looking at a bunch of indecipherable Egyptian hieroglyphics and they don't have a translation for it... ;)

That UI can work ok for a trained user who will invest many hours of studying and taking classes in order to learn how things work but it's quite baffling for other kinds of users who do not have a whole lot of time (and $$) to invest to go to training.

The level of confusion that a UI like that presents to beginners can be quite hard for an expert CAD user to relate to very well.

- Michael

MoI from CATIA_Freestile distinguishes the addition of a small number of functions for convenience and simplicity they both are equal, it is easier than Solidworks and other CAD.

You are a thinking man, take a look, compare for yourself... I will no longer post on this topic , I am glad that you yourself are working on some of the issues, I hope that I and my colleagues and friends in the near time will be able to get moi with shelves and start to use for work. And really hard to use this Alias.
Thank you all.

And just to put things in a bit more perspective - MoI is really focused much more on the basic concept of constructing models from 2D drawn curves and using booleans to cut pieces with another, that's the most fundamental area where NURBS modeling is particularly strong in.

Things that involve curvature continuity tend to be more in the realm of organic shape modeling - NURBS modeling becomes a lot more difficult in that area and often times those kinds of models are really better done in a polygon modeling package rather than any kind of CAD program at all.

The stuff that you're talking about is all much more in that realm of semi-organic type modeling - the initial main focus of MoI is not really strongly in that area, like I mentioned it's much more in the overall concept of using 2D illustration techniques to construct 3D objects. This works great for a wide variety of mechanical like shapes. For more organic swoopy shapes I mostly assume that most people are going to create that in a poly modeling package instead of in CAD at all, that's basically why there is not really all that much focus on continuity controls in the earlier stages of MoI's existence.

Some people seem to think that "concept modeling" is only about making swoopy organic melted looking things, but I think that's a very narrow view - really anything that allows you to do stuff quickly and easily can help to express "concepts" as well - just getting an idea from your head into a model is part of that, it's not like it's not allowed to be a "concept" if it doesn't have perfect looking Zebra reflection lines.

Hopefully this may explain a bit more about the overall design strategy of MoI, particularly as to why I've focused early on more on 2D construction techniques instead of areas that require more in depth comprehensive knowledge of NURBS modeling in order to be effective with them.

Like for example what you were asking about in your original post about keeping a projection as the same degree curve as the surface that it's on - that require a whole lot of very specific and advanced knowledge for someone to really even know what that means - that's very much against the overall direction of MoI. MoI is trying to bring some of the strongest areas of NURBS modeling (2D construction techniques and booleans basically) to be useful to people without requiring them to have an advanced math or engineering degree to understand how to do everything.

As time goes on I am trying to fill in more and more feature areas for the sort of traditional "Industrial design" swoopy concept model stuff, but I am approaching it carefully because I don't want MoI to become some kind of cryptic high learning curve and unapproachable software as is typically the case for such things.

- Michael

PS. I have not spoken about the icons and interface, but the number of teams that their little space. the Moi interface is that it is necessary, it should remain that way. I spoke about the features of the tools: tools moi similar to each other on the tools Freestile , only function is a little lacking.
i am sorry, it's all, I will not bother

Sorry DDP but MoI interface = 30 icons with words to get ya started plus self explanatory texts on tabs to delve deeper into the toolset where a similar layout of clearly labeled buttons await with icons. The screen you show there is over 50 icons with no visible clue of where to start. As Michael has said, the idea behind MoI3d is speed, ease of use, less clutter, logical fluid modelling sequences that just flow from one function to the next.

I came from a long and arduous root ... My history was Pen & Paper - AutoCAD - 3DS Max - Rhino & VRay - MoI3D - Cheetah and Shade, over the years I have spent thousands of pounds looking for software that functions in my little niche as a garden designer for the disabled and for wildlife, I thought I had met that with Rhino 3, but then better plugins meant i need to go to version 4 and that move introduced me yet again to whole heap load of bloated menues and hidden functions that were a nightmare to remember and still cost me hundreds of pounds to update and upgrade to just give me a financial loss and a major headache.

I have just spent money again on Shade and on Cheetah purely for render engines in OSX but they are sadly lacking from what i have grown used to. Trust me when I say this, I took to MoI like a duck to water, and it was so refreshing to be able to just sit and model things without having to rummage through a 1000+ page book to find a tool i needed, there really is nothing like MoI .... I can design my 2D curves for garden design work quicker then i could in any other package purely because of the power of MoI and its intuitive workflow that just works.

You are used to your CATIA and you are missing some of the functions that it possess, but please remember that MoI is a "designers" tool, it's there for those moments where you need to get something down quick before you loose that thought, Catia is a project development tool where things can go at a sedately rate where parts are manufactured to strict tolerances with lists of materials etc costs et al .... MoI and Catia are as different as a citroen 2CV and a Mclaren M1, they will both get you from point A to point B, but one will do so quicker than the other. MoI has the speed and ease like the Mclaren, but does it with the features and the cost comparison of the 2CV, purely because it's not Bloatware.

MoI is fast and fun and easy to work with, if that ever changes, then me and my cash will go elsewhere as soon as something else comes along that can replace MoI, and I for one hope that I reach retirement age before that happens.

Enjoy your MoI and your CATIA, it's nice to have input that offers potential insights to the future path of MoI, but accept that they are both tools designed to suit a particular audience ... You dont need to spend 20,000 on software to design a thimble when there is MoI3D available for almost 1/70 the cost and can probably model it far quicker and easier. Now if i was designing the latest 300 foot yacht that has people queuing to purchase at over a million pounds per sale, then I dare say I would then plumb for CATIA, but until that happens i am staying put :)

Martin Spencer-Ford

Hi Dmitriy, I'm sorry if what I've wrote above has discouraged you, I was hoping to explain some of the reasons why some kinds of NURBS features like continuity controls have not been a focus for the earlier stages of MoI. The primary focus has been more on being able to build things quickly from 2D curves basically. It's more like "build a shape with some curvy elements (like some revolves and sweeps and such but not 100% completely composed of them) really quickly".

Probably this main initial goal does not really coincide with what you need to do, that's probably what makes MoI not quite suitable for you without some of these particular features.

I do definitely agree with you that more continuity controls would be helpful and it is indeed something that I am working on. I'm not entirely sure if it will get to the level that you need or not, there is a certain point of difficult to use functionality that just does not fit in with MoI's overall philosophy and direction.

- Michael

Not quite sure what i said that was so bad or sounded like some type of "Attack"... It wasnt my intention.

Oh wait.... A potential customer just called and wanted to see something. I'll have to put my MoI on my 25 megabyte USB stick and go to his office and get the job! He'll be blown away when i model it at his desk, right in front of him at his office, in about 7.5 minutes!

Anyway...

There definetly should be a Like-button here... :-)