New Apr-26-2007 beta now available from the download page: http://moi3d.com/download.htm

Changes:

New Text command under Draw solid / Text allows for creating text geometry from TrueType fonts.

New Helix command under Draw curve / More / Helix. This allows you to draw a coiled-spring type curve.

Updated Hide command to allow for showing only a subset of the hidden objects. The way this works is when you go to show objects, instead of just showing everything it will display all the hidden objects on the screen and allow you to select some. When you push "Done" (or right-click), only those selected objects will be shown and the rest will remain hidden. If you push "Done" or right-click without selecting anything, then everything will be shown just as in the old version. This should help out when working with more complex scenes.

Added new Angle field to advanced settings in the mesh export dialog. Normally the slider sets the angle, but now you can also enter an exact angle if you want which also allows for values outside of the slider range. For example, the roughest value for the slider is 35 degrees, but if you want a very rough low-poly mesh you can now enter an angle of something like 90 degrees.

Updated mesh export so that open objects that are simple surfaces of revolution will have their normals oriented outward from the revolve axis.

Fixed a bug with filleting curve corners where the fillet would fail on closed curves made up of only 2 segments.

Have fun!

- Michael

What a productivity :)
French version in few time :)

French Version of the 26 April 2007
Unzip and replace FrenchStrings.txt in the folder ...Program Files\MoI beta Apr-26-2007\ui

Now you don't have to draw your fonts by hand anymore!

Also, the endless varieties of "how to construct a helix" are no longer necessary... ;)

- Michael

Great new additions! I have been using Text and Spiral/Helix shapes lately so these new tools will be a big time saver.

The Hide command works great.
Thanks

Hi Michael, thanks for the new beta,
here the first report:

Letters " a s w z " cannot correct projects are and offset,shell command doesn't work
Scripts : scalearray, fullscreen, do not function

best regards EDE

Hello Michael,

Thanks for these great new features! Alltough I was also kind of hoping for support for the 3dconnexion navigation devices [I am known for my impatience, but I am working on it :) ]. Two beta's in such a short time, do you never find time to sleep ..................?
Thanks again.

Regards Hans

Does it possible to have something who reset the Horizontal default of the 3D view after using the "arrow key" rotation's Script?
The right Click on the Button "Reset" don't make that! :(

Another thing: something for create a text along a path :)
Now that works for one letter or a text (array along a curve) but not for "each letter" of the text:)

Something like that : here along a simple circle :) (Or Maybe I did'nt think enough about a trick existing yet in Moi)

Hi Michael,

1/ Note, that after finishing new Hide prompt, the prompt's header gray line remains quite a bit fat contrary to common convention... hehe



2/ Is there any way of simulating a Done button from within script in order that I can run HideSwap command without intervention, i.e. right click or click on Done button?

HideSwap: Hides all visible objects and shows all previously hidden objects.

{key}=script:var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; gd.deselectAll(); gd.hide(); gd.invertSelection(); gd.hide();

3/ Add new Mesh option: Could you explain a little more a mathematical meaning of angle option?

Petr

ps: Scripts like FullScreen, ScaleArray, etc. work fine here...

Ho another beta. :)

I attached the updated german translation.

MfG
sk2k

Good lord Michael...let me catch up will you ;)

Great work as usual! Looking forward to getting my hands dirty with this one.

Hi Eddi, thanks very much for the bug report!

> Letters " a s w z " cannot correct projects are and offset,shell command doesn't work

I've fixed this one for the next beta, it was due to those letters having some small deviations in some of their tangent directions which those commands are fairly sensitive about.

There is also a workaround that you can use for the current beta - if you use Edit/Separate on those curves, and then use Edit/Join to re-join them, the resulting curves will then project properly.


> Scripts : scalearray, fullscreen, do not function

For this one, I think you probably need to copy some files over to your new installation. For scalearray, copy the "ScaleArray.js" and "ScaleArray.htm" files from the previous beta's \commands folder into the new beta's \commands folder.

Also you've probably got FullScreen.js in the old beta's \scripts folder, make a new \scripts folder under the new beta and copy that file over.

After that then those scripts should work.

Your keyboard shortcuts automatically come over for each new beta because all the betas use one common moi.ini file. But those separate script files need to be moved over.

Let me know if that doesn't solve your problem for ScaleArray and FullScreen.

- Michael

Just awesome!

> Alltough I was also kind of hoping for support for the 3dconnexion navigation
> devices [I am known for my impatience, but I am working on it :) ].

It won't be much longer, they are having a seminar on how their SDK works on next Thursday, so I will probably watch that and start working on it then.

- Michael

Hi Pilou!

> Does it possible to have something who reset the Horizontal default of the 3D
> view after using the "arrow key" rotation's Script?
> The right Click on the Button "Reset" don't make that! :(

There is a trick that you can use for this - select all your objects and hide them. Then press the "Reset" button when everything is hidden.

Normally reset will fit to the selected objects, or all objects on a second click, but if there are no objects visible it will reset to the original default.

Right click on the reset button does a reset for all viewports, same as pushing the reset button on every view.


> Another thing: something for create a text along a path :)

That's definitely something that I want to do in the future, but it won't be ready for V1.

But once Adobe Illustrator file format support is working, you should be able to use a 2d illustration program to do that type of text and then bring those curves into MoI.

- Michael

Hi Petr,

> 1/ Note, that after finishing new Hide prompt, the prompt's header
> gray line remains quite a bit fat contrary to common convention...

You've got an amazing eye for details! :) Hide uses a slightly different push/pop mechanism to populate that UI, because you can also do a hide while you are still running some other command. When used in that manner, the original command's UI will be restored when you are finished with hide.

It looks like that extra space is a side-effect of this alternate mechanism. It seems to go away after other UI is populated in there, so I think this may be one of those bugs that I just don't worry about fixing too much! But I'll do a quick check to make sure that it is benign.


> 2/ Is there any way of simulating a Done button from within script <...>

Try this: moi.ui.fireUIEvent( 'done' );

That should do the same thing as pushing the Done button, let me know if it doesn't work.


> Could you explain a little more a mathematical meaning of angle option?

It's used in 2 different ways. First, when breaking surfaces down into smaller portions, the surface normals at the 4 corners of the patch will be calculated, and if the angle between these normals is greater than the given angle, it will be broken into more patches.

The second use is for trim curves - trim curves also need to be linearized into a polyline during tessellation. In this case the tangent direction is taken at the start and end of a curve segment. If the angle between those tangent directions is greater than the given angle, the trim curve will be broken into more pieces.

So for example an angle value of 5 means that either patch normals or curve tangents that are more than 5 degrees apart from each other will be further refined. So reducing the angle to a smaller number will cause more polygons to be generated.

Normally this is set by just using the slider. I didn't worry too much before about setting it numerically, because most of the time the exact numeric value is not too interesting, instead you mostly want to push it up or down just a bit to get different results, which the slider works well for. But I exposed this manual setting so that you can get something outside the normal slider range for a special effect, like a really coarse low poly version.

- Michael

Hi,
I tried to put Scale Array into the new Beta and got a message ' Script error Line 84 Column 1'. Have I done it wrong , it used to work?
Tim.

Hi Tim, I just tried it over here and it seemed to work ok.

Judging from the script error you mention, I think you may not have copied over the ScaleArray.htm companion file.

There are actually 2 files that make up ScaleArray - ScaleArray.js and ScaleArray.htm, both of these need to be copied into the \commands folder for it to work.

Please let me know if that was not the problem.

Here are the original instructions on it: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=275.109

- Michael