MoI is great. It has a toolset so very well chose that it feels very complete and clean. With the inclusion of the brilliant flow command and the new ngone tool it just gets a lot better. The render engine is the better and most optimized out there and getting better now being multithreaded. The layer system is the easiest to use that I know and the import export options are great.

Well, all that is impressive. MoI outdone every other package in a lot of things it does. Because of that (and because of a great price) a lot of people from different industries are using it an integrating it into its workflow. I can talk for myself having used it in the process of making sketches and diagrams, architectural plans, product prototyping and laser cutting, architectural models (some under construction now), even a magazine logo and a lot more.

You may think why am I talking about things you may know? Well sometimes we know a lot of things but we have not thought about them as a whole. What I want to do by summarising all this is, first to remember what a great piece of software MoI is, and second to tell what I think MoI may need that will be useful for the majority of MoI users based on this kind of big picture of the program and my own day by day experience.

First, pdf export. MoI at its heart is a CAD package, thought for precision. And who needs precision? Mostly the people that needs to output its work. And a first output for revision may be printing on paper, precisely. Pdf (if I remember well) is a little brother of the .ai format, maybe it will not be to hard to bring it to MoI. Just a sheet size and a scale factor will be enough for a useful pdf output.

Second, objet management. Some time ago I ask if objects could behave like styles (styles are more than perfect). That made sense for me, and still it does, but maybe not for everyone. Two of those things I ask this time. First, an option to have an "active name" so that every object you make has that name (or maybe you can have none selected). It doesn't hurt anyone, instead it may help a lot of people. And second an easy way of changing some geometry to another object name (I know you can do that with a plug in but it does take some time to pop up and it does so in your face). Just like you can do with styles.

Continuing with object management, a feature proven to be a must: Groups (or folders). Just like photoshop has. When you have a lot of object names or styles you just can not find what you want as you do when the list is shorter. It is useful when you have sets of objects, and then sub-sets of them, like if you are modelling a tank (I have seen a lot of those in the forum) you can have the weels as an object, but then inside the weels there are the belts, the weels per se, some bolts and so on. Also, take my case for example, I can have a group of styles for curves and another one for solids and inside the solids a group for metals, other for plastics, other for woods, and so on.

Finaly, file optimization. This can be a little tricky. I know there has been some talking about instances / blocks, and thats one. The other can be external references so you can split a file into several and then just reference them.

So this is some feedback. I know Michael knows well what MoI needs most.

Hi ed, this is some great feedback. I think that eventually MoI will have most of these things you're asking for, they pretty much sound like a great fit for MoI. Probably external references is the furthest one out.


> First, pdf export.

Yeah I think this will likely be the next up for file format work. I did completely overhaul the PDF _import_ not too long ago for v3, it's way better than v2's PDF importer which could get confused pretty easily. Although PDFs are related to the old AI V8 format as far as the drawing commands that they use, they are very different in structure, with PDF being far far more complex in how it's organized into different compressed streams. But I'm fairly sure that the library that I was able to use to improve the import will also help with doing an export as well, we'll see.

So this one is probably not all that far off.


re: Object management - yeah this is at a pretty basic level right now in MoI and definitely needs more attention in the future. I have been pretty conservative with evolving it slowly because it's an area that is easy to mess up and once things go down a messed up path too far it's hard to reverse course. So I want to make sure that each step that is taken with it is one that will be able to be kept for the long haul.


> First, an option to have an "active name" so that every object you make has that name (or maybe
> you can have none selected). It doesn't hurt anyone, instead it may help a lot of people.

I'm not really sure about this one though, since that's kind of unusual behavior, I'm not sure that I've seen an object naming system that allows for that. It could possibly "hurt" if it needed to have a special additional control added for it which was always taking up extra space in the scene browser and didn't serve any other purpose. Styles have a color swatch that was easy to use for the "active style" indicator. Names do not have an equivalent swatch like that...


> And second an easy way of changing some geometry to another object name (I know you
> can do that with a plug in but it does take some time to pop up and it does so in your face)

This one I definitely plan to have, there will probably be a drop-down menu that you'll be able to activate by clicking on the name and it will contain some more actions on the menu, one of which will be "assign to this name".


> Continuing with object management, a feature proven to be a must: Groups (or folders).

Yeah I definitely want to do these, I think both geometry groups (which would give hierarchy and also allow selection as one unit), and also folders too which I think would also be useful for organizing styles too.

But in general right now I'm currently mostly focused on modeling tool enhancements, since being blocked from some areas of model creation tends to be a bigger overall problem for more people I think. Object management enhancements don't really give much benefits to people who are just trying to build one single model, they're primarily of benefit to a smaller number of much more advanced users, so that's why they have not been the front line focus for a while. I do expect to give them more attention at some point though.


> Finaly, file optimization. This can be a little tricky. I know there has been some talking about
> instances / blocks, and thats one. The other can be external references so you can split a file
> into several and then just reference them.

These would definitely be useful too - but they are probably a further ways out than the other stuff that you've mentioned above. These will require major new areas of UI to manage the features and anything that requires a lot of additional UI is a very time consuming and major area of work.


Thanks for the great feedback!

- Michael

Great to hear some of those features are on your plans! Just a couple of things...

"I'm not sure that I've seen an object naming system that allows for that."

Every program I can think of (not that I know hundreds) like Modo, Autocad, Photoshop, Illustrator, always have a name active. Modo have both, the equivalent of objects and styles and it always has an object active.

"It could possibly "hurt" if it needed to have a special additional control added for it which was always taking up extra space in the scene browser and didn't serve any other purpose"

Thinking about that, the indicator may be the background colour (or the font colour) of the name and the trigger can be a right clic.

"Yeah I definitely want to do these, I think both geometry groups (which would give hierarchy and also allow selection as one unit), and also folders too which I think would also be useful for organizing styles too."

Great because it is #1 in my list now!

"But in general right now I'm currently mostly focused on modeling tool enhancements, since being blocked from some areas of model creation tends to be a bigger overall problem for more people I think. Object management enhancements don't really give much benefits to people who are just trying to build one single model, they're primarily of benefit to a smaller number of much more advanced users..."

One of the top selling points of MoI (from where I see it) is its user interface. It is second to none and people know it. The toolset is great, it helps you doing most things you want and it is complete for most people. The ones that need more advanced tools are the advanced users and they can find those tools on other software. What you can not find anywhere else is the gold UI MoI has. That important is the UI for MoI.

And with the file optimisation, well, it can wait! Thanks for your answer!

Hi ed,

> Every program I can think of (not that I know hundreds) like Modo, Autocad, Photoshop, Illustrator,
> always have a name active. Modo have both, the equivalent of objects and styles and it always
> has an object active.

Many of these though have the concept of a "layer" being active, not really an "object name" being active.

The closest equivalent to a "layer" in MoI is styles, and as you know you can have an "active style" already.

As far as I know it's the same in Illustrator, right - you can have a layer active, but not an "object" itself being active. In the Layers palette if I select a named object inside there and then draw a totally new shape, the shape goes on the active layer but does not also get added to that named object on top of that.



> > "It could possibly "hurt" if it needed to have a special additional control added for it which was
> > always taking up extra space in the scene browser and didn't serve any other purpose"
>
> Thinking about that, the indicator may be the background colour (or the font colour) of
> the name and the trigger can be a right clic.

Hmm, I don't know - that's then highly inconsistent with setting the active style. It would be pretty weird to have 2 similar things within the same scene browser UI but that displayed themselves totally differently.

- Michael