Hi Michael, it sounds like you've got it all figured out, that it's just a display issue that you can configure in Rhino. Basically Rhino was originally designed to work with a wireframe display and when you're only drawing wires and no shading at all you need some way to try and see surface shapes and that's why it shows isocurves like that by default. They are just basically curves drawn at some regular intervals along the U and V directions of the surfaces.

There are some various remnants of that original wireframe display orientation still in Rhino, some of which are pretty annoying like the wireframe of selected solid objects showing up on top of everything.

MoI was designed from the ground up to use a shaded display instead.

- Michael

Hi Mike,

> You'd think that with Rhino's new release, they would have found a way to anti-alias
> their curves and iso-curves...

They can do it but unlike MoI they are dependent on the OpenGL video driver to do it for them, and if you have one of the lower cost "gaming" type cards rather than the expensive "workstation" one it may not be available.

One of the nice things about how MoI's graphics engine works is that it does the anti-aliasing itself directly and just sends textured polygon data over to the card for it to display rather than relying on the video driver to do the anti-aliasing instead. That makes MoI's anti-aliased curve display work on any card including "low end" gaming cards.

Often times the low end game-oriented cards actually have the exact same hardware as the "high end workstation" cards, and it's just the drivers for the low end ones have various stuff turned off in them. The more that a program relies on the drivers to do stuff for them, it tends to make that stuff only work on the expensive workstation cards, which can run something like $1000 more in cost than the same "gaming" hardware.

- Michael

"some of which are pretty annoying like the wireframe of selected solid objects showing up on top of everything."

I noticed that. I was hoping I could find a way to turn that off, but it sounds like I'm stuck with it. There are a few things that might come in handy with having a license of Rhino, but my plan is that for the most part, it will only get fired up when there is a need for T-Splines.

I have even more appreciation for MoI, with its clean interface and ease of use, now that I've begun to dabble in Rhino. It's severe information and menu overload. It almost makes me a little queasy.

"You'd think that with Rhino's new release, they would have found a way to anti-alias their curves and iso-curves...
The stair-stepped jagged curves are soooo 1990's!"

There are settings for that in the options. I just left everything default. I can crank it up if I want to later.

Michael,

I figured that with the Open-GL/Direct-X difference... I'm so enamored by the pure-looking lines in MoI even watching the tutorials for Rhino gives me a headache.

And gaming cards are advancing at such a pace that it may become preferable to use more of the 'gaming' end for 3D design applications.

Having the ability to use MoI on older systems has been great for me with my old PC's. I'm even able to use MoI on my tiny XP netbook when sitting on the couch in the living room. My kids are able to watch me try simple objects. Even though it's video is extremely limited, MoI's anti-aliased curves makes even working on a 600-pixel a pleasant experience.

The video drivers for OpenGL in Windows just generally tend to be a lot more problematic than Direct3D drivers. That's actually the main reason why I went with Direct3D for MoI in the first place.

Rhino has become more and more unfriendly to low end systems as time has gone on, there are several video cards that their support staff just flat out says not to use with Rhino: http://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/videocards

Direct3D drivers can sometimes have bugs in them as well, but because almost all games use Direct3D, those drivers just get a lot more testing and improvement effort put into them so usually the number of driver bugs is way way less with Direct3D.

Then there's also the problem that video card manufacturers seem to intentionally degrade their drivers for their "low end" cards and try to require people doing CAD work with OpenGL to purchase the $1000+ "workstation" type cards instead.

- Michael