>Can you please double check that you're opening the .ai file

Sorry I must have been confused. I was now able to open the .ai line drawing and I can see a wonderful clean layer structure! Thank you!!

But I have to ignore the linked PNG file. When I try to open both ai and PNG it just doesn't open. My Illustrator CS3 software on Mountain Lion is behaving very strange at the moment.

>Nope, for each surface it generates a new render mesh on the fly, and that mesh gets refined until the screen space projection of it deviates no more than >1/4 of a pixel on the render screen.
>So it should always look really smooth regardless of what your display Mesh Angle is set to.


So Michael, this begs an unrelated but burning question for a future request :::

For normal UI Viewport manipulation, would it be someday possible for MoI to wait until the mouse/rotations/etc is idle, then spend a little idle CPU time to render a beautiful, ultra-smooth, virtually anti-aliased UI image that would replace the active card-based image (hopefully near-seamlessly).

I mean, moving around would be the same fluid speed as usual, but wait, don't move.... ahhh. surely the best Viewport image of any 3D modeler on the planet!

;-)

Just a thought.

Hi OSTexo,

> I'm not sure if MoI repositions points on the secondary save or not

It shouldn't unless you're exporting it out using the 3D view that has perspective.

On export it has to refit curves that are rational or have a degree higher than 3, curves that are already degree 3 non-rational ones (like you'll have with AI import) should not be modified if they're exported from the Top ortho view.

- Michael

Hi Martin,

> Sorry I must have been confused. I was now able to open the .ai line drawing
> and I can see a wonderful clean layer structure! Thank you!!

Great!


> But I have to ignore the linked PNG file. When I try to open both ai and PNG it just doesn't open.

You should only open the .ai file - the PNG is already inserted into the .ai file as linked placed art, so it should be in place already right when you open up the .ai file only. But you do need to have the PNG file placed in the same folder alongside the .ai file so that Illustrator is able to find it.

- Michael

Hi Mike,

> For normal UI Viewport manipulation, would it be someday possible for MoI to wait until
> the mouse/rotations/etc is idle, then spend a little idle CPU time to render a beautiful,
> ultra-smooth, virtually anti-aliased UI image that would replace the active card-based
> image (hopefully near-seamlessly).

Maybe in the future someday, but it's unfortunately quite tricky to do a really good job of that.

The hard part is that it would not be very nice if there was any stuttering or lag when you just by chance happened to pause for a moment and actually want to continue to move around right away. It tends to be difficult to get a CPU intensive task to instantaneously stop.


> I mean, moving around would be the same fluid speed as usual, but wait, don't
> move.... ahhh. surely the best Viewport image of any 3D modeler on the planet!

Yeah, but unfortunately it's also very easy for something like that to go more like: move around, stutter, get nice image, run out of memory, ....


- Michael

Looks good Michael! Tested AI file into Illustrator CS5 & CS6 (3 layers). Tried PDF into Inkscape on Linux (Ubuntu), no layer separation but all elements were there and selectable. Nice Work, hope to see a new Beta soon!

>You should only open the .ai file

Hi Michael,

sorry I wasn't clear enough. I have both files in a folder. When I double click the .ai file nothing happens. It just doesnt open.
When I delete the .png file and then double click the .ai file I get a warning that a linked file is missing. If I push "Ignore" in that window the .ai file opens and I can see the lines.
I tried this on a second computer with the same setup and same result.

I also can't place the .png file into Illustrator. There seems to be a problem with large png files and/or transparency according to http://forums.adobe.com/thread/478570 or http://forums.adobe.com/thread/668668

This works:
I opened the .png in Photoshop and saved it as .psd file. Then I deleted the original png file. When I double clicked the Illustrator file I chose replace in the missing file warning window and then chose the .psd file. Now it opened fine.

I'm very happy with the result and the extra conversion doesn't bother me.

Hi Martin,

> sorry I wasn't clear enough. I have both files in a folder. When I double click the .ai file
> nothing happens. It just doesnt open.

Does the folder happen to be the Temp folder?

Do you get different behavior if you use File > Open inside of Illustrator to open the file rather than double clicking the file itself?


> I also can't place the .png file into Illustrator.

That's also kind of strange, I just tested placing the png over here in CS2 and it works ok for me. Somehow a system specific issue in Illustrator?


- Michael

Hi Michael,

>Does the folder happen to be the Temp folder?

No they're in a folder called outline test on the desktop. Isn't the temp folder a Windows thing? Never saw one.

>Do you get different behavior if you use File > Open inside of Illustrator to open the file rather than double clicking the file itself?

Tried everything. My Illustrator CS3 doesn't like the large PNG file. Although dragging the .png file into Illustrator worked but it came in way too large. We need another one with CS3 for testing.

Hi Michael,

Some feedback, concerning the AI file:

Illustrator CS2 (win7) and CC (Mac OSX 10.8.5): Working nicely. Got 3 layers, stacked in proper order, easily selectable. Can place/import the PNG file. Fantastic!

Illustrator CS4 (Mac OS X 10.8.5): Not working, at all: says it get an error and do nothing, it just ignore it. Also can't place or import the PNG file into. In my personnel case its not important 'cause we don´t use CS4 anymore. Maybe it affect some other user. Its better to let you know. Or maybe its something on my end, don't know.

Concerning the PDF file: It works, in every of the above setups, but don't have layers as it make hard to select. From my experience i got several no layered PDF files from others, but i think its a case of not tick on 'Perserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities' when saving as PDF, otherwise it export with layers.

Concerning the PNG file/render image:

Photoshop CS2 (win7) and CS4 and CC (both Mac OSX 10.8.5): Working nicely, its in 1 layer with transparentcy, but no AntiAliasing, so it's stepped/jagged on the outline.

The AA issue can be solved with a slight Blur Filter in Photoshop. Its a pretty big image, which is good for print work.

Overall, well done. Thanks.

One question concerning the rendered image: Looks the material main color is a Grey. It will be possible to pick 1 different color on export? It could help on the readbility. Anyway i could do it in Photoshop.

Carlos

Thanks for all the feedback Carlos!

> From my experience i got several no layered PDF files from others, but i think its a case
> of not tick on 'Perserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities' when saving as PDF, otherwise it
> export with layers.

That "Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities" thing makes Illustrator save a big chunk of private undocumented information in the PDF file that contains illustrator specific data. Illustrator uses that method for making layers come in through PDFs but it only works for PDFs saved by Illustrator itself, not from any other method of PDF file generation.

Since that Illustrator specific data is not documented there isn't really any way for a separate program (like MoI for example) to get layers into Illustrator by PDF import only since Illustrator does not read them in from the regular PDF data.

But it does read them in from the AI v8 format, so that's the format you'll want to use for the transfer if you want layers to come over.


That's pretty weird that CS4 does not work. That's good to know though.


> One question concerning the rendered image: Looks the material main color is a Grey.

It just happened to be in this case since all the objects were using the default style. The shaded colors will come from the style assignment and look the same as they do in the regular MoI viewport display.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> The shaded colors will come from the style assignment

That is is great, it will be very helpfull to have different colors on different parts, visually communicating some functions or how something have to be constructed.

Its great to comunicate with others.

Thanks.

Carlos

Hi Michael, the AI file works great in Illustrator CS6 64bit.
The bitmap doesn't import in Xara but I don't care since it works so well with a layered PDF.

Maybe adding a bitmap option in the export dialog would be nice?
Those who don't know the viewport export scripts or can't work with PDF might find it handy.

On the other hand the export dropdown list will start to be crowded.
Some programs have 75 choice in the dropdown, having to search each time for the right one is somewhat annoying.
An idea would be to separate export types; Solids, Polygonal, 2d.

Marc

For me, it's exactly what I need. Thanks michael

Hello,

That's great news that it keeps the points as is. On a related note, does MoI have a curve extrapolation function? In the areas where the hidden line generation doesn't completely close off the area or it gets a bit wobbly I import that portion of the AI into Rhino and VSR has a very handy extrapolation function to extend the line so it can be trimmed. Another handy tool that is free for AI to connect lines with curves is SubScribe from Astute Graphics if you don't want to pay for the other plugins.

Hi Marc,

I've got Xara 8 & 9 (Photo & Graphics Designer versions) & everything imported just fine.
See attachments.

Hi Marc,

> Maybe adding a bitmap option in the export dialog would be nice?
> Those who don't know the viewport export scripts or can't work with PDF might find it handy.

You mean something like a "PNG Image (*.png)" just directly listed in the file dialog for Export or Save As?

That would certainly be easiest for someone to find. But yeah (as you mention) the downside is if other image formats were also added there it would start to make the file dialog dropdown get clogged up and after some point it gets difficult to find things in it.

For direct image saving I'd been thinking that there would be something like a Render command that would generate an image and the image would be displayed on its own new window. Then there would be a file menu on that window where you could save the image to PNG/TIFF/JPG/etc... That would probably be something for v4 since I'm hoping to wrap up v3 fairly soon here.


> An idea would be to separate export types; Solids, Polygonal, 2d.

Yeah having image saving under some kind of Render function (probably with a Render tab on the pane for accessing it) would help to put 2D bitmap images into one kind of separate category.

It's kind of hard to introduce categories into the regular export without making things take extra steps, like it probably wouldn't be nice to have a separate dialog pop up before the file name one that made you pick between Solids, Polygonal, or 2D type exports before you got to put in the file name.

- Michael

Hi OSTexo,

> On a related note, does MoI have a curve extrapolation function?

There is a curve extension function under Edit > Extend. If you want 2 curves to meet, you can select both of them, then run Edit > Extend, then at the prompt to select boundary objects you just right-click or push Done at that point to tell it you want to do a "mutual extend" where they extend to each other, rather than extending them to a third boundary line.

- Michael

Colin wrote:
> I've got Xara 8 & 9 (Photo & Graphics Designer versions) & everything imported just fine.

Wow there seems to be a lot of variation in program support for these various things. Kind of a lot more differences maybe between Mac and PC versions and even between different versions of the same program than I would have expected.

- Michael

"""""""""""""""""""""""I've got Xara 8 & 9 (Photo & Graphics Designer versions) & everything imported just fine.
See attachments."""""""""""""""""""

Hi Colin,

Yeah PDF works great in Xara! I'm surprised to see other Xara users here.

I was referring to the AI test file import in Xara, it didnt import background file.
As said it works with PDF so no problem there.

Marc