Hi Mike,
> Interface :
> From what I've read it seems that Moi is more focused more on creating individual
> components rather than handing large assemblies.
Yeah sort, of. I mean it's certainly possible to create large assemblies in MoI and many people have done so, but there isn't a lot of functionality specifically targeted on helping that out so much yet.
> However, sometimes I'm dealing with imported CAD files of manufactured products that have
> hundred of items etc - often with 'longish' names. Is there any flexibilty on the width of the
> scene browser / object panel - as many of my part names get truncated?
I've got that somewhere on my long "todo" list to look into making something in Options to control the width. Right now it's not adjustable by a convenient setting but it is possible to widen it by editing the UI directly. To do that you need to open up the file BrowserPane.htm in a text editor. You'll find it in the \ui subfolder inside of MoI's main installation folder (on Mac right-click the .app and pick "Show package contents" and go into drive_c/moi/ui). Then the thing you change is different between MoI v2 and v3 - for v2 the width comes from a <div> element that has a bunch of A characters in it like: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA add more characters to that to increase the width. For v3 it's controlled by a width: property at the top of the file, look for width:15em; and increase that number.
> And a related question: Is there any intention to develop a grouping or other basic object
> management system beyond the current styles panel?
MoI does already have object names which can be used in addition to styles - after selecting an object, click on the name line of the properties panel (the top line where it says "unnamed"). A dialog will then pop up letting you assign a name to that object. Once you have assigned a name it will appear in the "Objects" section in the scene browser and you'll be able to use its entry there to hide/show/lock/unlock/select that particular object later on. You can also assign the same name to multiple objects and then you'll be controlling that whole set of them with that same entry so that's a type of basic grouping.
Then in addition to that you can also currently assign styles to an object to group them into different color categories, and those are controlled by the Styles section of the scene browser.
In the future I do plan on adding more kinds of object management methods like hierarchical groups too.
> Hidden line drawing:
> The new hidden line drawing feature in v3 looks very good. My question: is there a way to save a
> camera view so that I could create a hidden line drawing - then return to the file at a later date and
> return to the exact same view?
The current position of all the views are saved in a 3DM file and restored to that same position again when you load the file.
There isn't currently any separate "saved view" type mechanism, that is something I want to add in the future. I haven't quite figured out where to put that in the UI, I have some general idea that things that involve lists of saved items might be good to put in the scene browser but I haven't really had a chance to explore that yet.
If you're really desperate to save a view location for later, you can get the current camera position by using a script and write it down or something:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5981.2
- Michael
