Hi Michael,

I am seeking your help for the following:

At the moment I am using the trial version 2 for testing. Are there any restrictions during the trial period? Anyway I am going to purchase it.

Now to my Problem: I want to create a ship, or rather parts of it (superstructure, funnel, etc). It will be a scale model 1:400, original size apprx. 120 meters in length. I use the arrangement plan as a template, the problem is that the quality becomes weak in MoI. It is high resolution scan in bmp format, but when opening and aligning, it looks more and more blurred with more pixels.
And: what I don't manage is to get the real model size, in this case 300mm length.

I would like to unfold in MoI to a 2D format certain parts to use in Corel Draw, for example, for further works.

Can you advise about the above ideas and problems?

Best regards,

Axel

Scaling can be done while "aligning," just need a (say) horizontal reference line from stem to stern of the image, and a
target line 300mm long in MoI...

- Brian

Hi Axel,

> Are there any restrictions during the trial period?

Nope, there are no restrictions during the trial period.


> It is high resolution scan in bmp format, but when opening and aligning,
> it looks more and more blurred with more pixels.
> And: what I don't manage is to get the real model size, in this case 300mm length.

What is the resolution of the image? Also just a quick note - it's often better to store images in PNG format which has a type of compression built into it which reduces file size by quite a bit. BMP images are a kind of older bitmap format and won't be compressed so they take up a lot more disk space.

To display the image in the 3D viewport, MoI needs to use the image as a texture map, and often times video cards have limits on the maximum size of texture map that they support. Also because it's often limited MoI itself will downscale images over a certain size, that size is adjustable in moi.ini . To change that, go to Options > General and push the "Edit .ini file" button, then look in the [View] section for MaxTextureSize (it's probably right at the top), you might try setting that to MaxTextureSize=4192 and see if that works better for you.


> And: what I don't manage is to get the real model size, in this case 300mm length.

Like Brian mentions above, probably the best way to handle this is to use the Align feature inside the Bitmap command. That will allow you to draw a line on the image and match it to a line inside model space. Check out here for some demos of it:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1982.9

Also this shows how to snap an image into place into an existing already placed model rectangle:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1982.6

Some other related info on background image placement and snapping here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2501.14


> I would like to unfold in MoI to a 2D format certain parts to use in
> Corel Draw, for example, for further works.

MoI does not have any unfolding capabilities in it at this point in time, so you would need to use a different program to handle that part. Rhino and also FormZ I believe have some functions for that, and there are some other polygon mesh programs you could try:
http://laminadesign.com/
http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/

The upcoming MoI version 3.0 has new support for generating 2D output, but it's projected hidden-line type output, which is not the same as an "unwrap". Some demos of that here though:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=6297.1

- Michael

Hi Gents,

thanks for your quick replies with solutions and links, much appreciated!

I remember in Rhino there was the same option to activate better image handling and that did the trick! I will try when back home :) Indeed the image size is something with 6000.


Best regards,

Axel

"[...] The upcoming MoI version 3.0 has new support for generating 2D output, but it's projected hidden-line type output [...]".

You mean that you tweaked the hidden line removal algorithm for the upcoming release? That's very cool, with a projected-type it should be a lot accurate! That does my job, can't wait to use it :)

Hi Max,

> You mean that you tweaked the hidden line removal algorithm for the upcoming
> release? That's very cool, with a projected-type it should be a lot accurate! That
> does my job, can't wait to use it :)

I have tweaked it to increase accuracy, but it was projected before and it's still projected now... When I wrote that the hidden line drawing generation was projected I mean that it generates a 2D drawing by doing a view projection, which is a different kind of 2D result than unfolding.

- Michael

Version 3 of Bonzai3d has some form of unwrap tool, Not tried it though, since starting to use Moi3d I haven't opened or felt the need to upgrade a whole bunch of software.

Colin

Thank you Michael for the Texture Map size information. Raising the size will improve the scan-ability of some model plans.
The "antialiasing" or "dithering" blurriness, or whatever it is, is much improved.

Tried MaxTextureSize=4096, which was a big improvement in clarity over 2048.
Also tried MaxTextureSize=8192, which was even better.
This was with a jpg scan of a section of some old black and white "blueprint"copies of stagecoach plans, huge file size 6,962kb.

Also tried MaxTextureSize =32768. The image appeared to be the same as for MaxTextureSize of 8192.

(All three of the screen snipped images were about 422 kb)

Checked the specifications on my fairly good quality NVIDIA GTX560, which stated:

Max Texture Dimension Sizes 1D=(65536) 2D=(65536,65535) 3D=(2048,2048,2048)
Max Layered Texture Size (dim) x layers 1D=(16384) x 2048, 2D=(16384,16384) x 2048

So for now my setting is 8,192. Not sure if there are any associated negative effects on model size?

- Brian

Hello Michael,

I can also confirm what Brian has posted just above. I tried 4092 and then 8192 as max texture size and the result is perfect!! No blurries or unsharpen image.

And the UI and the control etc everything looks great to me. For sure a purchase it will be. Played a bit around, this is the way to build the model. I made a line with exact the same length the model will be and aligned the drawing over it, from end to end. When clicking one line or curve, in the upper right corner the length or radius is shown.

For unfolding I will use Rhino4, I hope the dimensions will be copied from MoI.

For a future update or version 3, would it be possible to show the actual length for curves, not only the radius?



Best regards,


Axel

Congratulations on finding the Ferrari of modelers Axel.
Handcrafted with infinite patience!

Marc

Hi Brian, yeah you were asking about something similar a while back and I think at that point I had forgotten about this particular limit in MoI's settings, sorry about that.


> So for now my setting is 8,192. Not sure if there are any associated negative effects on model size?

It won't have any effect on 3DM model file size, but it will have an effect on the consumption of video memory on the video card.

Now that I look at the code again, the main reason why MoI has its own default limit of 2048 was to avoid consuming too much video memory, some video cards do not have whole lot of memory available and large texture maps consume an awful lot of memory.

Like for example an 8192x8192 pixel image will take up 256 Megabytes of video memory just to hold that single texture map alone. If your video card only has like 512MB of video ram it's probably not going to be able to allocate a big enough space for that gigantic sized texture map. Your card I think has 1GB of video memory so it can probably handle it ok for just one of them.

- Michael

Hi Axel, I'm glad that changing that setting helped you too!


> For unfolding I will use Rhino4, I hope the dimensions will be copied from MoI.

Yeah, there is a high degree of compatibility from MoI to Rhino, you can bring in anything you create in MoI into Rhino without disrupting sizes or things like that. You can also use Copy/Paste to move objects back and forth between MoI and Rhino as well.


> For a future update or version 3, would it be possible to show the actual
> length for curves, not only the radius?

There isn't too much room to put a lot of information into the top level properties panel, but in the future I do want to make an "extended properties" dialog box that you could pull up that would then have a lot more details available on it.


- Michael

And the "UnwrapCurve" script will yield a line with the length of the curve.

You can find UnwrapCurve here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5136.1

- Michael

I usually use http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/#CurveLength to get a curve length.

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