Over the last few weeks I've been working on a set of plans for a CNC router. This is the kind of work that I would normally do in Sketchup. This time I used MoI to see what the difference is. The #1 thing I miss is Sketchup's idea of Components. Components are groups of objects that can be moved together. When a component is copied, the original and ALL the copies remain identical, no matter how any of these clones is modified. Not having this really killed my productivity:
* You can't use history to fake components: History breaks when you do serious modification to an object. E.g. you separate a curve, make changes, join and then re-extrude a solid from the curve part.
* The "Object Select" button in MoI selects all objects with the same name. Nice. When you make a copy of a 'component' it just makes even more objects with the same name. Then "Object Select" will select all the copied objects and the originals. After that it becomes super frustrating to select just 1 instance of a component to make further copies or to move it. This usually involves hiding things, using the lock command, constraining selection to a Style or in some other way isolating what you want to select, which is very time consuming.
* Objects don't move as a group. It's too easy to miss some object in a 'component' when you try to move it. The only indication that you have it all selected is a tiny yellow dot far off to the side of the screen. It's very easy to miss or not even look at and doesn't work once 2 copies exist. This results in lots of backing up to re-do a move I did 10 commands ago because I just noticed that 1 of the 20 curves in the component was not selected for the move and got left behind.
* Doing a full mock-up is a pain. If you make component copies before the design is finalized you will have to make changes. You will end up having to delete all the copies, clone the new design and re-position new copies. But if you don't make a mock-up you can't see the totality of what you are doing...
* Doing layout for 2D plans is similarly affected. I was making laser cut parts so I had to copy my profiles and lay them out inside a bounding box for the laser cutter bed. Basically all of the above problems came into play.
Please dont take this as some kind of rant, its not. This is just usability study feedback for when you go to implement this feature.
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