Any chance of adding a angle tool under deformations? If you could simply pick faces then pick the axis to taper from this would really be helpful for making master patterns for casting or models for injection molding.

Right now we are limited to the basic draft from the extrusion tool which is handy for text models but limited to base curves. Often I have models that require more than just a simple extrusion where drafts need to be put in place or modified after creation of the part as features are added. I usually end up extracting curves, offsetting them and lofting them back to create my solids which can be horribly tedious especially when you know the customer is going to make a change for the sake of changing...

Hi KAC - do you have an example you could post? It can be difficult for a deformation to process just some faces and not others.

- Michael

My wish list for MOI4, in random order:
Extend with cursor, without the need for a feature to extend to.
’Snap To…’ - I often want to snap to something that is buried in a blizzard of possible targets- I end up isolating and hiding, but I wish I could just specify ‘snap to the center of this circle’.
‘Look At’ - a feature in other software that lets you select a planar surface and the view orients to it and changes the construction plane to it- I used it all the time, very useful.
An annotation text box where I could keep track of changes I made, things that need to be done, etc.
I’d like to be able to save a high resolution bitmap without shading- my end product is 2d technical drawings that I color with other software- black line art would be great, without going through the gruesome AI file cleanup.
And finally, for now, SVG output. The AI files are a mess- I spend hours trimming/extending/deleting duplicates/etc. Rather than try to improve the accuracy of AI files, a proprietary format owned by a company I don’t really admire, SVG might be a better choice.
I, of course, have no clue about what’s involved in coding these changes- just things that would make MOI better for me.
Rick

I can email a sample model I hand constructed, was a logo that had to go on a pipe that was sand cast. Logo is arched but drafts had to be all perpendicular to the part line.

Look at - try cPlane - orient to all views
Snap to might be scriptable - just for centers of objects
I have a lot of time mess in my scene with snaps options, if scene grows dramaticly -> i have to open several Moi windows to do small stuffs in other windows, keep all tangecy that i need there & one for collecting with few snaps/low mesh angle detail
a saving way for ai I see making a 4k-8k res render of view ( with hight contrast lines ) & trace in ai, manually shade surface inside Ai

when u say reverse engineering - the only thought is hacking that software ! nope ! i wanted a object view inside moi !
obj mesh -> moi
head -> headphones, microphone, gas masc, helm , gear, etc etc - to match shape
table -> ornaments !
old 60'th phone -> ornaments ! details
scanned mesh -> moi
roentgen, room, nature -> objects construct objects inside

Cemortan_Tudor-
Thanks, cPlane is usually a trial and error process- my wish is that a selected planar surface could become the cPlane.
Tracing a bitmap in Illustrator is a lot of work with files that have thousands of curves- editing a Make2D image is the best solution I've found, but still a very long process.
Rick

Hello,

I use MoI for technical illustration as well. You might want to check out the tools from Astute Graphics to extend paths, clean up vectors etc.. That's not to say Moi wouldn't benefit from curve and surface extension features, just a suggestion on what you might use to get by in the meantime.

"my wish is that a selected planar surface could become the cPlane"
cPlane is scriptable

Hello Michael!

How are you ? I hope fine :)

I imagine that you're working hard for the next V4 beta builds, and actually I only would like to know what is the situation about the three fundamental "bricks" we talked about when V4 was announced :

1) 64Bit and Mac OS native : DONE

2) Instancing : missing

3) Grouping : missing

If I remember correctly these were the "foundation" for V4.

Thanks a lot and have a nice day.

Hi Marco, sorry no progress yet on #2 and #3, and actually some priorities are shifting a bit, I'm probably going to work on dimensioning as a higher priority than those.

I think I am getting quite close to having V4 fully production ready without any regressions from V3, that's the fundamental step that I have wanted to get really nailed down first before digging in to large new feature areas.

- Michael

Hi Michael.

@You : "...I'm probably going to work on dimensioning as a higher priority than those."
Ok. I understand.
But I only hope that you can soon put your hands on "Instancing" and "Grouping" because are two very important and long awaited features.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the reply and have a nice day ;)

"I don't see any information there about how instances are stored in a LWO file which is what I would need."

I believe LW instancing is in the scene file and not in the object itself. Instances are represented through nulls that are associated with the object clones, I believe.

Hi Paul, unfortunately the LightWave scene file format does not seem to be documented as fully as the object format.

http://static.lightwave3d.com/sdk/2018/html/filefmts.html

I wasn't able to find any mention of clones or instancing in there.

- Michael

Michael,

You're right. Newtek isn't great about stuff like that.

You're probably aware that Lightwave 3D is essentially two distinct programs - modeller and layout.

In Modeller you create objects and in layout you create scenes using those objects.

The instances in LW aren't cloning the point data for objects, they are taking an object as a pattern and laying out nulls in the scene that are replaced during render time with the point and surface data associated with the template object. It's essentially collapsing the scene file size and reducing the render overhead by only instantiating objects where the instance is part of the visible scene.

As a lapsed LWer (my version of LW pre-dates instancing) I wouldn't expect MOI3D to be building instances in the LW sense. Instances don't exist in the object sense, only essentially as markers in a scene for object replication at render time.

[edit: Also I'm not even sure that you can merge LW scenes, so even a template scene with the correct LW style instances may be of little use in practical terms. ]

Paul

Hi, Michael.
I have such question, it is possible to write the script that it was possible to change places the beginning and the end at open curves, such as: lines, arcs, NURBS?
Vladimir.

Hi Vladimir, yes you can use the Flip command in MoI to do that:
http://moi3d.com/3.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#flip

- Michael

Thanks, Michael. That's very good. There is another MoI issue that incorrectly exports the file to the DXF format of the arc and circle.
For comparison, I attach another pdf file.

Vladimir.

Hi Vladimir, could you please describe the DXF bug in more detail?

When I open your DXF file in MoI v4 over here it looks like this:


When I open your PDF file in MoI v4 it looks like this:


DXF in Rhino v5:


DXF in Autodesk online viewer:


- Michael