I was able to get some 3D mechanical shapes created quickly. The interface is Rhino like and files saved are Rhino native. Am I to assume, Moi is baed on Rhino?

MoI is brand new, it's not based on Rhino.

But I guess you could say that they have a bunch of "design DNA" in common since I did a bunch of the initial work on Rhino.

So I'm not surprised that you'd see some similarities because of that, and also just because they are both NURBS-based 3D CAD programs, they are going to be doing some similar kinds of things.

But there is quite a lot about the interface that is different, though - for instance MoI does not have a command-line interface, and no traditional top pull-down menu bar... The selection model is different, etc...

The different interface is sorta the main feature of MoI.

I'm curious about what parts of the interface you'd consider to be the most "Rhino like" ? Is it because you do all the work in one environment instead of having separate sketch / part / assembly modules?


The file format is based on the openNURBS toolkit. I figured that MoI would be a more useful tool if it was integrated tightly with an existing file format. It should make it easier to use MoI alongside other software.

- Michael

Michael Gibson
Triple Squid Software Design

Thanks for the clarification. The only reason why I thought it might be Rhino based was because of the default 4 views and that it only saves to .3dm. But the fact that there are inferences makes it far simpler to operate than Rhino. I think I recognize your name as one of the early developers at RMA? What other file formats do you plan to support?

> I think I recognize your name as one of the early developers at RMA?

Yup, I think that we've met before when I worked at RMA, it's been maybe 8 years or so, though.

> What other file formats do you plan to support?

I'm not 100% sure, but I think I'll probably be able to do IGES, STEP and maybe SAT for NURBS data, and STL and one other format (maybe Wavefront .obj) for output-only polygon data. That will probably be it for V1.

It will probably be a little while before there's any progress on the different file format stuff.

- Michael