Hi Frenchy... this one is for you, or anyone else who wants to chime in. I'm working on an article for Fast Company on the future of medical drones (oui, quelle coincidence vis a vis Bulgarov!) and I need to create some photorealistic renderings by next Thursday. Instead of working in MoI, I chose to create concepts in SketchUp primarily because:

• SketchUp has instancing-- important for creating one 'side' of a model and having it automatically update on the other 'side.'
• SketchUp has hierarchies-- very important for moving groups of components.
• SketchUp has sketchy renders-- very good for communicating concepts.
• SketchUp has SketchUp Warehouse. Posable humans and other parts are valuable when trying to 'kit-bash' something together. The 'humans' and stretcher on this model are from there.
• SketchUp seems to me a bit faster in creating stuff like this. I really don't need to worry about fillets not working or blends failing, etc.. In SketchUp, booleans pretty much never work, and it's difficult to fillet or chamfer anything even though Fredo has some great tools.

So, I've got the design (shown below).

I need to import it into MoI to start detailing and was wondering if there are any 'best practices' for this sort of thing. I was planning on importing the wires and working from there. Just found out that the Obj23dmWireframe_converter is windows only and I'm on a Mac. How to go from OBJ to Nurbs on Mac?

Not sure how to handle linked hierarchies-- I suppose just remembering to select named objects when translating? Also, it would be so cool to be able to have instancing-- that way I could create placeholders for parts, then detail a single part (like a quad rotor blade) and they would all update.

Anyway, any thoughts on all this would be appreciated! :)

Hi chippwalters,

That's a tough one, there was some talk about this not long ago which relates to your request, trying to import poly data to MoI. http://moi3d.com/forum/messages.php?webtag=MOI&msg=7189.1

-

FWIW, I was able to export from Sketchup to OBJ using:
Wireframe OBJ importer:
http://moi3d.com/wiki/Resources#Obj23dmWireframe_converter

and I could make it Mac compatible by running the Wireframe OBJ Importer under WINE with the instructions at:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5135.9

For those Mac users who are interested, here are the steps:

Find the drive_c folder in your MoI3d package and unzip so that there's a folder: drive_c:\Obj23dmWireframe
Put the .obj file you want to convert into the same folder.
After you launch the Command shell (see above instructions) you only need type:

C:\Obj23dmWireframe\Obj23dmWireframe to run the .exe. Just select the file and convert it. Then copy/paste the resulting file to your working directory. ***DON'T DRAG/DROP THE FILE AS IT WILL ONLY CREATE AN ALIAS!*** To move the file from the drive_c:\Obj23dmWireframe directory, just select it. Copy it (Command-C) then go to the folder you want to move and Option-Command-V to MOVE it there.

As some of you may have surmised. I only managed to drag/drop the alias and then MoI couldn't read the file :-) !!! HTH

Hi Chipp, it's not easy to go from SketchUp into MoI because things like those round looking housings are not truly round things in SketchUp, they're made up of a whole bunch of little individual triangle facet pieces.

CAD programs are not designed to work with highly faceted objects like that, so it's difficult to take triangulated data and convert it into CAD data. It's possible to go the reverse way which MoI will do when you do a SketchUp export out from MoI - when you do this MoI will take the large smooth CAD spline surfaces and dice them up into little facet pieces. But it's very difficult to try and automatically reform large smooth surfaces from already decimated facet data. That's why MoI has an SKP exporter but not an importer.

So really your data there is not in a form that will import very readily into MoI, since it's in a polygon mesh format you could load it into a polygon mesh modeling program but not into a NURBS focused CAD program like MoI.

A couple of things you might try would be to see if the Rhino mac version can import it and convert it into a rather poor NURBS version by using the MeshToNURB command - this will likely not work very well because every separate triangle in the polygon mesh object will become a trimmed surface in the NURBS object and CAD objects are not meant to have such a high density of little tiny separate surfaces like that, they are meant to have large smooth surfaces that have trims on them. So it will probably not work very well.

You could also look into using Wineskin to run the the Obj23DMWireframe converter program.

Another possibility might be Max's OBJ loader script from here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4104.6

But likely none of these will yield very good results because your model data being all in triangle mesh faceted form is just fundamentally a different kind of data than what MoI works with itself for modeling.

- Michael

Hi Michael

Yes, I know, but I was referring to use the wires (or other idea like backplates?) as reference objects only. I think I've got it figured out now. I get the whole NURBS vs POLYS thing but just wanted to see if there were any other workflows out there for going back and forth with templated wires. Turns out I found a couple good threads you posted awhile back and now have a pretty decent handle on the wires import and they are all separated into objects. FWIW, the 'face' option in Obj23dmWireframe.exe never did work.

I fully expected to 'rebuild' the model in MoI. The earlier pics are just concepts, not finished designs (My SU abilities would be quite tasked to put together finished design for this sort of thing :-) Thanks for the help.

Also, interestingly, the objects can be exported as OBJ in SU one at a time if necessary and they will come in 'pre-registered' in MoI. Good to know!

for the moment best when you have more than one unic object is export in 3DS format from Moi
then explode the object exported one time in sketchup
so you will have each object from Moi as component named in Sketchup obj0, obj1, obj2 etc...
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=7181.1
and see this post and following for "comparaison component / group " for optimum result of similars components / groups after import from any progrograms!
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=29279&p=551830#p551830

Thanks Frenchy!

I did see your post on that in an earlier thread. Much appreciated. What I am doing is going the other way, from the sketchup to Moi, and am using wires to rebuild the model there. I think I've got it figured out. Thanks again!

Hi Chip,

Did you try this Obj importer from Max Smirnov?

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=6674.68

http://moi3d.com/forum/get_attachment.php?webtag=MOI&hash=8e7570bc59ea9e111727dcc1a5a5a3dc&filename=importObj.zip

Huhu!
Sorry! Iin the other way it's more difficult if your objects are some complex!
Import small by small seems the only solution today!
In the same session or in multiple sessions!

Thanks Glenn! That's just what I was looking for originally. *Much appreciated!*

I just did finish the model and renders in time for a FAST CO article tomorrow. MoI performed incredibly well-- can't say the same for Keyshot (Mac version)-- tends to crash a lot. Still, the renders turned out sweet. I'll post a link to the article tomorrow sometime. For now, here's the final. Wish I had more time to detail it, but c'est la vie.

Hi Chipp, it turned out really great! It would be cool to see the article too.

- Michael

Article is up at:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3041696/this-drone-ambulance-is-totally-wild-and-totally-inevitable

Compositing could be better, was done very last sec (in fact all three done last night after midnight and before sunrise).

Cool article Chipp!!

- Michael

Thanks Michael. Frankly, I wasn't sure if MoI was up to the task of speed modeling the vehicle. I may have been more mentally at home in Lightwave, where I can find kit bash items if necessary. But Modeler doesn't have the super accurate workflow and strong Boolean and filleting commands MoI has.

FWIW, I've not had good luck doing this sort of hi Rez photo modeling in SketchUp-- just too many things can go wrong and unlike LightWave, it's difficult to hand stitch vertices in the rare case they need help. Plus the SubD plugin, while an amazing feat of programming in Ruby, doesn't have the full features of native SubD implementations of other poly apps.

Time and again I was super thankful for the obvious attention you've paid to this interface, where I would 'discover' a way of solving problems intuitively. The coolest part is, the drone is pretty much buildable at scale on my 3D printer-- I believe it's that accurate. Composed of *mostly* solids (had to separate some solids to surfaces for decaling and material application in Keyshot), the hinge mechanisms and pivots were all worked out pretty much.

All in all a success. I believe I pushed some of the bounds of MoI- 50 or so named objects each with numbers of solids, surfaces and curves. Final export was in the millions of polys in obj format. Imported and rendered beautifully in Keyshot. Though the incremental saves eventually became quite large, MoI didn't hang on me once. Surprised at how robust the Wine implementation is not to mention your fine programming.

At the first view I had believed that was a crash between a car and a drone! :)