Maxwell is the best but if you have Rhino why bother with MOI?
Just curious, I have no modeling skills, just architectural drawings with Revit and AutoCAD so I need something more for misc models like deco... If you own Rhino what is that you don't find there?
I am asking this because Rhino is cheap and was thinking of buying it but now I will stay with MOI to see how it will go.

Sorry this is very off topic from the thread, but to answer your question - there is really nothing in Moi that Rhino can't do, except for the n-gon meshing and shelling function. So i use it just for that alone. and it will probably be worth it's price as an add-on utility for many Rhino users. I guess we could break down the Rhino vs. Moi issue to a few simple arguments:

TOOLSET
No comparison. Rhino 4 and Moi are in 2 seperate classes. Rhino is quite obviously the winner...

INTERFACE
Many people seem to love the Moi interface. Whereas, the default Rhino interface can feel a bit intimidating to people who are new to Nurbs modeling. This seems to be where Moi is gaining support. It's very easy to grab it and go. The trick to Rhino is creating your own interface and custom tools (by plug-ins, scripts, or macros). I have recently done this, and now it feels very slick. My work environment is completely submersive. I can work with 100% of my monitor assigned to the grid, and pop-up any of my custom tool palettes (directly under my mouse) with a simple click of a hotkey. So the argument of Rhino having a dinosaur UI is a little bogus, that's the opinion of people who've never explored it's full potential for customization. Also, I have my doubts that Moi's "hands-off" UI will be able to grow along with it's toolbox. IMO the advantage goes to Rhino, although i will probably be stoned to death for saying that in this forum... :)

CONCEPT SKETCHING
For some reason, everybody has overlooked the fact that Rhino does (in fact) have a freeform curve sketching tool. It also has 2 styles of calculators for numerical input. But Moi doesn't require to have have one hand on the keyboard to move objects along the Z-axis. The advantage goes to Moi...

COMPLEX OBJECTS
As it was intended, Moi is very nice for modeling concepts. But it doesn't have the tools to develop complex forms. I'm referring to assemblies of many objects, and also of single complex forms. Advantage to Rhino.

So i guess it depends on what you're modeling. If it's just props for architectural renderings, then Moi is perfectly well-suited. But if you are modeling complex shapes, I would go with Rhino.

jonah

Hi Jonah, I'm glad that you're such a dedicated fan of Rhino. I'm still very proud of creating Rhino and I am glad that it has stood the test of time and become useful to so many people.

It's very interesting to me to see you take my older work as an argument against my newer work! :)

But I can understand that because MoI is definitely focused on different things than Rhino. It's certainly true that there are many advanced tools in Rhino that can be very useful for a variety of complex modeling tasks. I would encourage people to download the Rhino demo and give it a try for themselves.

MoI is a lot more about reducing the learning curve, making it simple to do simple things, and enabling a fast sketching workflow, especially with a pen tablet.

As you mention, there are actually a couple of advanced capabilities in MoI that Rhino does not have (N-gon meshing and shelling). But you seem to have missed out on a larger number of more simple things.

Simple things are the area where MoI really shines. You seem to be more interested in major feature lists, but a lot of people are much more affected by how the simple things function.

A partial list of some simple things:

- Drawing a horizontal or vertical line doesn't require touching the keyboard.

- It's possible to easily draw a square with the rectangle tools.

- It's possible to easily draw a cube with the box tools.

- Object snaps are enabled during dragging, so for instance if you want to snap 2 lines together at their ends you can do it just by dragging one, you don't have to use a different tool.

- It's possible to switch between the top and front view with a single click.

- You can optionally select pieces to keep inside of Trim rather than only which pieces to discard.

- There is never an extra dialog or menu that pops up when you do a selection, instead you get a preview glow around the object that will be selected if you click.

- When you do a window selection, there is a preview glow around objects that will be selected by the window.

- When you do an object snap, all snaps that were active are listed instead of only one. Also they are appear in translucent text so they don't obscure your scene.

- Viewport manipulation panel at the bottom of a viewport makes it possible to navigate with a pen tablet, with no keyboard or right click usage.

- Construction lines gives a powerful way to get tangent/perpendicular extensions, in-between points, mirrored points, elevator-mode type z elevation, and more all in a single tool which reduces the number of tools and modes needed.

- Extremely fast meshing for display makes it feasible to work full time in a shaded view.

- Command options are shown in a dedicated area on the side pane, so there are never dialog boxes that pop up and obscure your workspace.


This is only a partial list. To you some of these features may not be important, like you may not care if there are 5 different modes to do what construction lines do, or that there are 4 different fillet tools instead of one fillet tool, since you don't seem to mind complexity and you are willing to spend the time to learn everything and make your own custom UI to handle it. However quite an awful lot of people (I would have to say the vast majority) are not like that. So that might help to explain your confusion about why people are liking MoI.


> Also, I have my doubts that Moi's "hands-off" UI will be able to grow along with it's toolbox.

Well, I'm pretty sure you're wrong about this. I spent a year of time planning and implementing the current UI through several iterations, and it is designed with expansion and future progress in mind. I will be able to add quite a number of additional palettes to the side pane (for example, "Dimension", "Render", "Analyze"), and these will have a very minimal impact to the overall complexity since they will start out collapsed.


Anyway I think your recommendations are correct - if you have complex surfacing needs then you probably need Rhino. Of course that doesn't mean you can't use MoI as well if you want to, it works very well to use MoI and Rhino in conjunction with each other.

I hope that my explanation above might shed some light on why some people are enjoying MoI. I think in general MoI is not always very useful to advanced Rhino users, because advanced Rhino users have already spent the time to become comfortable with the Rhino workflow and they don't really need the simplified workflow as much.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

i hope you don't think i was knocking Moi in any way. It's an impressive program, and very stable for such an early beta. And i am really happy that it has sparked new interest for people to learn Nurbs modeling, despite the common misconception that SDS can model anything under the sun... As you mentioned, there are a few "simple" (but not so simple to implement) features which give Moi an advantage over Rhino, and most notable to me is the consolidation of similar tools such as fillet, blend, etc. Pre-selection highlighting is another one. And believe me, the requests have been numerous on the Rhino forums. And i have been one of the people asking for it... :)

I hope you prove me wrong about the UI limitations that i predicted. But i will explain where my thinking comes from. No use of left hand means more collapsed pallettes onscreen. As i know from my own Rhino experience, a typical modeling workflow requires that you use a particular function just a few times, then you might pick a tool in an unrelated palette, then you pick a tool from another unrelated palette, and so on... Constantly scrolling through tabbed palettes drives me crazy. Of course, it's easy to overcome by using hotkeys to open palettes (as i've set up for Rhino) but that kind of defeats the one-handed approach of Moi. But then again, i'm sure you have some majic tricks up your sleeve...

jonah

Hi Jonah,

> i hope you don't think i was knocking Moi in any way.

No, not at all. I just didn't want to leave the impression that because Rhino has more tools than MoI, that it is universally better in all areas and for all purposes except for shelling and n-gon meshing. There seem to have been some conclusions along these lines in the Rhino newsgroup, but I think that things are rather a bit more complex than that.


> Constantly scrolling through tabbed palettes drives me crazy.

I'm not a fan of scrolling through UI either. That's why part of the design of the MoI palettes is that there isn't any scrolling - if you open up a palette which wouldn't fit on the screen, other palettes will collapse so that you don't have to scroll. This way the set of currently open tools always stays visible on the screen.

But certainly, needing to switch back and forth between different palettes too frequently can be a problem. There are parts of MoI's UI that are specifically designed to reduce this problem.

One big part is the command consolidation, where one command performs multiple functions depending on the selection, for example combining the equivalent of Fillet, FilletEdge, FilletSrf, and FilletPolyline into just one fillet button. A smaller number of buttons makes it easier to have more functionality exposed on the screen simultaneously.

The other big part is not having just one big tabbed palette. Having them grouped into smaller tab chunks makes it more likely that you can have more than one type of activity open simultaneously.

Another factor is that I have tried to group items more according to their activity, to make it more likely that you will use several tools within the same palette.

These factors help to reduce the problem in the current workflow.

Once the problem is reduced to a certain level, it isn't really a big problem anymore. It's not really terrible to switch palettes every once in a while to get to other tools, it is only a major issue if you have to do it with a particularly high frequency.

Many of the tools that will be added in future versions will not be high frequency use tools, for example dimensioning or rendering tools. So I don't think that there is really a reason to worry that adding such tools will destroy the current design...

- Michael

Hi,

Does anybody know about a free non photorealistic rendering systems like a Rhino's plugin Penguin as a companion to MoI? I have found quite amazing ones, but the trouble is that...

1) the viewer RTSC (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/proj/sugcon/) crashes each time even with ply data downloaded from their gallery. It seems to load n-gons from obj files well, though.

2) the real-time rendering system JOT (http://jot.cs.princeton.edu/index.php) is rather reasearch tool. It seems to work only with triangle meshes via his own file format and I am not able to get all the data necessary to fine rendering from MoI's obj files... what a pity!


Petr


ps: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/

< you must change some path in *.bat file. Just have a look at README.txt file
OK But have you successed to launch it?

Resolved!!!
You must install the folder jot at the root of your disk C and not somewhere else!!!
For mysterious reason it want just that
so only
rem *** Change this to root install location ***
set JOT_ROOT=C:\jot
and the shortcut command
C:\jot\batch\jot-config.bat

Exploring the prog seems only object format JOT can be loading !
Format JOT is explain here http://jot.cs.princeton.edu/jot-file-format.txt
Maybe a little abstract for me :)
Maybe some guy has made a plug OBJ ---> JOT :)

There is a script inside for Blender but for an old version !

Some try :)
There are more parameters possible than in the Challenger Space Shuttle :D

But if someone knows how to enter an OBJ format object that will be great!

Hi Pilou,


Someone may have written a plugin or something like this, but I couldn't find it. So I have made a script myself.
The script can be downloaded from kyticka.webzdarma.cz/jot/. Actually, there is merely one file in the package which converts MoI's obj file to JOT's jot format - moi_obj2jot_jot.vbs - you can put this file somewhere and run it. If there is some "obj" file(s) in the same directory, it is processed and a relevant "jot" file(s) is created. If a relevant "jot" file already exists, it is left unaltered. The script creates only vertices, faces and texcoords2 fields. However, the JOT is kind of real-time (non photorealistic) render, thus it is possible directly to adjust camera and lights, rotate, move, scale objects and so on.

Some notes:
ResetView (focus on WYSIWYG window) Press "Shift+V" after you load particular jot file from within jot-cmd window. It adjusts camera so you can see all objects placed into the scene.
Creases: You have to reveal the creases. Select object and go to NPR Stroke editor(Line mode editing)->Mesh tab->Adjust "Crease Detect Angle" slider appropriately->Press "Regen. Creases"
Render image: Press "g" key when WYSIWYG NPR window has focus on. The big_grab000x.png is saved on disc in the current working directory. Alternatively, you can type "grab [scale-factor] [filename]" in the jot-cmd window; e.g. grab 2 scene.png
Render mode menu: Press "Shift-M". Just press Shift-M once again so that it can disappear.
Keyboard commands: ..\jot\manual\pdf\jot.pdf - page 44
Command line: you can handle a scene via typing commands in the jot-cmd window, i.e. hide/show object, rename object, list objects, delete object and so forth. For details on it, go to kyticka.webzdarma.cz/jot/commands.html.


Petr

Hi Tyglik
Speedy test :)
Your script seems works very fine
Just a try with a simple sphere from Moi
I have not refound how select other lines than the boundary but not passed many time on it :)
(seems all "front faces lines" can't be selected but one more time I have not time to explore )
and sorry i have not very well reading your text Only the the "Shift V "!!!!
I must re read it !
Here the file obj from your script result and one little image in JOT :) tyglic
Bravo and many thx for your incredible work and reactivity !

So any 3D objects in only triangles from Moi can be now exported to Jot !
It's a new task !

ps I have re- read your text and effectivly it was the "Stroke editor(Line mode editing)->Mesh tab->Adjust "Crease Detect Angle" slider appropriately->Press "Regen. Creases"" who permit to refound the original form :) (tiklic1)
No more time now for play with it :D

That's very cool Petr, that turns it from a purely academic research project into something useful!

- Michael

Hi Jonah,

>>there is really nothing in Moi that Rhino can't do, except for the n-gon meshing and shelling function.

I don't agree ... this is why I think that MoI is a excellent companion to Rhino unless you have bought powersolids ...

Petr

>Just a question :you said "MoI obj", it's not valuable for any Object from other prog s in obj format?(in all triangles made of course)

It depends on how particular program differs in file structure from MoI's obj. if you'd be interested to convert an output from some particular program, you can post obj file so that I could try to look it for.

Petr

True enough, Petr. I tried your experiment in both Rhino and Moi and got the same results as you. Rhino was able to do solve the fillet around the edge of the sphere only if i reduced the radius to 0.2. As many people know Rhino has some limitations due to it's intersection code. This surely must affect it's filleting tool. It's something RMA has needed to improve for quite a while... Power Solids i've always thought was too expensive. But Moi seems it will have a more reasonable price, and will be a nice compliment for Rhino users i agree. 99% sure i will buy it.

jonah



>>there is really nothing in Moi that Rhino can't do, except for the n-gon meshing and shelling function.

I don't agree ... this is why I think that MoI is a excellent companion to Rhino unless you have bought powersolids ...

Petr