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
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