Thanks Michael, AlexPolo and Eric!

Michael, I appreciate the incredibly detailed response, and agree that MoI has a special place that is separate from most Mech CAD software. I do not want to try to bend it into some poor-man's Solidworks, that would be doing MoI a disservice.

I do have to admit that I still don't agree that MoI has no place as a mechanical modeling tool - I think the ability to throw together very fast sketches in an intuitive manner and rapidly realize a design with a minimal interface clutter allows it to go much further than most other modelers into even relatively complex projects, it's ethos as a lightweight modeler can actually be a tremendous advantage in this area. When I watch someone struggling to do a rapid sketch to add a component in SolidWorks or Fusion 360 I find myself thinking back to why it is that I love MoI.

The real disadvantage of MoI comes when you want to modify a complex design down the road, and this is where I think a changes like allowing some kind of operations history/editor along with hierarchy would be tremendously useful!

Organizational features that are broad enough could allow for most of the things I am talking about, and more e.g. hierarchy could both allow you to have assembly groups and sub-groups, and also allow for you to link images to a particular part or group by dropping an image object under another object. You could allow any type of object to be a child, and leave it to users to come up with neat future uses for that.

The same goes for annotations, if you can have a "text" object that can be added as a child to any other object, and that has a name, it would be easy to add information like suppliers, web links, etc. Text objects could be allowed to feed the text tool, so for example, extruded text boolean-differenced out of a solid to create an engraved look could be modified later by modifying the original text object.

The same goes for instancing, and allowing outside links. Here, for example, you could allow a user to modify a linked image, in say Photoshop, and have the changes permute directly back into MoI without having to reload and re-orient the image reference.

I hope you don't take my suggestions as presumptuous or critical. MoI is very much your baby and you have done an amazing job with it. I love it as a lightweight CAD package and I really have never found anything more intuitive or enjoyable to work in. I agree with everyone else that the seamless MoI -> Rhino integration is great, and also that I just don't want to use anything else after using this combo.

-FDP

Hi FDP, don't get me wrong, I definitely do want to get some things that you mentioned to work in MoI relatively soon like hierarchical groups and instancing. But other things you were asking about are either further away than v4 or maybe never... I didn't mean to be negative or sound irritated in my explanations I just don't want to "sugarcoat" those types of things that are not likely to happen soon (or at all) so that you can plan accordingly. If features in Solidworks would help you get your job done with less work right now then using Solidworks would probably be a good idea for you. That doesn't mean that you can't still use MoI in areas where it does a good job, especially in early stages for concept modeling and quick drawing.


> The real disadvantage of MoI comes when you want to modify a complex design
> down the road, and this is where I think a changes like allowing some kind of
> operations history/editor along with hierarchy would be tremendously useful!

Yup, that's definitely correct - if you're at the stage where you're setting up mechanical part production and you know you will adjusting diameters and producing families of parts that's a stage where you would probably be better off with parametric functions in Solidworks. I certainly agree that this would be useful to have in MoI as well and it is something that I do hope to add into MoI. But there will be a lot of work involved in bringing that to MoI and I thought you were asking specifically if it would be in MoI v4, not just if it would ever be in MoI in the future.


> Organizational features that are broad enough could allow for most of the things I am talking
> about, and more <...>

So the unfortunate thing about this part is that making very broad functions can also take a lot more design and implementation work on my side. The "drop an image object under another object" is a good example of that - currently background images are a separate type of entity in MoI than a geometry object and trying to make them behave the same as geometry in grouping and hierarchy doesn't just come along automatically, it would probably involve some amount of internal redesign for that to happen.

The main focus of images in MoI is to make it possible to bring in a background image to use as a tracing reference, so the current implementation is tuned for that use, not for using it as a descriptive annotation like it sounds like you're looking for?


> The same goes for instancing, and allowing outside links. Here, for example, you could allow
> a user to modify a linked image, in say Photoshop, and have the changes permute directly
> back into MoI without having to reload and re-orient the image reference.

So again unfortunately there would be a substantial amount of work involved on my end to implement all the details that would actually enable that to happen. I have to weigh that work against the benefit that would be gained. Like I mentioned above the main use case for images in MoI is that they're intended to be used as a reference image like a scanned blueprint for example. If you have such an image that you are using as a background image in MoI there isn't much use in editing it in Photoshop dynamically.

If you have a very different use case like if you wanted the image to be part of some extensive 2D printed document that you wanted to create entirely inside of MoI like a Desktop Publishing app, then that type of live linking would be useful. But it would take a whole lot more work to set up "Desktop Publishing" level image infrastructure in MoI than it did to set up "image backdrop for tracing" infrastructure.

You've got to remember that I'm just one person working on MoI, so my resources are very limited. The more narrowly scoped and specifically targeted something is, usually goes along with a less intensive implementation as well. If I were to target all features in MoI to be flexible enough to be used for areas other than as modeling aids, each of those things would take a lot more of my time to work on and then since my time is limited the cost is that other features wouldn't happen.



> I hope you don't take my suggestions as presumptuous or critical.

I certainly took no offense and I did not intend to reply negatively, I'm sorry if it came across that way. I'm just trying to explain how MoI at its essence a pretty focused tool and if you are doing work outside of that focus area then some other broader tool like Solidworks is likely to be a better fit for those areas of your work.

I do expect to add more functionality to MoI over time, including in several areas that you're asking about. But some things that you listed like for example having a web link attached to something in your drawing, would be something for generating production type 2D drawings, it's just not an area that MoI is focused on right now. Some basic annotations like simple dimensions are pretty high on my target list but I only expect to have those at a simple level especially at first.

- Michael

A basic dimension system,choosing like A4 or A3 format then export sheet in PDF should be good enough for most of us ;)

Thanks Michael,
I did not take any offense to your initial response, just wanted to be clear that I don't mean to be pushy! Being the sole force behind a piece of software like MoI seems like an enormous undertaking in itself, let alone trying to continuously grow that software and deal with customer requests and support.

For the linked picture reference I think I just confused things a bit. Sometimes I will edit a reference image after loading it (for example to increase contrast on edges), but I'm pretty sure that MoI reloads the images when you re-load a file anyway, so this isn't a big issue (and of course you already have the "reload" button). Mainly I just wish that if I moved some curves I generated from a reference image the image could stay locked to the curves.

I've use MoI for both mechanical and artistic uses (for me as a designer they often mix together) and have found that it plays very nicely with 2D software for vector output as well as 3D 3rd party software through IGES or Step and .obj/.stl for 3D printing. The only issue I've had in mixed workflow are face direction being broken on occasion, otherwise it has fed everything from graphic arts to gaming workflows with relative ease.

Hi All,

Even though parametric tools like Solidworks have strong merits I find that as part of my work flow I store base geometry in hidden layers or object names I can reconstruct even complex models very quickly by going back to base build stage. Perhaps in this workflow having a ARCHIVE HIDE function as I find switching individual layers/objects on and off in complex models the only repetitive function - that way the base build parts could be kept hidden withing the model and only switched back on when really required. As far placing parts in complex models a more advanced ORIENT tools like multi point orientation so that you can precisely place parts into large assemblies would certainly help. Minor thoughts.

Hi AlexPolo,
I essentially do the same as you - I tend to break models down into the base curves, and then steps for each operation to get to the final model and I hide the base geometry. The thing is, if you create an extrusion, for example, from a base curve and then directly edit the base curve you will see that the changes permute through to the extruded geometry (the same is true for making changes to mirrored or arrayed geometry). There is a one-step limit to this functionality at the moment, but it is there in some form.

I pretty routinely have 11-12 steps to get to a final geometry, and more importantly, have secondary geometry that is linked to a primary (take, for example, a part that fits into another part with a gap that is formed using the curve offset command). Here the existing MoI methodology can necessitate significant rebuilt times based on pretty simple base curve changes, even if there is a straight-forward procedure outlined by careful object naming (hours in the worst cases when multiple parts depend on each other).

From my perspective, having to manually do the rebuild is really where the workflow gets killed, even if it were easier to organize the manual steps from a user perspective, the real solution is just tracking the operations history of an object and allowing for it to be rebuilt based on changes to the input geometry. Another side effect of relying on hidden geometry is that file sizes are significantly impacted by having multiple copies of everything (I get into the 250MB size sometimes for relatively simple final models just from having all the internal revisions as separate hidden objects).

In some CAD software every object has it's own internal plane associated with it, and then a vector transform is applied to place the object geometry into the world view. I think without this ability for an object to have its own internal plane and then a transform attached you can't ever really do assemblies properly, as you can't know whether the object is in world space or object space.

My personal solution to these workflow issues at the moment is to feed MoI curves into Rhino and then use Grasshopper to set up a parametric workflow. There are a few really annoying issues in Grasshopper, but since they allow for Python scripting I can almost always write a little function to get myself around most of them, or add functionality as needed. The thing is that 90% of what I'm doing could just be done with the above-outline workflow in MoI, and Rhino + Grasshopper requires two relative large screens to really use effectively. Also, jumping into Rhino and invoking grasshopper kills the speed efficiency I get from using MoI in the first place. I have never found anything that works as well on one screen of almost any size as MoI - Michael pretty much nailed CAD UI better than any other software I have ever used (Maya, Houdini, Rhino, Solidworks, 3DS Max, Blender, Sketchup).

For multi-point orientation, I usually create a circle from 3-points on a circle found in a piece of input geometry and then use the created curve to manage rotations and scaling of the part. Not going to solve it for something super-complex, but I have found the process to be somewhat painless. It would be really nice to be able to have a quick command to temporarily turn any subsequent curves into a piece of temporary measurement/orientation geometry, and then allow for an close command to delete all those curves. Seems like low-hanging fruit and could allow for faster sketching (going to go see if this already exists).

Hi Michael ...

Will the V4 Beta include some basic dimensions? and, if so, will it incorporate into Rhino?

While Rhino and MoI are well integrated now once I switch to Rhino for some finish work it is not easy to switch back as dimensions and Rhino text don't show in MoI.

My goal is to do more work in MoI and less in Rhino.

cheers,
eric

Hi eric, the first v4 beta will not have dimensions yet, it will have the same features as v3 initially except that it will be 64-bit and a native Mac build.

After the first beta is out then I'll be working on new features and basic dimensions are high on my radar so I hope to be able to work on them during the beta period. But I don't know exactly when they will be implemented or how they will interact with Rhino dimensions yet, I won't know more details about that area until I've been able to spend some time on it.

- Michael

Thanks Michael.
I'm glad to hear that dimensions are fairly high on your priority list.
In my anticipation I forget that first you have to do a major rebuild before you can get to the details.
MoI is delightful for modeling and pretty good at basic 2d stuff. Unfortunately much of architectural work is in the 2d details and dimensions.
I just look forward to the day when I can keep working in MoI most of the time.
cheers,
eric

Hi eric, yeah it's been pretty frustrating to do all this work just to get back to the same feature set to start with. It would definitely be more fun to have been working on new features instead of the rewrite. But I do get an awful lot of questions relating to running out of memory and various quirks in the Mac version. So having those things ironed out really well will be worth it in the long run. It's one of those things where it just gets harder and harder the more you put it off!

It won't be too much longer before the first v4 beta, I still have just one big area to work on which is the viewport display.

- Michael