Hi all,

I'm Salvador Ureña, a 3D generalist artist from Barcelona, Spain. I'm very happy to be part of this community.
I just purchased Moi3D and I have the fist question:

Is it possible to manually set the absolute values of the surface points?
Also, I have ODCopyToExternal plugin and it is not working for me, has anyone tried it? If so, can you help me to install and configure the shortcut?

Regards!

Salvador Ureña

Hi Salvador, welcome to the forum and to MoI!

re:
> Is it possible to manually set the absolute values of the surface points?

It is but it will be rather tedious. You'd need to turn on surface control points by selecting it and using Edit > Show Pts, then select a point and run the Transform > Move command. Snap the "Base point" for the move onto the point, and then for the second "Target point" step of the Move command you'd then type in your x,y,z value and push enter.

It would be more normal to enter in the points when you are creating the curves that you would generate surfaces from rather than doing it on the surfaces directly. Like when you're in the curve command drawing a curve you can type in an x,y,z value and push enter to give an absolute coordinate when it's asking you for the next point of the curve or line.


re:
> Also, I have ODCopyToExternal plugin and it is not working for me, has anyone tried it? If so, can
> you help me to install and configure the shortcut?

I'm not familiar with it but it looks like you'd copy all 5 files to the MoI commands sub-folder which should be at C:\Program Files (x86)\MoI 3.0\commands . Then you'd set up 2 shortcut keys, one for copying and one for pasting. For the copying one you'd put in ODCopyToExternal as the command name and for the paste one you'd put in ODPasteFromExternal as the command name.

You also may need to set the option to "Run as administrator" on the shortcut you use to launch MoI since it looks like the script writes a temporary .obj file in the commands folder and by default with regular program privilege level Windows will prevent modifications to anything in the Program Files directory.

The other thing is that trying to paste polygon data into MoI will probably not work very well since MoI is not designed to work with polygon data for modeling, it's designed to work with NURBS surface data for modeling and only exports to polygon data. The plugin converts polygon data by making an individual trimmed surface in MoI from every polygon but that will often result in an unwieldy and very heavy NURBS file and so it's not something I recommend doing. But going the other direction, copying from MoI into a polygon modeling program should be ok.

- Michael

Hi Salvador,

If your points are in a simple file, you could use the ImportPointFile script:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4381.7

The point file could also be made by yourself.

- Brian

Thanks for the responses.

Michael,
Just tested the point move procedure. It works fine, but should be more friendly. :)
Yes, it seems ODPasteFromExternal and ODPasteFromExternal need to be runned as admin, I wonder how to fix this.

bemfarmer,
I normally import/export meshes, seems to work fine, but you cannot (or I don't know how) change tesselation options.

Regards!

Hi Salvador,

re:
> Yes, it seems ODPasteFromExternal and ODPasteFromExternal need to be runned as admin, I wonder how to fix this.

I think it's because as part of its processing it writes an .obj file in the MoI commands sub-folder. The problem with that is that it's underneath the "Program Files" directory and as a security measure Windows will deny write access to that directory for programs running at the default privilege level.

The fix would be to modify the plug-in to write the .obj file to the temp folder instead, but also running MoI with elevated privileges (using "Run as administrator") should also work.

- Michael