Hi George, if you click on the number for Length, Area, or Volume number it will get copied to the clipboard. Either left click or right click should do the same thing. It does not pop up a menu though since other things that would be on the menu like "Select All" or "Delete" don't really make sense there. It just gets copied with the click itself.

- Michael

There is no Calcul Mass * Volume ?

Hi Pilou,

re:
> There is no Calcul Mass * Volume ?

Not currently but that's something that I would like to add in the future when I have a chance to design the UI for it. But if there are quite a lot of things to consider for it like should there be a list of materials that you pick from, do you need to enter in your own material types, is it necessary to have different densities assigned to different objects and have the mass of all of them computed together?

If all you need is a simple Mass = Density * volume calculation that is something done very easily with a calculator once you have the volume.

- Michael

Maybe you can just put a link to it! ;)

Like this shortcut directly inside Moi second column ;)

moi.filesystem.shellExecute( 'http://www.calculatoredge.com/matweight/material%20wt.htm' );

Hi Pilou,

> Maybe you can just put a link to it! ;)
>
> Like this shortcut directly inside Moi second column ;)
>
> moi.filesystem.shellExecute( 'http://www.calculatoredge.com/matweight/material%20wt.htm' );

Sorry, no it's not a good idea to have a link to a third party website like that embedded directly inside MoI. There are too many factors out of my control that can break it, like they change their domain name or even just reorganize their site so the address is a little different.

I'd recommend just keeping the link in your web browser's bookmarks.

- Michael

Sure...was just a suggestion :)

Thank you,

Worked as described above.

No problem George - I think I'll add in a little message there like "Copied to clipboard" when you click on that so that you can tell that it did something.

- Michael

hi

GREAT JOB Michael

Can you add something like the next GIF for small dimensions ?

Chri

It seems to me the fbx export is broken. The files aren't readable by our 3D software afterwards. No matter what fbx version I choose for the export.

Currently I need t o change the date to run the previous version of MoI to be able to export to fbx. Would be awesome if you could take a look at it.

Hi Chri,

> Can you add something like the next GIF for small dimensions ?

Yup, probably at first it will be a manual toggle instead of an auto switching thing.

- Michael

Hi sconstable,

re:
> It seems to me the fbx export is broken. The files aren't readable by our 3D software
> afterwards. No matter what fbx version I choose for the export.

There are some other changes for FBX format, it now supports writing object names and materials to the FBX file.

What is the other software that can't import them now?

You can disable the materials export by a setting in moi.ini :

[FBX Export]
WriteMaterials=n

Does that make any difference with that set?

Can you please post an example .fbx file that isn't read by your other software?

Thanks,
- Michael

As I am becoming more familiar with how these dimensions work I am also realizing what a clever and potentially powerful implementation it is. And it's actually not that difficult to add dimensions to a 3D model should you choose to do what's not allowed ;)

And with the Cplane you can dimension any 3D thing not orthodox mechanical drawing! ;)

Hi Terry, that sure is looking nice! Now if you can make a PDF that looks like that too that's going to be pretty convenient.

So maybe the key to making the "forbidden style" easier is to have some more options for setting the construction plane. Maybe something like a "quick cplane" that will set it to a select face just for the duration of one command and then automatically restore it. Something to experiment with after v4 is wrapped up.

One of the problems with not projecting them is that it's pretty unexpected I think to place dimensions in an ortho view say like this:



And then to get this type of result:



When I saw that happening it was kind of "uh-oh that's probably not so good".

But if you really want to give non-projected a try it's actually possible to do that. Edit the text file DimLinear.js inside the install commands folder, and on line 7 change this:

    pointpicker.projectToCPlane = true;

to this:

    //pointpicker.projectToCPlane = true;

- Michael

>Now if you can make a PDF that looks like that too that's going to be pretty convenient."

Yes, that is key to being able to communicate fabrication details and I'm looking forward to it.

>So maybe the key to making the "forbidden style" easier is to have some more options for setting the construction plane."

Maybe. Don't get me wrong. I agree with what you are saying. It's just that sometimes it's helpful for the guys who will be building your design to ALSO see the dimensions on a 3D view. I was just saying that it's not really difficult to draw them directly in the perspective view with the current implementation. If you have ideas to make that even easier, great but only if it's not too difficult and time consuming. I'd rather you got the export function going. I prefer to export as AI for formatting rather than directly to PDF.

By the way, I love the fact that the dialog can stay open while you work. I would just like to be able to set up defaults and maybe be able to save multiple setups.

Great work and thank you.

Terry

Thanks Terry,

> I prefer to export as AI for formatting rather than directly to PDF.

AI and PDF are similar enough that they should be able to use the same mechanism between them.

The thing that's most problematic is text, PDF/AI does not allow a full 4x4 matrix transform on text, so for a perspective view the regular postscript type text entity isn't usable for perspective text, it has to be rendered some other way.


re:
> I would just like to be able to set up defaults and maybe be able to save multiple setups.

Yup, this is the next area of work. This will probably be going in the Options dialog where you will be able to create some presets of annotation properties and then in each annotation command there will be a Preset: dropdown where you can choose which one you want to use for that one you're making.

Maybe one preset named "Default" will get stored in your moi.ini file so it's there for all new projects and other presets will be stored in .3dm files.

I'll know more once I dig into it some.

- Michael

'I like to incorporate elements from both of these worlds but sometimes they are in conflict with each other.' - Michael

A position that MoI seems to uniquely fill so well (especially those of us having to integrate with Rhino) - so from all us engineering types - please keep this up!!

- Rich

Thanks!

Thanks a lot!