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!

Hi Michael,

thanks for this great release!
Dimensions is gonna be a huge timesaver :-)

I have a quick question about the Volume calculator:
I usually work in mm but i would like to have the volume in cm³. mm³ is not that useful as a unit for me, cm³ on the other hand is the same as ml (milliliters) so much more convenient.
So, is it possible to change the unit for the volume calculator independently of the main preferences?





Dinos

Hi dinos,

re:
> So, is it possible to change the unit for the volume calculator independently of the main preferences?

Sorry no there isn't any facility for this built in currently. Right now your choices would be to convert to cm units before the volume calculation, or also just apply the conversion in a calculator. Let's see, 1 cubic mm = 0.001 cubic cm so you'd divide by 1000 in a calculator to get your desired result.

There seems to be various kinds of arithmetic that people want to do on the volume number so I'll see about adding various options there in a future version. Since it only takes such a low amount of effort to use a calculator it's not a priority right now for the v4 release, sorry.

- Michael

No need to exit Moi to find a Calculator! Just use Elephant! :)
Here with some French but existing in Full English!
Don't not yet seen a Volume Node but I have not finished the repository!

Hi Michael,

its not a big deal at all, like you say its just dividing by 1000, so its trivial to do even without a calculator.

thanks,
Dinos

Excited to kick the tires on the new Beta version.

Not sure if this is the proper venue to make suggestions about change or feature requests, but I have a very minor one.

When doing a control clicked on the "view icon (eye)" of a layer which has locked elements on the layer to unlock the items on that layer, if it could automatically select the elements/objects that are being unlocked, that would make identifying and deselecting something that was just unlocked easy to do. This would then allow you to simply de-select a specific item that's just unlocked, then immediately re-lock all the other elements that were just unlocked on that layer.

Release notes added to first message in thread now (http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=9526.1), sorry for the delay.

- Michael

news of the Beta V4 Oct 10 2019 French Version done
Site http://moiscript.weebly.com/v4-quoi-de-neuf.html
Forum : http://moiscript.weebly.com/v4-quoi-de-neuf.html

MoI v4 has come on very nicely thank you, Michael. The Dimension tool in particular is a joy to use.

I'd like to make one request though - would it be possible to have the 'units converter' widget also be available under the new Details... Calc button please? I find it useful when I'm working in mixed units to quickly verify a measurement.


Martin.

Hi, I don't know if the following issue has already been posted:

In the Mac V4 beta, several settings windows overlap and cannot be moved around. For example the export dialogue.

Not sure if this is what you want...but I changed my UI a bit to change the units without going into Settings.

Hi Lestatdelc,

re:
> When doing a control clicked on the "view icon (eye)" of a layer which has locked
> elements on the layer to unlock the items on that layer, if it could automatically
> select the elements/objects that are being unlocked,

It's too risky to modify any selection behavior of the scene browser this late in the beta cycle but I'll see about putting in a switch you can set in moi.ini to enable this behavior.

- Michael

Hi Martin,

re:
> I'd like to make one request though - would it be possible to have the 'units converter'
> widget also be available under the new Details... Calc button please? I find it useful
> when I'm working in mixed units to quickly verify a measurement.

It's definitely a good idea but it's something that I'll look into after the v4 timeframe. There are a lot of requests for different kinds of arithmetic and conversions on those values and I would like to try to cover all of them in one go when I have a chance to work on it.

Thanks,
- Michael