Resources

Links to useful MoI information on the web      (Version Française ici)

MoI home page

MoI discussion forum

Frequently Asked Questions

MoI help file online      (French)  (German)  (Spanish)  (Italian)

Shortcut Keys

Hidden Secrets

Scripting

Petr's MoI page, contains a variety of MoI information including scripts and custom commands.

(French version of the Petr's page added for the V2)

V3 Beta release notes

Language packs: (Spanish v2 update)  (Italian UI and help file) (French v2 update) (German v2 update)

Tutorials

MoI documentation video tutorials

Introductory videos by Tom Meeks - videos with narration covering a lot of basics.

Introduction and overview PDF by Fabien Franzen

Nigel's video tutorials - excellent overview of some fundamentals like view navigation, etc...

Steph's video tutorials - note one of the older quicktime ones needs this codec, and you may need to hit "reload" on your browser after waiting for it to load before it will play.

Mike Maynard's tutorials, and here 18 of them in French by Pilou

Daniele's halogen lamp video tutorial

Video from lyes on modeling a SpacePilot controller

Vimeo channel with tutorials from lyes

Joe's classical column video tutorials

Japanese bathtub tutorial

Object repair tutorial

Ring tutorial by Jesse Kaufman, and #2, #3, #4, #5, #6

Simple ring using rail revolve, and variant using sweep + scaling rail for more control

Product design forums modeling challenges (not specific to MoI but useful for general CAD modeling strategy).

Simple Intarsia type design

Creating a 3-toed base foot

Modeling a water can out of one smooth surface

Ferrari 599 GTB tutorial videos by lyes

Snowman figure by PaQ

Accurate tapers using Expressions by Danny

Discussions on ship hull techniques

Videos: Functions of the Manual by Pilou (in French)

Making accurate screw threads video from OSTexo

Flow workflow video from danperk

Helper programs

Some standalone small programs to help accomplish specific tasks.

Obj23dmWireframe converter

Download Obj23dmWireframe converter

This enables bringing polygon data in an .obj file into MoI to use as a construction guide. Unzip it to some folder, and then you can run the Obj23dmWireframe.exe program. It will prompt you for the name of an .obj file to read, and after that the name of a .3dm file to create. It will read all the polygon data from the obj file and convert the edges of polygons into line segments, and then write those line segments to the 3dm file. You can then load that 3dm file into MoI and use those line segments to snap on to. Originally posted on the forum here.

3dmCurves2DXF converter

Download 3dmCurves2DXF converter

This enables converting curves from .3dm to .dxf format, to help export data from MoI to some CAM programs. Unzip it to some folder, and then run the 3dmCurves2DXF.exe program. It will ask you for the name of an input .3dm file, and then the name of an output .dxf file. It will read through the input .3dm file and convert any curve objects it finds to Spline entities in the DXF file. Originally posted on the forum here.

MergeOBJ utility

Download MergeOBJ utility

This utility program can combine several input OBJ files into one single OBJ file. This may be useful if you want to build up a set of different OBJ files possibly by exporting pieces with different mesh settings, and then combine them into one OBJ file if your target program wants to work with only a single file. This was created because the freely available mesh editing tools have a tendency to remove vertex normals when combining files together, this utility will preserve vertex normals. Announced on the forum here.

Blender importer

Download Blender import script

Anthony D'Agostino wrote a custom blender .lwo import script to enable exporting data from MoI to Blender while preserving the accurate vertex normals to get high quality smooth shading. To use the script, you need to turn vertex welding off when you export from MoI - in the Mesh options dialog, click the small arrow in the lower-left corner to expand to detailed options, and uncheck "Weld vertices along normals". Getting the accurate normals makes a significant difference in increasing render quality, it eliminates small shading glitches that happen when the shading normals are created just from averaging adjacent polygons. More information in the forum post. Also see this other forum post for a link to Anthony's custom build of Blender that does not throw out normals and recalculate them for rendering.

Old utilities

These utilities were to help with MoI v1 which did not export material assignments to OBJ files. Since MoI v2 can control material assignments by assigning Styles, these are no longer necessary but are still included here for v1 users.
    SeparateOBJ editor - Breaks an OBJ file exported from MoI v1 into smaller pieces and puts separate material assignments on each piece for import into programs that require that.
    MergeOBJ editor (old version) - Edits an OBJ file to combine all the different objects in it into one single object so there will be just one material for the whole thing.