Hi Michael,

Why rush out another beta. I would prefer you take a few more weeks to add some of the "objects properties" to the next beta release. (the current beta is active/usable for about 7 more weeks)

Just a personal thought.


Regards,

- Steve

Hi Steve, I was originally planning on waiting until this part was finished, because it is pretty much the major new feature that has been planned for this release.

But on the other hand I've got quite a lot of bug fixes for this release already finished up, and there are a few big ones like this sphere trimming thing that are popping up in several bug reports pretty frequently now.

So I kind of want to get those fixes distributed...

- Michael

quoto steve !!!

MArco

Hi JTB, thanks for the feedback!


> It looks great, I am happy not to read the word "layer"!

Yeah, I don't really want to have a "layer" to be set as a property of an object, because that causes a pretty major restriction of only having an object belong to one layer. That doesn't allow for very flexible grouping or organizing.

I should mention though that this stuff for object properties is one piece - in addition to this I want to have a kind of "scene browser" panel that will provide some stuff for grouping and more "layer-ish" type stuff, this was discussed last month here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1944.1


> Maybe yes, I will have to see this working to fully understand if
> it is better this way.... Generally it is a very nice idea.
> Style is mostly grouping by appearance (for example color,
> linetype etc) so maybe you're right.

We'll see pretty soon! :)

One thing that is nice about focusing on setting a "style" that is a group of properties is that the top level interface there can stay nice and streamlined no matter how many individual properties are added later on. If I tried to provide controls for each individual property in that one spot, it is going to get complicated pretty fast when more are added. I was struggling with this part for quite a while.

I don't mind if there is complexity included in some kind of optional thing (like adding a new style for instance), I just don't want it to kind of bubble up and take over the main UI.

I think there will still be a way to edit individual properties as well, the idea for this is that there will be one style in the drop-down that says "custom", if you choose that you will get a dialog that will allow you to edit individual properties to be applied to just one object. So individual property setting may not need to be totally absent.

But by mainly focusing the primary UI on picking a style, I think it should help to keep the top level more simple over time.


Re: changing the radius of a circle - the plan is for this to work the same way with history as a transform would. If there are objects that have history connecting them to that circle they will update when the circle radius is changed. But there is still work to be done to improve the history mechanism so that the history chain does not get broken so easily, that will be a kind of separate chunk of work from this though.


Thanks!

- Michael

Sounds great so far Michael, no doubt MoI is on its way in becoming a house hold name in the 3d world alongside and maybe surpassing the others like 3ds max, Rhino, Lightwave, Cinema 4D just to name a few, and it's great to be one of the many here to see MoI evolve into a 'can't design without' type package.

Anyway back to business, I have just a couple of questions for now, until I get my head around this new object organisation system a bit more.

What will the new panel show on multiple selections and will you have a filter selection system for each object type, like if I want to select all curves and filter out all other objects from selection ?

P.S. I think someone should update this Wikipedia entry to include MoI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_computer_graphics_software

~Danny~

""What will the new panel show on multiple selections?""

Yes, I would be also interested in how this will work.

Will the panel Extend to fit them all?
Would it display for example "3 curves, 4 solids" or "4 objects in group 1 & 2" ?


Keep up the excellent work!!

Marc

Interesting ideas Michael.
I´m an adopting kind of guy, so I don´t have any suggestions. Looking forward to this update.

Keep up the good work.

Hi Michael:
Any questions (sorry if those questions has been answered yet)
1.- If there aren´t layer, what happens if someone is working with Rhino and MoI?
2.- Then, will be there linetypes soon?
3.- As well as Danny says, it would be very interesting if the Select area offers a filter for colour, linetype...or much better, if the filter let to select with combined properties (like "red dash", "green curves" or any other combination). I think that could be a small floating panel where you can choose puting ticks in a small squares close to the properties.

Anyway, I think that it´s the next big step for MoI and I´m waiting for that! :-)

Hi Michael,

Keep up the good work.

FRESH

Hi Danny, thanks for the feedback!

> What will the new panel show on multiple selections

What I think will happen is if all the objects have the same name, it will show that name there, or otherwise say: (multi) or (varies) in there.

For the type label, if all the selected objects have the same type it will show that type, or otherwise if they are of different types I think it will just say x objects, like: 5 objects.

For the style if all objects have the same style it will show that style, or otherwise say Multiple styles, or (varies) in there too, something like that.


> and will you have a filter selection system for each object type,
> like if I want to select all curves and filter out all other
> objects from selection ?

I do want to have this, but I'm considering that to be a selection helper tool, I'd like to categorize it under the Select tab in the UI. It will be a pretty separate piece of work from the grouping and properties stuff. It is kind of doubtful that this will fit into the v2 timeframe at this point.

There are some existing tools you can use for that though - Petr wrote a custom command for selecting all objects of a particular type which you can get here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/#SelectByType

You can also set up a script on a keyboard shortcut to select or deselect a particular type of object, like for example this one will select all curves:

script:moi.geometryDatabase.getObjects().getCurves().setProperty( 'selected', true );

And various other similar ones (like select closed curves, select solids, etc...) are listed here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/#SelectNaked


Let me know if you have a particular kind of selection task involving object types that you need to do frequently and I probably can cook up a script for a keyboard shortcut that will do it in the current version.

- Michael

Hi Marc,

> Will the panel Extend to fit them all?
> Would it display for example "3 curves, 4 solids" or
> "4 objects in group 1 & 2" ?

It's kind of disruptive to the overall UI to have that panel expand to be too big, so I was thinking it would not do this.

If all the objects were of the same type, then I was thinking I can include that type label there, like "5 curves". Otherwise if they are different, I think I'll just put the number there with a generic label like "5 objects".

But then if you push the Details button I can put up a bigger report listing all the different types inside of the dialog box that pops up for that.

How does that sound?

- Michael

Hi David!

> 1.- If there aren´t layer, what happens if someone is
> working with Rhino and MoI?

Currently this is what I'm thinking - there will be another mechanism for setting up batches or groupings of objects, it was discussed some previously here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1944.1

That is going to be another chunk of work for that, which will happen after this object properties stuff is finished.

I think the way it will work is if you set up your tags/groups in such a way that they are compatible with layers, which means that you have placed each object only to belong underneath one tag instead of multiple tags, then the tags will translate directly to layers when you export. If you have an object belong to multiple tags (which is what I'm hoping to give more flexibility with than traditional layers allows for), then it will just pick one of those groups that it belongs to, to be the "layer" for that object.

So basically if you restrict yourself to only set things up in the same way that layers allows for, then it should be able to translate directly.


> 2.- Then, will be there linetypes soon?

I'm not quite sure, I do have some support in my display engine for linetypes currently, which you can see if you go to Options / Grid:



Increase the grid line width to something like 5 and set the color to black to see what those different styles look like. (After you have finished, push Restore defaults / Current section only to go back to standard grid settings).

However, it may take some extra work to finish up this area for being applied to objects in general. I'm not quite sure yet how long that will take.

re: #3 Selection filter, please see my reply to Danny here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2127.15


Thanks for the feedback!

- Michael

Complicated

Hi George,

> Complicated

Is there any particular part that seems complicated? Or just the whole thing?

I definitely want to keep it simple to do basic things quickly. But there may be several subtle details for how it behaves with multiple selection, etc... - probably once it is actually in front of you and running it will not be as complex as some of my extended and detailed explanations make it seem. But we'll see! :)

- Michael

Hi Michael:

Thanks for your prompt reply!

I had made a sketch of my idea.
Obviously you have the ideas more clear than me, but the sketch was made yet... :-)

Hi Michael,

Probably is my view of the whole thing.

Regards,


George

Hi George, if you have any ideas on how to simplify it, it would be great to hear them!

I appreciate the feedback, but some more specific details on what you don't like would help.

Right now that is really the most simple design that I could come up with so far, after quite a bit of work on it. There are just 3 lines of new controls there...

If that is getting too complex for you, it is possible that you may need to stay on MoI v1 and not upgrade to v2.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Having a long thread/discussion on the probable implementation of this feature will just go around in circles. Why not just finish this part up and release it, we can then discuss the actual implementation and its future development.


- Steve

Hi Steve - it's going to take a fairly substantial effort to finish it up. It can help save a lot of time overall if the direction that I move forward in is largely in line with how it should work finally or not.

If it was particularly quick and easy to do it, then I could make it work more like you are describing where I can just put out the implementation first and get feedback on that.

The more work it takes for me to accomplish the implementation, then the more careful I kind of need to be to try and move in a good direction initially. So it can help me to get some feedback or potential ideas in cases like this.

- Michael