I am currently evaluating NURBS modeling software for purchase by the end of the year. I am a non-commercial hobbyist, so cost is a strong factor. It appears that MOI is the least expensive option, but I am considering just going ahead and getting Rhino and be done with it as it seems that I will not outgrow Rhino.

Can you guys convince me that MOI is a better way to go?
Is it possible to get an evaluation copy of V2? V1.2 definitely has missing features that would lead me to go to Rhino instead. I have quite a bit of CAD experience so teh CAd like nature of Rhino is more of a plus than I minus. Also I am very used to using construction planes in my work flow. Will they be fully supported in V2?

Thanks a lot for any input you can provide.

Regards,

John Tucker

Hello,

I think my comments are not so much trying to convince you as they are my impressions. I got demos of both packages, and ended up with MoI. Rhino for me seemed to be overwhelming to some extent, too much going on in the interface. While I don't like to think I'm lazy, I much preferred the clean interface of MoI.

While in terms of features MoI has less at this point, I really think a strong + for MoI is the developers closeness to the users for feedback, requests, education, and implementation. Being in the IT field I have never seen such attention to the customer as with this solution. As a direct result of this, the software has saved me hundreds of hours in cleanup tasks alone (ex. silhouette support... next I hope is hidden line removal).

In addition, I tend to agree more with the measured procedure that is being taken advancing the MoI feature set. I found myself digging through Rhino in order to get where I needed to be, where MoI seemed to get me modeling faster. For me, it is just easy to use, of course my brain might be wired to be more accepting of this type of modeling, as I always had more trouble with poly.

Pricing is a no-brainer, MoI at $295, Rhino at $995. After another evaluation of Solidworks and SCE, I picked up SpaceClaim Engineer / HyperShot HD / Data Exchange I and II. Engineer is ~$2K base, but I think they have a Style edition package that is about $500. I know a few have SCS here, if you were going to drop ~$1K you might think about MoI and SCS, although there are some that can speak about SCS more in depth than me since I am not 100% sure what is taken away from SCE to drive that price down. Hope it helps.

If cost is a big factor, the "10 times more expensive" seems to be a big leap! :O

All owners of V1 can use the beta V2. It is far better. Tools you are missing are there now.

Rhino will have more specialized toolsets to work with. But what are your needs? As a hobbiest are you recieving models from outside vendors and needing to analyze them in different ways?

MoI is a powerful modeler. Not full of 10 trillion different specialized functions though. So the only time I see MoI let anybody down is when they are looking to see if it can "Array-duplicate-curve_twist special-double digit-backflip.....and Michael say's: "Sorry, not yet!".....I may be able to add that in to V3 though...

So I guess if you need to come out of the box doing double dgit backflipping arrayed curves, then you may need to choose rhino. But then again, in Rhino you will need to buy the "Add-On" that does that, so there goes more money! THe cost of those add-ons is fairly large.

MoI's future is Bright. It would not be a poor investment.

Plus of all....The guy that is responding to you in here "Wrote Rhino".

I own and use both MoI and Rhino. I always start a project in MoI and keep it there as much as possible, but there are often things that I cannot do in MoI because some tools are sometimes not there yet, but the main reason to go the Rhino is to be able to use the analysis tools (zebra, environment map etc.) that are essential for me to ensure smoothness and continuity. Also I have Flamingo as an add-on relatively rudimentary renderer. The beauty of this combination is that I can simply copy and paste back and forth between MoI and Rhino. Also, for complex projects, I find it much easier to store parts of a model in Rhino layers, as I have never quite grasped the equivalent feature in MoI.

So the bottom line for me is that MoI and Rhino/Flamingo (and Penguin) work best as a team, but I have to admit that it is a bit of a luxury. However, I could not justify upgrading to Rhino 4.0 and I have to make myself happy with good old 3.0. The only thing I am missing, I feel, is the cage deformer feature, which might come handy in some of the weird things I do with aircraft and ship hulls. The other thing is that Brazil looks like a great rendering software, but it works only with 4.0. But for high-end rendering, I own Modo, to which MoI exports beautifully, but I have not quite mastered yet (and that is an understatement) the very complex user interface of a high end renderer like Modo.

As you can see, I have never been too good at choosing. If only polygamy was not illegal …

OSTexo wrote : "Pricing is a no-brainer, MoI at $295, Rhino at $995"...

Rhino is less than $800 if bought from a reseller online...

Also, someone mentioned the need to use plugins to accomplish advanced tasks in Rhino. That's not true. Many plugins (especially the jewelry-related ones) are not really adding new features as much as they are just wrapping up Rhino functions into a different interface. A lot of scripts are out there for free which can handle a lot of that function too. The most common plugins which "really" add new features are Tsplines, the various CAM plugins, the various render engines, Grasshopper, etc. And you can't factor those into the equation of Rhino vs. MoI because MoI has no equivalent. So it's only fair to look at the price in terms of whether that software fulfills your needs...

jonah

Hi John,

> It appears that MOI is the least expensive option, but I
> am considering just going ahead and getting Rhino and
> be done with it as it seems that I will not outgrow Rhino.
>
> Can you guys convince me that MOI is a better way to go?

Well, it's hard to give a recommendation just in a vacuum, it really depends a lot on what kind of models you want to create.

Do you have some examples of the stuff that you want to do?

If your models are based off of things like Extrusions and Booleans, then the tools already in MoI will probably handle that kind of stuff for you completely, there won't be any "outgrowing" issue.

If you intend to do more exotic or fancy kinds of stuff than that, then it could possibly be an issue, but like you've heard from other people there are many people who like to use MoI and Rhino in combination with one another. That's because MoI has a newer and more streamlined UI design which helps to get the basic stuff done more fluidly and quickly with less learning curve.


> Is it possible to get an evaluation copy of V2?

It will be once v2 is finalized and released, which should be coming up pretty soon.

There is an collection of all the notes on new stuff in v2 here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/doc/V2releasenotes.html


> V1.2 definitely has missing features that would lead me to go to Rhino instead.

Like what kinds of things? If you can list the specifics that you are looking for, I can tell you if they will be in v2 or not.


> I have quite a bit of CAD experience so teh CAd like nature of
> Rhino is more of a plus than I minus.

In this case, Rhino may feel a lot more natural to you than it does to just the average person who does not have AutoCAD experience. If Rhino feels comfortable to you and you like how it works, then probably it would be a good option for you to get it.


> Also I am very used to using construction planes in my
> work flow. Will they be fully supported in V2?

Yes, MoI v2 has added a Construction Plane function so you can relocate the drawing plane (and the Top/Front/Right views) to be oriented relative to a particular local frame of reference so you can more easily draw and model things hanging off of an existing part.


Also, one other factor - MoI actually offers some functions that are not in Rhino at all, such as the ability to export clean n-gon meshes into rendering programs.

So some people actually use MoI along with Rhino in order to use some advanced functionality that MoI has that is not in Rhino, it's not always the other way around.

It's pretty nice to have both because they tend to complement one another and you can move data back and forth easily with Copy/Paste.

- Michael

Hi jonah,

> And you can't factor those into the equation of Rhino vs. MoI
> because MoI has no equivalent.

Just don't forget to also factor in the things that MoI has where there is no equivalent in Rhino, such as generating high quality mesh output including the option for having a clean wireframe with n-gons.

That's actually a hugely important function if you intend to generate mesh output from your model data, which is often needed for a variety of stuff such as exporting to a rendering program.

In fact there are many people who are primarily Rhino users who use MoI for its advanced meshing functionality alone since the meshing in Rhino totally fails for their needs.

It's a very important factor to consider if you will be needing to target mesh output.

Rhino tends to let a lot of people down at that particular stage in their workflow, and it is very frustrating when you have basically finished your model and then want to produce it as mesh data only to have it be completely mangled at that point.

- Michael

Hello,

Pricing is always a factor unless you have unlimited funds. I mentioned price since if he is going to bite the bullet and purchase Rhino, he can perhaps get more useful function tuned to his use for an equivalent price, as opposed to buying something he may or may not ever use.

My thought is there is no one "be all end all" package out there, its just a matter of doing enough research and testing to get the best packages working together for your budget. I happen to think grow with (MoI) is superior to grow into (Rhino).

Knowing what kind of work you do would help to give you suggestions.

Marc

Hi Michael. I wasn't making any direct comparison of either Rhino or MoI. My point was just to take plugins out of the equation and also to look at the real price (not the list price) of each software. Obviously each one has a plus and minus over the other in different ways. Like many people, I agree it's best to not choose and just buy both! But if someone must choose only one, they should be compared as apples to apples, without adding cinnamon and sugar... :)

jonah

INDEED Knowing what kind of work you do would help to give you suggestions.

But in general when you start using MoI you get the filling that, that is how Rhino should be...is all those little details that make MoI very attractive...MoI & Rhino are very similar products...and you could say Rhino is more advance BUT MoI is gonna get there in time, no doubt about that.

Also note both MoI & Rhino have similar limitations so my recommendation would be go for MoI & SpaceClaim Style or MoI & Inventor LT... (both for about $1200) Although Ill personally like to support SpaceClaim I choose Inventor and the main reasons are, a) DWG support is not working as advertised. b) they charge a ridiculous amount of money for the file format translators (inventor LT includes 3dm, Alias, DWG, Catia, ProE, UGS NX, SolidWorks, Sat, Parasolid, etc).

Hello,

Agreed on listed pricing for the translators for SC. They were willing to budge on those in my case, I don't know if it was unique or not. It is a bit much to ask ~50% of core pricing for translators IMO, I would call and see what they can do, as I just told them what I was willing to pay them for the bundle. It doesn't hurt to ask.

OSTexo that's good news, could you elaborate pls. just to be clear, do you mean for the price of SC Style they are willing to include the translators (which ones, all of them ?)

Hello,

In my case I purchased Spaceclaim Engineer, DE packs 1 and 2, HyperShot HD (they were running a Hypershot special and it came out to around $100 with discount applied) and I negotiated to prepay for support in order to get a better deal on that. I doubt they would include the translators at zero cost, but they did discount them in my case with a contingency for buying quickly after I did all my evaluations. I am quite happy with the solution, and find that it fits in quite well with MoI. The model preparation and de-featuring tools alone are extremely helpful in my case when I am having trouble with something not resolving correctly in MoI (my mediocre skills in MoI are showing ), but I am unsure whether these tools make them into the Style edition.

I see, thanks for your prompt reply OSTexo...