Monday, September 22nd, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Michael Gibson releases MoI 3

Former Rhino developer Michael Gibson has begun shipping MoI (Moment of Inspiration) 3, the long-awaited update to his lightweight, intuitive NURBS modelling software.

And in this case, ‘long-awaited’ means just that: MoI 3 was originally released in beta in 2011.

“Feels great having V3 being active, it’s been a long time coming!” commented Gibson in his forum post announcing the release.

Lots of new modelling options
For the minute, MOI 3 is a ‘soft release’, so while you can order the software, the website hasn’t been updated with a full official features list.

However, the wiki collates all the release notes from the individual betas – and there’s a lot of new stuff.

First up, there are a number of new modelling tools. Twist is fairly self-explanatory; Flow wraps geometry over a surface; and Extrude to point and Extrude Tapered options generate cones and angled slopes.

There are also new options to create and trim surfaces using isocurves, to fill n-sided holes in surfaces, and to construct variable-radius fillets: shown in the video at the top of the story.

140922_MoI3

There’s even a rather neat auto-Boolean option for faces (above), which makes a selected face automatically Boolean union or Boolean subtract the base geometry when dragged in or out.

DXF import and export has been added, and PDF and AI export have been improved, with new options for automatic hidden-line removal when exporting to all three formats.

Multi-core and multi-touch support
Under the hood, the draw engine now supports multiple CPU cores, resulting in a speed boost “in the range of 2x to 3x” when displaying more complex models.

And MoI now supports multi-touch on Mac OS X 10.7 and above and Windows 8. You can see a video of it running on a Samsung ATIV 700T tablet PC on the MoI forum.

Pricing and availability
MoI 3 is available now for Windows and Mac. A new licence costs $295. You can currently only order directly via the online store (link below), but the site should be updated later this week.

Read Michael Gibson’s release announcement for MoI 3 on the MoI forum

Read about the new features in MoI 3 in the Wiki

Order MoI 3 from the online store