Moment of Inspiration - New NURBS tool

[JohnFredC]

Back in the late 90's McNeel and Assoc. began development of Rhino 3D, a nurbs modeler that has set a new standard for an intuitive user interface for 3D modeling. Nurbs modeling is very different from mesh modeling and the Rhino approach was radically easier to use than its competitors at the time.

McNeel ran the beta effort through a newsgroup (and still does), something new for the time. I participated and a couple of my (small) suggestions were incorporated in Rhino.

Rhino has since become very successful. It is a wonderful tool (now in version 4.0) and though inexpensive in its industry, probably too costly for most of us.

Michael Gibson, one of the original Rhino developers (maybe THE original, the legend is that Rhino grew from his personal project) left McNeel before Rhino was released. He has now resurfaced with a beta of a new Nurbs modeling tool called "Moment of Inspiration" that uses the McNeel "Open Nurbs" (.3dm) file format.

MoI is designed specifically to be used with a tablet and pen(!) if desired. The current beta has a substantial toolset (including parameterization/history) and in my use is quite stable.

Besides the very accessible Nurbs functionality, one interesting thing about MoI is that it has an HTML Javascript GUI. The whole interface lives in a UI folder subordinate to the main program folder. This includes all bitmaps, html snippets, style sheets, .js code, AND translation texts.

Cool!

MoI is freely usable during the beta period. Check it out! The UI is really quite well designed.