The layers system is great - with one caveat - I don’t like the fact that when you are using a tool and select something from there it automatically defaults back to the main selection tool. It would be a great time saver if the current tool remained selected.
Also a hot key or button for smooth shading from wireframe would be nice. This is one of the things that come in very handy in ViaCad.
If I understand your request you already can - ‘option + V’ toggles the smooth shading on and off.
I’m trying the ‘option+v’ toggle in EIM 5.0.2 on a Mac. It doesn’t affect the shading mode. Tried some other combinations too. Shading mode unchanged.
I’m on a Mac mini 1.42Ghz PPC. Maybe my graphics card doesn’t cut it?
[left]Option + V didn’t work for me either. Selecting the Control key or right mouse button does give you access to the Draw level.
I also did a quick scan of the manual’s shortcuts and didn’t see anything… but it was a quick scan…
I’m on a G4/400 OSX 10.2.8 EIM 5.02
I’m curious… how well does the Mac Mini work with EIAS/EIM? I’m in a bit of a pickle, I’m buying a house but my Mac is a vintage '99 machine and the monitor is acting up a bit. I was hoping to raise some cash selling off stuff before/during and after I move so I could upgrade my machine and EIAS.
I’d love to go with the Pro stuff, but reality for a struggling hobbiest/dabbling artist says a Mac Mini and a Macbook pairing would smoke my G4/400. I’m just a little worried about EITG’s new version requirements vs a low end Mac. I was considering a PC…but my gut instinc says Apple still has the ease of use/less pain in the butt OS.
Thanks,
Mike
[/left]
Hi Mike,
I’m using EIAS 6.5.2 and EIM 5.02 on my ‘ancient’ PPC Mac mini maxed out to 1GB RAM. They run quite well. For demanding renders I use Renderama and render out to a dual 2.0GHz PPC G5.
I think an Intel Mac mini would perform better than my configuration, as long as you have versions of EIAS and EIM that can run native or in Rosetta.
Aziz.
I’m using EIM V5.0 - it was the last release and not a beta.
I’m surprised option+V doesn’t work for you. It worked under OS 9.2 and also on OSX 10.4.2.
I have a mac mini I use with EIM, works great. I dont really render on it, but the 6.6 render times I got were faster than (6.5 or 6.6) my G5.
Note, RAM is limited, and the graphics card is not bad, but not professional by any stretch. But I would replace an old machine in a heartbeat with a mini.
Cj
cjberg & AzOne thanks for the info.
Sure wish Apple would offer a $1500 tower…
cheers,
Mike
EIM addition: BREP (Boundary Representation AKA Manifold Volume) tool.
This is something Amapi Pro has: you create a series of intersecting surfaces that describe an enclosed volume, and this tool will do the necessary booleaning and stitching and flash-deleting to produce this enclosed volume in just one step.
Post-resurrection, I’d encourage the EIM team to really take a look at the ways Amapi Pro (an app with an uncertain future, as the original French programming team has been disbanded) does certain things in a very interactive way. Here I am beveling this cube by clicking each edge while in the beveling tool context, the app recomputing the bevels as I add or substract edges (it can work non-interactively, too, if I anticipate it’s going to be too processing-heavy), and letting me try tool variations instantly (see the top center bevel options toolbar), or increase and decrease bevel depth by means of the + and - keys. When I am satisfied, I OK the operation.
In general, Amapi feels like a NURBS-based Hexagon (it’s the other way round, actually). What Amapi and most SDS apps do quite well is provide very interactive tools. On the other hand, they lack the robustness, exactness and ease of use a traditional four view 3D modeler has, them being so single perspective view-centered, four views sort of an afterthought (ViaCAD suffers from being a single viewer app big time). As fun as Amapi is supposed to be, its single window cursor system is so irritatingly cumbersome and its four view system so unconvincing that I always gravitate back to EIM: it is far more agile.
But there are things to be learned from it and the like.
Whoa… you don’t lke EIM’s snapping? I haven’t used Rhino, but I thought EIM had really good snapping: snap to point/edge/surface (all of which can be toggled independently), constrain-x, constrain-y, constrain-z, etc. I’m now curious to hear about Rhino’s snapping. Could you tell us a little about how it’s better than EIM’s?
–ChiralSym
EIM additions:
More import/export options. For example, Object to SAT and vice versa. Now that would make me very happy.
Jim Mulcahy
Whoa… you don’t lke EIM’s snapping?
EIM’s snapping lacked feedback. Many times you moved points together then later an operation like sweep or round failed. Then you would zoom in really, really close, and find that the points didn’t actually connect.
In MoI, when the point snaps, it JUMPS across the screen to connect. There is no doubt that you’ve successfully snapped. In fact, sometimes to avoid having it snap you need to zoom in to allow placing the point close to, but not touching, another snap point.
Also, MoI’s snaps are just more user friendly. You get pop up inferences that tell you what thing you’re about to align to such as Tangent, Perpendicular, Same Height, Center, etc.
What amazes me most about EIM is that EI has always said that feature bloat was a waste and that usability was the key. Features that didn’t work well were useless to the customer. (Which justifies some things in EIAS, I suppose.) Then they released EIM with it’s plethora of features, but the $#@% thing crashed and failed and generally was a bear to work with.
Then came MoI and all was well.
I have my hopes that EIM will mature into something good, but at the time it was dropped, I had already ceased using it.
[QUOTE=ChiralSym]Whoa… you don’t lke EIM’s snapping? I haven’t used Rhino, but I thought EIM had really good snapping: snap to point/edge/surface (all of which can be toggled independently), constrain-x, constrain-y, constrain-z, etc. I’m now curious to hear about Rhino’s snapping. Could you tell us a little about how it’s better than EIM’s?
If you compare other mid range modelers such as Rhino, MOI, ViaCad, Hexagon and Silo, you get some sort of positive feedback telling you that the snap has indeed worked. More often than not, particularly working with the surface tools, this does not happen with EIM. As has been pointed out already, you may think that you have snapped to whatever you are snapping to only to discover that it hasn’t because the operation you are trying to perform has failed. The only recourse seems to be to zoom right in and try again - which sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. Its frustrating, time consuming and makes life an awful lot more complicated than it needs to be.
I like MOI’s feedback a lot, there is absolutely no ambiguity about it and I think if the app is developed further to fill in some of the gaps needed when modeling a complex project it could be spectacular.
I especially like Rhino V4’s snapping. In V4 they stole a little of ViaCad’s snapping gizmo but made it friendlier to use. In Rhino a little name tag pops up near the mouse pointer telling one what sort of snap is about to occur and what choices are close by. Easily the best snapping I’ve encountered. Never once was there a mistake…even booleaned/partial circles still maintain their ‘center’ snap locator.
In the last weeks i played with the beta of Rhino for the Mac and
what i really liked was the collaboration between Rhino and the
3D Space navigator from 3Dconnexion.
So please, please, please…
fantomaz