Screenshot of MoI

MoI - “Moment of Inspiration” — is a NURBS modeling program developed by Michael Gibson, the man who originally designed Rhinoceros for McNeel and Associates. NURBS modeling offers great flexibility for making complex compound-curved surfaces without sacrificing precision — zoom into a NURBS curve, however far, and it doesn’t break up into segments, it’s always the same mathematically-defined curve. Surfaces based on these splines can therefore be very smooth without taking up a lot of memory, and Boolean operations - subtracting, intersecting or adding one part and another - can work very well. MoI is a lightweight modeling system that’s easy to learn and very stable. Rather than trying to do everything for everyone, it concentrates on what NURBS do best: creating the hard surface models useful for artists and product designers without requiring them to master a huge number of commands, icons, and modes corresponding to functions they don’t need. Free of the constraints posed by parametric solids modelers but more precise than mesh modeling tools, it’s the perfect vehicle for those who wish to quickly work out a 3D concept and export it to their CAM software for CNC machining.

MoI was specifically designed to work well on pen tablet computers, without needing a keyboard in order to function fully. It has an excellent NURBS-to-mesh translator for producing OBJ, STL, and other mesh format files; many users have bought it just for that function alone. It works fine on computers that aren’t hooked up to the Internet, and doesn’t upload your data into the cloud. It’s software that you own and don’t have to pay for continuously, although every few years a new version is announced to which you can optionally upgrade for a portion of the original price. In the meantime, you can participate in the development process by downloading a working beta version and interacting with the designer in an open forum, submitting requests for desired features, and giving feedback on new iterations. And it doesn’t hold your models hostage by locking them up in a proprietary format that will only open with this particular program. MoI licenses are cross platform - you receive both the Windows and the Mac version installers and the same license key can be used with either or both of them. MoI has 90 day free trials for both Windows and Mac. MoI is offered here at an extraordinarily reasonable price.

Manufacturer: MoI 3D