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MoI V2 Released

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Michael Gibson, the one man company called Triple Squid Software Design, announced on his forum that version 2 of his Moment Of Inspiration solid modeling system has been released. V2 is priced at $295 with a V1 upgrade price of $100. Earlier Michael had mentioned to me that the price of MoI would not always stay at $195. He said that it would go up in increments of $100 over the next several releases, which is precisely what had happened.

According to Michael’s announcement, V2 has been in development for over two years and among other things the new features include:

  • Scene browser for manipulating sets of objects
  • Styles for setting up material assignments
  • Edit frame for quick scaling and rotation
  • New lighting engine for a greatly improved shaded display
  • New object orientation and positioning tools
  • Added file format support (SAT, STEP, FBX, and SketchUP)

A detailed list of new features can be seen from the V2 Beta Release Notes. Judging from the sheer length of that web page you can get an idea that Michael has been quite busy from the past two years. You can order MoI V2 from here.

One of the most elegant things about MoI software is its clean and simple user interface. As Michael puts it on his web site:

MoI’s sleek intuitive UI blends a fluid easy workflow with powerful tools, making it the perfect choice for someone who has been frustrated with the complexity of existing CAD tools.

Here is a screen shot of a piston stored in ACIS SAT format imported into the latest MoI V2 Beta.

Click image for larger view

Michael offers two types of trials: (1) a 30 day fully functional trial, and (2) a save disabled trial that does not expire. So you can try it out at your leisure. I suggest you download the latter and install it on your computer or keep it on your pen drive (the installer is just 10 MB). You will have something interesting to do when you want to kill some time like waiting for a flight at an airport. Personally, I find MoI to be one of the most easy to use solid modeling systems out there.