Moment of Inspiration, has the same creator, Michael Gibson, as the successful Rhino program, and both share a similar approach to CAD design. However, Moment of Inspiration is simpler and less expensive. 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.

There are unique approaches in MoI. Complex curved surfaces are created in a very different, but simpler way than most CAD packages, such as TurboCAD. Most of the CAD packages available work in the same well established way. These tend to get more and more complex over time and harder and harder for beginners to start with. A beginner or designer who doesn’t have a lot of time to devote to learning the software can be left behind by current CAD software, it also can be out of reach either in cost or too high a learning curve, neither is true with MoI.

MoI streamlines operations and uses fewer steps to get your designs realised. Partly the reason for this is that instead of simply building on existing UI standards, Michael started again from the ground floor spending a year just developing the UI.

CAD software development is often slow because publishers tend to adopt known existing methods and appearance so that users see a similarity between what they are accustomed to and what is new, making it easier to sell.

So who would use Moment of Inspiration?

Artists and model makers, Engineers and furniture makers, in fact anyone needing a simple to learn and use 3D CAD system.

A lot of people find MoI a simple piece of software to use, and yet it delivers on much the same functionality as Rhino, which is far more expensive.

There are many professions that need basic solid modelling tools to help them do their work, but often find much of the available software too difficult to use, this is not the case with MoI.

It uses industry standard data formats, the focus on data transfer as a very important function, using a proprietary format is just unnecessary.

MoI saves in .3dm, IGES, SAT, STEP, Wavefront OBJ, STL, 3DS, LWO, FBX, SKP, Illustrator, PDF, DXF

MoI opens: .3dm, IGES, SAT, STEP, Illustrator, PDF, DXF

MoI works well with a pen drawing tablet – the standard type CAD user interface tends to require lot of right-clicks and modifier keys, which can be awkward when

using a pen tablet. A unique aspect of MoI is that it can be used without touching a keyboard – this makes it run a lot more smoothly with a drawing tablet or Tablet PC.
Some other parts that are unique are the high quality graphical display (anti-aliased curves on low-end cards, and very fast display meshing to allow for a smoother less polygonalized display than typically used), and also a high quality polygon mesh export that supports creating n-gons with a clean wireframe instead of a whole bunch of triangles.

For more information go to http://paulthecad.co.uk

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Editor - David Carpenter