Hi PaQ,

re #1:

> With this default value it might already take quite some time
> to have a feedback, and most of the time I will change this
> value and this 'waiting time' is somehow lost.

The plan I have for solving this is to make it possible to interrupt the mesher if you enter new values when it is currently calculating. Most regular commands do work this way already, like if you are doing a fillet and it is taking a long time to finish, if you enter a new fillet radius it will automatically cancel the current fillet calculation and start a new one with the new radius.

Doing the same kind of thing for the meshing dialog should make this work a lot smoother, the meshing dialog is just different enough from a regular command that I have not had a chance to make that happen yet.


> So I was wondering if it's technically possible to show the actual
> settings used in the viewport in fact, as I suppose we already see
> a mesh version of the nurbs model. That would give a first realtime
> preview of the mesh.

The problem there is that the viewport/display mesh is actually created with a different meshing process than the export meshing. The display mesh mechanism is very oriented towards calculating a result very quickly and sort of errs on the side of creating denser meshes. The export mesher does a different job and does a lot heavier and time consuming calculations to make more efficient and evenly spaced meshes, it's oriented more towards mesh structural quality and not towards execution time like the display mesher is.

So it just won't work very well to show the display mesh as a temporary result, it is just not the same mesh that is created for export at all.


> 2) Running the meshing tool as a command without having to export my
> model would be a nice feature too (but maybe it's already possible ?) <..>

I do this frequently myself to test the mesher - to get this set up, create a keyboard shortcut with this as the command on it:

SaveAs c:\test.obj

Or use Export instead of SaveAs if you want to only do selected objects instead of the whole scene. Now when you hit that key, the mesher will fire up and after you have looked at the result press Esc or Cancel to bail out without writing the "test.obj" file.


> 3) Is the 'add detail to inflections' from the view option working a
> little bit like the 'avoid smaller than' from the meshing command ?
> (just by curiosity)

It's a bit different than that - it's an option to try and actually increase the density of a mesh, while the "Avoid smaller than" is trying to decrease it.

The way it works is that it will force additional meshing subdivisions to happen in areas where there is an "inflection point". That's an area where the surface is changing curvature from one side to another. Like on a curve that is "S" shaped, the inflection point is the middle of the S where the curvature swaps from one side to the opposite side. It can look nicer to have refinement happen in these areas, and part of the reason why the display mesher is faster than the export mesher is that it takes some shortcuts and can more easily miss refining some areas than the export mesher, this piece of the display mesher tends to help compensate for that and give some detail in little tight areas that can be kind of noticeably rough in shading when they are not subdivided enough.

re: #4 - I would like to add some mechanism for exporting the display mesh at some point, that is actually on the wishlist already. But it is not a very beautiful mesh structure, it is triangles only, tends to be quite overly dense than necessary, and currently has T-junctures on shared edges instead of completely matching vertices along edges.

- Michael