trimming a spring

 From:  Michael Gibson
4215.6 In reply to 4215.5 
Hi Danny, it could be possible for me to set the MoI tolerance tighter but there are unfortunately some negative side effects to doing that - various calculations will take longer to finish because they'll continue iteration for longer and even worse is that things like fitted curves will have a substantially higher control point count, making for a lot larger data size in the model.

Having it user settable is not so great because in my experience I have seen it frequently get set to poor values, like 10000 times more precise than is actually needed, causing a really really big increase in file size and calculation time.

There's also the reverse problem of it getting set too loose as well.

Also just the general strategy of having it set to any one single specific value makes for difficulties in several kinds of uses like when someone creates an object that has a large scale, say like 10,000 units across. With objects at that kind of scale trying to target a fixed tolerance of something like 0.001 or 0.0001 units is not good since it is so very tiny in comparison to the object. So that's why I want to move more towards a kind of relative tolerance that tries to operate at some fraction of the object's overall scale, the idea for that is to make operations automatically adapt their accuracy to large or small objects instead of requiring every user to be an expert at judging fitting tolerance values before they start working on every project...

It's a pretty big can of worms - if you need to set a tighter tolerance or have really specific control over it, some kind of more specialized software like NX probably makes more sense for that type of use.

The main goal for MoI is to generally target an accuracy of 0.001 units for objects built at a regular scale.

- Michael