Full Version: Does Moi have a "practical" limit to the size of designs?

The design in the attached image is only 601 objects, as I tend to boolean small items together as I work.

It absolutely makes my machine (M4 Mini w/16gb RAM) crazy when I try to add things to it now. When I was creating the diamond plate, it would give me a spinning beachball for every operation. (I know adding each and every "bump" using an array may not be the best method, but it works for me.)

Have I gone too far? LOL The intended use is 3D printing in resin on my Formlabs printer.

Thx.

Chris

Image Attachments:
TIR500 deck.png  TIR500 screencap.png 

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Just out of curiosity, what is the total face count?

There are a number of things that can impact performance. Number of faces, modeling technique used (which can impact the number of faces to display, calculations that happen behind the scenes, etc).

Two geometries that look the same can be quite different under the hood.

But, lets start with that total faces in the model. That might tell us something. The textured diamond plate like surface - that itself could be a nightmare and have more faces that you think.

even adding fillets to areas that are important but one would never see unless you zoom in can create more calculation and faces to deal with. I am not sure how the MoI geometry kernal works, but coming from SolidWorks and other modelers like that, while working on complex models I would supress fillets and arrays where I could and then unsupress everything when I as completed with the model since I didn't care about performance anymore.

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Hi Chris,

re:
> Does Moi have a "practical" limit to the size of designs?

It does, but it's hard to quantify it exactly because it depends on a lot of different factors.


re:
> The design in the attached image is only 601 objects, as I tend to boolean
> small items together as I work.

Object count is not particularly indicative of complexity all on its own. For example 600 boxes is not very complicated but 600 solids with a thousand surfaces in each object could be pushing it.

You can get a total face count by selecting everything and pushing "Details..." - there will be a total face count shown here:



It looks like you've got a substantial amount of very tiny fillets:



That's probably the main thing bogging things down.

What is the size of the print going to be, is there going to be enough resolution to be able to even see those tiny fillets?

Another thing you could experiment with is to divide some of the heavy objects into separate pieces.

- Michael

Image Attachments:
chris_face_count.jpg  chris_face_count2.jpg 

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Also there is a display setting that could help. Go to Options > View > "Meshing parameters" (at the top) and set
Mesh angle to 25 degrees and uncheck "Add detail to inflections".

That will make a coarser display mesh.

- Michael

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Maybe these are a *teeny* bit complicated... And yes, the geometry is still sloppy for lack of a better word. This is going to be printed out at 16 microns resolution in 1/4" scale, so the heavy detailing does matter.

Image Attachments:
faces 1.jpg  faces 2.jpg 

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Hi Chris, yes having 10,000 faces in one object is quite complex, especially when most of them are fillet surfaces.

It looks like that deck plate contains about half of the face count of the entire model so that's probably the main thing to try and simplify.

I'd probably try extracting the top and saving it off to a separate file and replacing it with just a blank plane while working. Then bring the super heavy detailed top part back in only when ready to export.

- Michael

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Your file data made me smile.

I can see why things are slower than you would like.

I didn't pay attention enough to notice that your diamond plate texture that you modeled also as fillets on each feature.

Thems is some things you might want to only to last and possibly in a seperate file while leaving a base, dimensionally accurate in the critical areas, bounding box in its place so you can still model with the precision that you need while reducing overhead. That is a ton of overhead to deal with for no reason. Even just using a naked / smooth top surface while you model rather than the textured surface multiple thousands of unneeded surfaces.

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Hi Chris, also some tips for making that type of pattern:

You can prepare one cell with a plane at the bottom:



You can then array that:



And then select all the cells and use boolean union which will merge the bottom planes:



But construct this as one of the last steps, not while still modeling.

- Michael

Attachments:
DeckPattern.3dm

Image Attachments:
chris_deck_pattern1.jpg  chris_deck_pattern2.jpg  chris_deck_pattern3.jpg 

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