UPDATE: Set the value to 5 (was 0.2) and unchecked inflections and its worked!! What I have been trying to achieve the last 2 days worked in under a minute!!! Very happy. Now please excuse while I go kick myself. Hard. Several times.

Hi Sebastian,
.02 for the display angle? Yes, this would be overkill. 5 would still be quite high. I think MoI's default is 10 but i work at a lower angle too, but I am not loading 600 mb files.

The mesh angle will not affect accuracy at all. It's just what your looking at in the MoI viewport. If you set to coarse, then zoom way in, you would have to learn to trust the numbers and add some other techniques to model accuratly, because at the higher zoom level, things can start to appear "off" from what they actually are.

5 has got you going, but dont be afraid to try working at 10 (10 would still be better than "most other systems")

Hi Sebastian,

> And I can't break it up 'cos MoI always gives up the ghost.

To split it up into smaller files, try selecting some objects (like maybe just half is fine) and then write only those objects to a new file using File > Export. Then don't delete them since that will create a huge undo unit - instead use Select > Invert to flip the selection around and then do another export.

That should help to break the file down into 2 separate files.

- Michael

> I have been monitoring memory usage and that is
> when it seem to start giving me headaches.

Yeah all kinds of actions require allocating some memory at least for a while to do stuff, so everything will start to fail if it reaches the "memory totally full" type state - you want to try to never reach that point.


> Question then: if I lessen the display mesh will that affect the
> quality of the model when I export it?

Nope, the export mesh is calculated totally separately from the display mesh, so the display mesh setting has nothing to do with the export.

- Michael

Hi Sebastian,

> UPDATE: Set the value to 5 (was 0.2) and unchecked
> inflections and its worked!!

Yeah 0.2 is extremely tight - that's asking for only a deviation of 0.2 angular degrees between surface normals of the display mesh, so that's going to generate a tremendous number of triangles.

Even 5 degrees is still quite tight - the default is 10 and even that is on the tighter side.

If you are working with large files I would recommend setting "Mesh angle" to 25 degrees (25, not 2.5) and uncheck "Add detail to inflections" and that will help lessen the memory load by quite a bit.

- Michael

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Like I said, I got it sorted and learned something too :)