Hello,

MOI was my escape today. I got some complex IGES models from my client, one PC housing with many holes. Rhino can not mesh it and create long wrong polygons over the hole pattern. Michael, last you gave me the advice to use obj for export and I'm very happy with the results.

I observe, that if the IGES object was loaded (it need some time) and I try to "save as", that if I click on the "save" button, that the menu need a very long time to open, a few minutes. Maybe it's possible to speed up the workflow for large models, because I wait for several minutes three times - open the model, press the save button and creation of the mesh.

Michael, could the MOI mesher conected to Rhino per plugin? Maybe you could set it on the wishlist. The Rhino mesher seems to be a little bit out to date and instable, but a good mesh is the basic for rendering.

Best regards,
Micha

Hi Micha - I'm glad that you were able to use MoI to help out!

If you have a large model it is going to take some time to process. Fundamentally a lot of data means a lot of processing.

One thing that I will be able to do in the future is to add a wireframe mode to MoI. Right now when you open up a model MoI will create a display mesh so it can show it with a shaded display in the viewport. This display meshing processes a lot quicker than export meshing, but it also tends to consume quite a lot of memory.

Probably what has happened in your instance is that all your RAM has been used up and you are paging to disk which slows things down a lot.

A wireframe mode would help to use less RAM and is probably the one thing that I will be able to do in the future to speed up the loading time.


For exporting time, MoI does a lot of extra work to try and make a very well formed mesh. It would be possible to speed this up, but the tradeoff would have to be lower quality on the mesh result.

Is that a tradeoff you are interested in? I mean a lower quality export but one that was quicker?

I have assumed that most people want as high quality of an export as possible since it kind of freezes the model data at that point into a new format.


> Michael, could the MOI mesher conected to Rhino per plugin?

It's possible but it would take some extra work to get it all ready to do that, and instead of working on plug-ins for other systems right now I have to place priority on adding new features directly in to MoI instead. So right now I'm not planning on doing that, sorry.

It is quite easy to use MoI in combination with Rhino though, you can also use copy and paste to transfer models back and forth between them.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

the idea of the wireframe is great.

I suppose so, Rhino will not get a new mesher in the near future. I feel, new features are more important than refinement of old, imperfect features, because the mesher is a problem since a long time and the McNeel team never said, it will be new coded. So, could be a great help, if MOI could be an alternative mesher for Rhino. ;o)
I think, some Rhino users are quite happy with the complex Rhino, but would like to buy MOI for meshing only. Many new render engines are conected to Rhino, but a bad mesher is a distaster. I'm realy in a crisis - is Rhino3D the right tool for 3D visualisation?

I'm not sure, what lower export quality means, best would be, to give it a try. I posted a problem IGES surface here:

http://news2.mcneel.com/scripts/dnewsweb.exe?cmd=article&group=rhino&item=279421&utag=

Also I wish, the mesher could show more options, most I miss:

* max edge length
* max distance edge surface (max error)

Also Options like "quad only" could be great.

Micha

Hi Micha,

>>Also I wish, the mesher could show more options, most I miss:

>>* max edge length

I think you can do this by setting an angle in such a way that it results in a very low-poly mesh (it means the angle value like 180 degree). Then setting a "Divide larger than" option controls maximum polygon edge length. Moreover, you can apply this option to curved surfaces, planes or both of them.



>>* max distance edge surface (max error)

It has already been added to the wishlist.


Petr

I'm very impressed by the speed of the display mesh creation. It looks perfect. Could it be possible to export this mesh? I know, it's a special fast mesh, but maybe with some little modifications it could be exported.

Hi Micha,

> I'm very impressed by the speed of the display mesh creation.

Thanks! The speed of the display mesher is really important for working in a shaded display.

It's actually a key part that makes MoI's fluid operation possible - it is a big interruption if you have to wait too long for display meshes to be recalculated when you edit your model.


> It looks perfect. Could it be possible to export this mesh? I know, it's a
> special fast mesh, but maybe with some little modifications it could be exported.

In the future I should be able to add some way to export this mesh, I've added it to the wiki wishlist (http://moi3d.com/wiki/Wishlist)

But there are some messy parts to this mesh - it will tend to be much more dense than the export mesh, and it also has T junctures in it where surfaces join together at common edges. Not actual cracks, but some vertices are snapped on to the edges of neighboring triangles instead of there being a complete vertex-to-vertex alignment for everything. Also it is all triangles, no quads or n-gons.

The export mesher does a bunch of work to make a better quality mesh than this.

- Michael

Hi Micha,

> I'm not sure, what lower export quality means, best would be, to give it a try.

It would generally mean a lot more polygons than necessary, and less alignment between adjacent surfaces. The overall mesh appearance would be less orderly than what you currently get.

But it would take some time to experiment with it and I don't think that it is really the direction that most people need the export mesher to go (less quality but faster)... Most people have asked for even more quality instead.

It seems like maybe the other option to dump out the display mesh would fit this purpose better.

I do expect to do some work in the future to make both the display mesher and export mesher take advantage of multi-core CPUs, which will help the export speed out in general, but probably not for this particular case you have of one single complex surface.


> * max edge length

Like Petr mentioned, this one is handled by "Divide larger than" in MoI.


> * max distance edge surface (max error)

I think I should be able to add this one for v2.


> Also Options like "quad only" could be great.

I'd like to experiment with this at some point in the future, but it requires a completely different meshing process than the current one. The current one is focused on trying to make a highly optimized mesh using only what vertices are necessary. Doing quads only means tiling some areas with a large number of quads instead of having a single large n-gon there. It's a completely different problem. Here is a recent message on this with an illustration: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1322.8 .

- Michael

Hi Michael,

sounds good for me - polygon mesh creation at high quality only, but the possibilty to export the display mesh.
Right, speed isn't so important like quality. And the MOI mesher is extreme fast compared to the buggy Rhino mesher, that need an extrem long time to create an unuseable mesh:

http://news2.mcneel.com/scripts/dnewsweb.exe?cmd=article&group=rhino&item=279500&utag=

If you could implement Multi-Core support, that would be phantastic, than it could be 4 times faster at my current device model here - a dream. I'm not sure, how good the display mesh will be for my need, so, a multi-core support could be more important for meshing.

One wish more - could it be possible to create a mesh within MOI without export? Since exist a copy&paste conection to Rhino, this could be a shortway for the mesh from MOI to Rhino.

Thanks,
Micha

PS: My problem from last, that the "save menu" need a long time to open - we forget to talk about it - was not visible anymore. Could be, a shutdown of my machine solved the problem.

Hi Micha,

> One wish more - could it be possible to create a mesh within
> MOI without export? Since exist a copy&paste conection to
> Rhino, this could be a shortway for the mesh from MOI to Rhino.

I have added this to the wishlist as well. But this one will probably take a while before it becomes possible, supporting a mesh object in MoI brings in quite a bit of baggage with it as far as trying to make all the existing tools work with a new kind of object. Probably the other things will happen before this.


> PS: My problem from last, that the "save menu" need a long
> time to open - we forget to talk about it - was not visible
> anymore. Could be, a shutdown of my machine solved the problem.

Sorry, I didn't quite understand this. I guess you mean that just the display of the File menu was slow, the one that has buttons for "Open", "Save As", "New", "Import", "Export" ?

Did you happen to open a file on a network drive before that?

Sometimes this kind of slowdown can be due to checking if any of the files in the recent file list actually still exist or not. That can sometimes be slow to check on a network drive but I thought that I had some stuff in place to skip that check for network drives...

- Michael

>>I do expect to do some work in the future to make both the display
>>mesher and export mesher take advantage of multi-core CPUs


IntegrityWare news:

Hi Petr, actually that won't have any effect for MoI - MoI does not use the IntegrityWare meshing code at all, I wrote all the meshing code for MoI from scratch.

One issue was definitely speed - my display mesher is on average about 15 times faster than the standard one was.

So switching to 5 times faster would actually be a downgrade in MoI's case.

But because I wrote all custom code for my mesher, it will also take additional custom work to make it multi-core enabled though. I do still want to do that in the future, it is just that other things have taken priority over that for now.

The tremendous speed of MoI's display mesher tends to be a major factor that makes MoI feel so fluid and smooth when you use it, other systems just tend to hiccup a lot more when they have to create new meshes after you have edited an object.

Before working on multi-core actually I need to do some work to prevent excessive meshing and too high of polygon count in some cases first.

- Michael