Many thx for the dedicace :)

Maybe this can interest you
A French guy has begin some times ago "Le Soleil Royal"
http://forums.polyloop.net/travaux-cours-finis-3d/16728-soleil-royal.html
(explore the thread for see how details can be amazing with Zbrush)
but like you he has stopped for new kid and some other things ;)
I will show your result for that he restart his crazy project!

Hi David, I remember when you were working on this.

It has turned out really great now!

- Michael

Love the details David, nice work!
The look of the preliminary render suits the era of the ship.

Cheers

wow superb modelling congratulations can't wait to see the final renders.

Thank you guys!

Pilou, I think that there are a huge difference between my model and the Thomas one. The Soleil Royal is more baroque than La Couronne, and he´s modeling it with these level of details....only compare my canon with the other one :-)

Michael, I have some questions about this model. This model is draw in mm and it is very very small (56 mm of length). When I try to change the units to meters, the file is crashed. But the generated file with the bug is empty. Anyway, if you want I´ll send you. There are a *.zip and a *.dmp file.

Another question. Since the last beta -with the Styles- are the files smaller, or it´s my imagination? :-?

Another one: When I want to change the style of any object (all the formers files are draw without styles) I switch the style off and then I change the property of the object for put it into the new style, but then, the style switch on. For me, is easiest to keep the styles off because in this way the screen is going clearing meanwhile I was changing the object to deactivated styles.

The last one: When I was trying to export the file for import in Blender, I switch all the Styles off, less one of them. Then I select all the object of those style, and I export them to a file (named with the name of the style). This steps has been made in *.obj and *.lwo.
But some of this files, when I merged them into Blender, doesn´t keep the scale. What´s happening?. I think that it´s can be related to the small size of the drawing

Well, thank you!

David

P.S.

Another question about the export to Blender:

I´m not able to get a fine result with the balustrade and the hull. The rail of the balustrade is not curve, and there are a small space between it and the hull. Suggetions?

It happens in *.obj and *.lwo

Thank you!
David

Hi David,

> Another question about the export to Blender:
>
> I´m not able to get a fine result with the balustrade and
> the hull. The rail of the balustrade is not curve, and there
> are a small space between it and the hull. Suggetions?

Maybe this is some artifact of Blender's conversion from N-gons into triangles.

If this is the case, then one suggestion is when you export from MoI, switch the Output: option to "Quads & Triangles" so that you will use MoI's n-gon triangulation mechanism rather than Blender's. Does that maybe make a difference?

- Michael

Hi David,

> Michael, I have some questions about this model. This model
> is draw in mm and it is very very small (56 mm of length).
> When I try to change the units to meters, the file is crashed.
> But the generated file with the bug is empty. Anyway, if you
> want I´ll send you. There are a *.zip and a *.dmp file.

That's ok, you don't need to send it if it is zero size.

But that's a very strong indication that the crash was triggered because all memory was occupied. Creating a proper crash dump also requires some memory to be allocated for it to do its job, so if no memory is available it can result in empty dump files like that.

When you change the units and the objects are scaled (you can turn off object scaling with unit changes by Options / General / Unit options / Scale on unit system change), there will temporarily be about 2.5 times as much memory occupied by your model. There is the original model, the new scaled version that is replacing it, and then additionally an undo unit version of your previous model is created which is compressed but still can occupy a fair amount of memory.

So if your model was fairly close to occupying all available memory already, some operation like this that applies to the entire model can pretty easily run out of space.

I try to make running out of memory just fail to complete the operation instead of crashing, but it tends to be difficult to catch every single area where it may happen. I'll try to take a look at the unit change function and see if I can protect it a bit better to avoid crashing when running out of memory.

However, even if I can avoid the crash, it is a bad situation to be completely running out of memory because it means that numerous operations will fail after that since many things need some memory space to operate. So you are generally better off making sure that you don't run out of memory, either by making sure you have plenty of RAM installed on your machine, or if you are working with a very heavy model try breaking the model up into different pieces to avoid having the entire heavy model loaded all at once.

There is also one easy thing you can do to reduce memory consumption by quite a bit with heavier models, which is to reduce the display mesh density.

By default MoI creates a really quite dense display mesh which makes for a nice smooth looking display but tends to occupy a lot of memory. When your model becomes heavy these high density display meshes can pretty easily consume all your memory. To reduce the density, go to Options / View / Meshing parameters, and set "Mesh angle" to 20 or 25 degrees, and uncheck "Add detail to inflections". Currently it is a good idea to adjust those settings if you are working on a high density model, to avoid the display meshes from consuming too much memory. You can restore the settings back to their defaults when you're working on a smaller model.


> Another question. Since the last beta -with the Styles- are
> the files smaller, or it´s my imagination? :-?

They should be the same size on disk actually... But I did fix a bug that was causing even more heavy display meshes than I had intended in a few certain situations when "Add detail to inflections" was enabled. But even with this bug fix in place it is a good idea to turn that setting off (and loosen the angle to a higher angular degree) when working with heavy models.


> Another one: When I want to change the style of any object
> (all the formers files are draw without styles) I switch the
> style off and then I change the property of the object for
> put it into the new style, but then, the style switch on. For me,
> is easiest to keep the styles off because in this way the screen
> is going clearing meanwhile I was changing the object to
> deactivated styles.

What really happens in this case is that in MoI a style is not by itself on or off, only individual objects are on or off. The "eye" icon on a style just tells you if all the objects belonging to it are either on or off.

So currently when you move objects to a style, if the objects were not hidden then they are not hidden when they belong to the new style either.

I've had some feedback from others that find this confusing though as well, since it is different than how a more traditional "layer" system works.

Maybe what I should do is when you change an object's style, I can look at all the other objects belonging to that style currently and if they are all off I can switch those newly assigned objects to be hidden as well.

In the meantime, you may also be interested in the script which I posted recently in this other thread:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2619.19
which will move a selection of objects to a style named "hidden" and also hide them so that you can get a "move to other style and hide" set up on one keystroke right now.


> But some of this files, when I merged them into Blender, doesn´t
> keep the scale. What´s happening?. I think that it´s can be related
> to the small size of the drawing

Hmmm, I don't know about this - is there some kind of auto-scaling feature in the Blender importer that you need to turn off?

I've seen that with a few other programs, where they try to automatically scale an object when it is imported so that it will be of a more typical size in that environment. That can happen on an object-by-object basis with different objects getting a different scale factor applied to them.

But if a program does that, there is a setting to turn that off since that process does not work well when you are importing and assembling several pieces that should maintain relative size to one another.

- Michael

@ DAvid : I will tell you when Thomas restart his crazy project ;)

Hi Michael, thx for the answer.

Finally I changed the drawing to a no units system, and it was very quickly, without problems! :-)

Anyway, if this is useful for you, when I was trying to change the units to meter, before the crash, the file is aprox. 90 mb, and it was using about 500 mb of RAM (I have 2 Gb)

About the balustrade...the problem is in the angle or number of polygons when I´m exporting the file. The problem is the same in n-gons and quads&triangles. The thing I can´t understand is why it´s happens only with those balustrade. The rest of them looks more fine.
I have remade those balustrade and I only obtain a straight shape. I have made the balustrade extruding a rectangle using the edge of the hull under this balustrade like path.
If I increase the values, I obtained a heavy model. Well, I can select only the balustrade, and export with other parametres, but I don´t know if this is normal.

Hi David,

> Finally I changed the drawing to a no units system, and it
> was very quickly, without problems! :-)

Yeah sorry I forgot to mention that if you switch to or from "no units", there will not be any scaling of your objects happening, so that will avoid the sudden spike in memory consumption that otherwise happens when your entire model is scaled into a new version and also has an undo entry created for it.


> and it was using about 500 mb of RAM (I have 2 Gb)

That's a pretty high amount of RAM being used - even when you have 2GB available, you can actually run out of available memory space at somewhat less than that for a couple of reasons - one is if memory is "fragmented" into many small bits and there is not any single large enough chunk available for a request that needs a single large block. It may help a bit to set your machine up with the /3GB switch which could help to make more address space open for MoI to use.

But what happens if you turn your display settings down?

That's the option in MoI under Options / View / Meshing parameters. What happens if you switch the "Mesh angle" parameter to 20 or 25 and uncheck "Add detail to inflections" before opening your heavy model, does it help to reduce the memory load?

Or do you mean you were at 500MB usage even with the display settings turned down to be coarser?


> About the balustrade...the problem is in the angle or number of
> polygons when I´m exporting the file.

I see - from the screenshot it looks like you have an area that there is fairly long but has a quite shallow curvature?

Such things don't really get meshed with more detail when you use only the angle parameter, unless you crank the angle to be pretty tight. Check out this previous post for another description of that:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2451.35

Instead of cranking the angle parameter down in this case, I'd suggest using the "Divide larger than" parameter to force some additional refinement of anything that is larger in size. For example try entering in a value of 1.0 (if that is what your grid is set to there) for "Divide larger than" - that will force any polygons that are larger than 1 unit in size to be subdivided, in addition to the regular angular measurement. That tends to help with large but shallowly curved pieces like I think you have there.

I could probably give you some more specific advice if I had the actual model to deal with, maybe if you are still running into problems could you send just that piece that is causing you difficulty to me at moi@moi3d.com so I can take a look at it? It tends to be difficult to make a very good diagnosis just from looking at a screenshot. But as far as I can tell, it is this "large but shallow" curvature issue, which can be dealt with by using that "divide larger than" parameter in addition to angle.

- Michael