> shrink surface to trimed edge you have to separate the polysurface first.

Lyes, this sounds interesting but I do not understand. What does "shrink surface" mean? And, why do we have to "separate the polysurface" and how is that done?

Leonard

Hi Leonard, well actually your hardware is not too terribly ancient..

Did you actually run into problems with the higher density files, did things actually bog down and go too slowly to use?

I would think that you probably don't have to worry much about this unless you are getting into quite a bit larger in size than that. (EDIT: - yes if you were getting into the 100MB range then that would be good to optimize)


> In C4D, there is control with the fillet (Bevel) size and subdivision
> and thought perhaps there was a subdivision setting that I had
> missed with Moi. (Maybe in the future?)

That's probably when you are producing polygon model output in Cinema4D - you can typically adjust the number of polygons that are used when generating polygon output.

In MoI things work quite a bit differently than that - when you create a fillet in MoI you are not building polygon output then, you are actually building a "perfect" circular fillet shape that is refined to be accurate to within 0.001 units tolerance.

That's one of the major differences between NURBS modeling and polygon modeling.

With NURBS modeling you are building something that is more exactly defined to be an accurate curved shape in its definition.

Polygons don't enter into it until later on when you save to OBJ format. (well, they also do enter into the viewport display but not the definition of your model data though)

At that time that polygons are generated, you will then have a similar chance to adjust the polygon density - you can use that slider to reduce the number of polygons that are generated and there is another setting on the full settings (push the little arrow in the lower left corner) called "Avoid smaller than" which can be useful for reducing polygon density in small details. You can enter a distance value there, and anything smaller than that distance in size will get a much rougher mesh angle applied to it so small details will get fewer polygons with that setting. So for example if you have fillets that are smaller than 0.5 units in size, you can enter 0.5 for that "Avoid smaller than" value and then those fillets will get a rougher meshing on them than the larger sized parts of your model.

- Michael

Hi lyes,

> to shrink surface to trimed edge you have to separate the polysurface first.

A quick note - actually you don't have to separate your object to run ShrinkTrimmedSrf on it, that works on solids/joined surfaces as well.

But you do need to separate it if you want to see how the control points look like.

- Michael

Hi Leonard, I'll just jump in also,

> What does "shrink surface" mean?

After you trim or do booleans, you can have an "underlying surface" that is larger than the trim curves on the surface.

There is some description and illustration of how trim curves and underlying surfaces work here:
http://moi3d.com/wiki/FAQ#Q:_Why_does_show_points_work_for_some_objects_but_not_others.3F

It is possible to set up a keyboard shortcut for a command named "ShrinkTrimmedSrf" which when applied will shrink the underlying surfaces of an object so that they are only as large as the trim curves instead of possibly having excess area.

That can actually reduce the 3DM model size if you have a lot of pieces that are booleaned out of larger initial surfaces. But usually it won't do that much for things that are heavy with fillets though, and it won't have any effect on the polygon generation to OBJ format for example.


> And, why do we have to "separate the polysurface" and how is that done?

That means selecting a solid and running Edit/Separate on it to break it into individual surfaces that are not joined to each other anymore.

You typically have to do that if you want to turn on control points for objects that have been booleaned, some more info on that in the above link.

- Michael

Hi Michael i did not know that nice tip
NY put short cut key
ALT+S ShrinkTrimmedSrf
and hit it whene you feel like it