The largest IGES and STEP files I've received is about 200mb, with every nut and bolt needed for the construction to look just like the real deal. Not that I necessary need it for the visualization I do for them, but that's what I get from them, therefore it's a tedious stage to deselect all and select only what I want to export in several stages to individual object files.

I totally understand programming is hard work, there's a reason I don't do that kind of work and rather let others do it instead ;-)
I never thought about the fact that the reason for this time consuming job was due to the writing of a bank of undo/redo. Thanks for clearing that.

I'll see if I find a workaround for the scale/rotate work for LightWave and keep you guys posted. I guess I'm not the only LW user in here.


Again, thanks a bunch for your time!


Edit: I went into Options and under View -> Meshing parameters I set the Mesh angle to a larger number while I'm just scaling and rotating. This made the handling of these procedures quicker than before.

Hi Ola, that's good news that reducing the display mesh density helps, that will also help keep memory consumption down a fair amount as well.

One thing that can help to reduce detail for little nuts and bolts pieces is to use the "Avoid smaller than" option in the expanded dialog at export time.

That lets you enter a distance, and any polygons smaller than that size will shift to get a much rougher mesh on them, things smaller than that size will get meshed to an angle of 35 degrees.

So if you enter in a distance about the size of one of those bolts, that will probably help to reduce the generated mesh density by quite a bit.


If its the more dynamic movement aspect of the moving and scaling that is bogging down, one other thing you can try is to enter numeric scale factors rather than picking points with the mouse.

For example if you want to scale all objects down to 1/100 of the current size, push Ctrl+A to select everything, then run the Transform / Scale command, and now type 0 <enter> to specify the 0,0,0 origin point for the scale's origin, and then type 0.01 <enter> for the scale factor.

- Michael

Hi Ola, actually I'm kind of confused about your last message here.

Earlier you wrote that the import took between 3-10 minutes, and that at export time, mesh generation took 1 minute, and saving to the file was nearly instantaneous.

So that adds up to about 11 minutes of time, but you also wrote that along with scaling and positioning it would take you between 15-60 minutes to complete each model.

That means that it is taking you nearly 50 minutes to do just the scaling and moving part, is that actually correct?

I had assumed that you were seeing some kind of long pause after each scale or move, which I thought could be related to undo unit generation with a very heavy model. But in your most recent message you mention that decreasing the display mesh generation helped to speed up that process - however the only thing that will actually speed up is the screen redraw, not undo unit generation.

So when you were talking about it taking you a long time to do the moving and scaling part, do you mean that it is just the screen redraw that is going too slow?

One thing to note is that your screen redraw is much more dependent on your video card than on the number of CPU cores you have - do you possibly have some kind of underpowered video card on your machine?

Anyway, if your dynamic screen redraw is a problem the steps that I described previously where you can do transforms by just typing in the scale factor with the keyboard rather than moving the mouse around should help out a lot to get things done with much fewer screen redraws during the process.

You may also want to hide edges (use the "Types" section in the Scene Browser as a way to do this quickly) which can also help to speed up the display a lot - in many cases drawing the edge curves of models is actually the most time consuming part.


But it is not entirely clear to me exactly what you are running into with the moving and scaling part, if you could possibly describe what you are seeing in a bit more detail that could possibly help.

- Michael

EDIT: I see now in your original message that you have an GeForce 8800GT card - that's certainly a good card and for normal uses should be really fine. But if you are working at a particularly high complexity level you may think about upgrading it to get better 3D display performance, I think that card is part of the GeForce 8 generation of cards, and as you can see at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce, there are some newer generations since then... It is possible that a more up to date card could help you if your problem is mostly related to display speed with high density models.

Yeah it's possibly the redrawing that makes it so time consuming. I'm really out of clues, so that's why I tested that one, since you had given me tips about that setting earlier.


I'm thinking of a GTX 285 for the Mac, but it's too expensive for what I can afford at the moment. If they only could have PC market pricing for such equipment.. :-)

Hi Ola, so does setting the display mesh density to be coarser make it workable for you?

I'd suggest setting (under Options > View > Meshing parameters) Mesh angle to 25 degrees and unchecking "Add detail to inflections".

Then along with that hiding all edges also can be a big boost to screen redraw time.

If that speeds things up enough to be usable then you may not need to get a new video card, although when dealing with very heavy models you generally want to have as up to date hardware as you can.

- Michael

Oh yes, it does a MAJOR difference in performance!

The Add Detail to Infections was always the killer for me - I always make sure that's turned off.

-Will

Hi Will,

> The Add Detail to Infections was always the killer for me -
> I always make sure that's turned off.

Also there was a bug in v1 where "Add detail to inflections" would mistakenly get really carried away and could over mesh things by a whole bunch.

That's fixed in v2 so it is not quite as bad, but it can still be a good idea to turn it off if you have a whole lot of stuff.

- Michael

Interesting, I'll give it another try Michael - thanks for the info.

-Will