Hi Tree,

> Or should I just post in the forums?

Yes, please just post in the forum or send me an e-mail if you have a file you don't want to share.

Also, it definitely helps for me to have an example file to work with.


re: helix slowdown - you may be running into a problem where it can be slow to calculate apparent intersection snaps on some longer helix curves.

Does it go away if you uncheck "Use apparent intersections" under Options > Snaps > Object snap options?

Also can you please post (or e-mail to me at moi@moi3d.com) a 3DM model file with those curves in it so I can try to reproduce the problem over here with the same data?

Thanks,
- Michael

Hi Michael,

Yes. Unchecking the "use apparent intersections" did help the performance considerably, but not 100%. After deactivating all snapping, I could work without any form of performance loss. Of course, this is not the most optimal solution, since the snapping is a vital part of my workflow.

Hi Tree, thanks for posting the file.

Over here, it seems that disabling apparent intersections actually solves the problem completely. And this is on a 6 year old machine with an old video card...

What degree of performance lag do you still see with it disabled?


It's going to be difficult for me to fix this for v2, I'm probably going to have to add it to my list to look into for v3. It's probably not feasible to really speed up the calculation itself, I'll need to figure out something else, like maybe not doing an apparent intersection on a curve that ends up doubling over itself so many times like this, or possibly doing it on a separate thread.

For now there are a variety of workarounds though - hide the helix, turn off apparent intersections, or disable snaps temporarily while working just in that area where the helix is at... You can also hold down Alt to temporarily disable snaps instead of using the toggle button in the UI.

- Michael

Thanks Michael,

Yeah, I just put it in a different layer and hide it when I need to change something. Maybe the performance hit has something to do with the virtual machine (VMWare Fusion) running on my mac. I'll have to do further testing sometime later.