Hi Mike,

> Which leads me to believe that for every single surface or
> curve, Flow has to make a separate calculation,

Yup, that's correct - each surface or curve goes through a fitting process that reconstructs it.

On something like you're showing there where each little hole is not really deformed so much you could try something like use the "Rigid" option for Flow to just replicate a planar hexagon over all those areas and then use boolean difference and use all those planar hexagons as cutting objects.

The "rigid" option only takes a point at the bounding box center of the object and deforms only that point to determine where to move and rotate the object, so it positions the object along the target surface but does not actually deform it when that option is enabled.

- Michael

Yes MJS, Rotational array can produce beautiful results.

In this case I wanted to establish a method to use Flow to "wrap" a pattern of objects along a rotated of non-conventional surface.

Here's a good example: ... And I finally achieved a design effect on my wish list. :-)

This woven metal basket was made by flowing each strand to the bowl shape by referencing them off of a flat rotate shape with the same control point spacing:



The grid pattern maintains it's relative shape as it is translated across U and V.

The wire object used in each run was made from one single sweep of a circle.
A wavy curve was made for the sweep rail, repeated multiple times, joined and Rebuilt to form a "seamless" object - so that Flow would work quicker. As two surfaces of half length take twice as long as one of a single length.
The wire mesh here is ad-hoc and nothing really lines up like a mesh should, but the process worked well to show.


Michael, I noticed that after selecting more than a dozen or so surfaces to Flow, the flow time was not incremental but seemed exponential.
...Or even as if it was stuck.

May I suggest placing a simple curves counter on the script to tell you how far along it is? Such as: "Object: 23 of 400"
It could also be divided into the time spent to estimate a "remaining" time.

Also, you did talk about the intricacies of using multiple processor cores - for future thought, could the total objects to flow be simply divided up and batched into separately spawned running instances of the Flow command script?
But I'm not a programming expert, just a humble fan of MoI. ;-)

Great Magic !!

it's touching or pentrating between elements of the grid?

The wires of the grid in this model are most likely colliding everywhere. This was a rough layout.
I'd like to make a cleaner one later.

Each wire or sets of wire were Flowed on separate instances.

Hi Mike, cool use of Flow!

That is definitely getting to a very high level of surface complexity though so it will be normal to expect for a lot of number crunching to happen for that kind of a thing.


> Michael, I noticed that after selecting more than a dozen or so surfaces to
> Flow, the flow time was not incremental but seemed exponential.
> ...Or even as if it was stuck.

There isn't anything in particular about Flow that would cause it to be exponential - but as you select more objects you are probably using up more memory and when you hit the point of running out of all physical available memory the virtual memory system of Windows will kick in and start swapping chunks of memory out to your hard disk to free up more space. Unfortunately your hard disk is several orders of magnitude slower than RAM is so once that happens there can be a severe slowdown.

If that's what's happening to you then you might try adjusting the display mesh density to be coarser, as described here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4196.2

A coarser display mesh setting can help a lot to reduce memory consumption on high detailed models.

Also if you're going to be making really complex results like this you'll be best off on a high horsepower machine - a 64-bit machine with at least 4GB of RAM will help to make more memory available for MoI to use.


> May I suggest placing a simple curves counter on the script to tell you
> how far along it is? Such as: "Object: 23 of 400"
> It could also be divided into the time spent to estimate a "remaining" time.

Right now I don't have any general mechanism set up for doing that, but that could be a good improvement in the future.


> Also, you did talk about the intricacies of using multiple processor cores - for
> future thought, could the total objects to flow be simply divided up and batched
> into separately spawned running instances of the Flow command script?

The problem with that is it wouldn't give any improvement for the case where you're deforming one big solid, since that is just one object that gets input into the command.

In order to give an improvement for that kind of a case, the threading needs to be handled more internally to the command where different edges and surfaces are separated out into a work item queue which then is processed by a pool of threads. However, a high degree of care must be taken when dealing with multiple threads to make sure that the different threads are not tromping over the same memory structures when they access them simultaneously. It tends to be a particularly delicate and error-prone type of programming so stuff involving multi-threading is just generally time consuming and difficult work.

- Michael

Thanks Michael,

Yes, I understand... and I hope you have increased success with V3's developments of course - we're there to test them out for ya. ;-)

At work I'm using Win7pro, 16 gig of DDR3 on an ASUS P8Z68 64bit system with an i7 - 4 core x2 with hyper-threading (8), and a GeFore GTX 560 Ti with 4 gig
ram. The HD is a WD Black, 7200rpm ??? A modest system where MoI kicks serious butt, even using one core. With Flow running, It barely registered. ;-)

My home system however... sigh... the newest part on it was made before 2004.
There's only 1 gig of ram on it... and three empty ram slots... hmm.

:-/ ...But I've made some killer MoI models on it, none the less.

Hi Mike, so I'm not quite following though - are you making that complex wire mesh thingy on your work computer or on your much older home computer?

- Michael

That was here at work...

...ick, I wonder it it would even work at home, I'll get spoiled if I'm not careful.

I'll have to try it later at home.

Hi Mike I see - I had just heard you mention your old machine before, and since the kind of thing you're showing there is going to consume a lot of memory it might require an upgrade on an old machine in order to not run out of memory too easily.

Possibly on your new machine it's not so much running out of memory that makes things exponentially slower when more pieces are selected - probably when you start selecting some of the shapes that are approaching the pole area of the revolved surface it could be possible that those ones are taking much longer to process because of trying to deal with the compression or expansion of 3D to UV space that occurs around those areas of the surface.

- Michael

I know, the machine at home nearly bogs down to a halt if I leave MoI running too long without a restart.
It's some kind of service, maybe for IE that shows a huge number of IO reads.

You said that the Beta version uses less or none of the IE implements. It is an independently running app now?

Yes, if anything is set near the poles, it does some nasty things. I made sure that the wire thingys were not on the line or in the center, so this thing turned out nice without any major glitches.

There's a nice cloverleaf pattern on the bottom as the "icing" was spread on the cake plate and adjoining table.



Well, all this is good for conforming objects to revolved things, but I cant wait to try out the projected flow.

Ahh... one thought about your projection flow option:
From what I could see on your examples, the objects, I think, maintain their width from the front to the back of the objects as it is conformed.
Or in other words, like the sides of an extrusion, for instance, maintain parallel angles.
If the surface has a sharper angle, the projected shape might look really warped.

Perhaps the shape of the object can conform to the surfaces normal, as they do when done with regular flow?
This example shows what I can't describe adequately...



So it would really look like you took a cookie from the cutter and carefully placed it on the target surface.
Just a thought.

Hi Mike,

> You said that the Beta version uses less or none of the IE
> implements. It is an independently running app now?

Yup, that's correct - the v3 beta version doesn't use any pieces of IE anymore.


> Perhaps the shape of the object can conform to the surfaces
> normal, as they do when done with regular flow?

Yup, there's an "Straight" option for projective mode - when Straight is unchecked, then the objects come off of the surface normal of the projected base surface which behaves like the current flow similar to surface offsetting. When Straight is checked, the objects come off only in one direction like an extrusion (and like the constrained direction idea that you mentioned back a while ago).

The previous examples I posted are actually all going off of the surface normal - but if the surface is not very curvy in that general area you won't see too much difference between these modes.

The projective mode won't work too well if the object being projected on to is curved too steeply in relation to the projection direction - it shouldn't approach too close to being 90 degrees away from the projection for example. It's more meant for beaming an object on sort of like a decal to a localized area of the object rather than wrapping across the entire surface.

- Michael

Wow!
Thanks, I can't wait to try that one out.

The only drawback I notice when playing with MOi3D is the viewport speed.
When I start filleting objects the frame rate drops badly. I do have a fast system and even with Cinema4D I do not have problems with the viewport speed but with Moi I do.
Is this a know issue?

I have a laptop with an I7-2720QM 3.30Ghz 16GB ram and a 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 550M GFX.
So that is not a bad configuration.
On my PC I have a Radeon 5770 GFX and it shows the same slow viewport speed.

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

Hi Rich_Art - often times much of the viewport speed is taken up by the edge curve display - try turning off the hidden lines (On the side pane under View > "Display hidden lines") and see if that helps speed things up.

Also by default MoI generates a pretty dense surface display mesh which looks nice and smooth but can tend to bog down if you've got a heavy model with a lot of little curvy bits, like lots of fillets.

Try making the display mesh density to be coarser as described in this previous post and see if that helps:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4196.2

The settings for that are under Options > View > Meshing parameters - try setting "Mesh angle" to 25 degrees and uncheck "Add detail to inflections" and see if your display speed gets a boost.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the tips. Tonight after work I'll test the things you just described. :-)
I'll let you know what the result is.

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

michael

i have tried this morning similar exercise to danperks with sphere and pattern made out of 5x10 rings (approx 2x1 ratio) and the final result of flow
is perfect but i have feeling that flow did it like a wrap around equator with longer side. i still expect it to work more equaly spread.
is that flow script based on some sort of Buckminster Fuller type triangular teselation (geodesic dome type) perhaps .
maybe i am not doing somthing correctly. streight was unchecked.
i'll keep trying this wonderful tool. i just love it.!!!!

regards

Hi Mario,

> is perfect but i have feeling that flow did it like a wrap
> around equator with longer side. i still expect it to work
> more equaly spread.

Flow will make use of whatever the structure is of the target surface - a sphere surface is a rectangular surface (all NURBS are based on a rectangular base shape) which has its top and bottom edges compressed down to a single point.

So because the sphere surface has compression in its structure, it follows that using it in flow will also generate compression.

If you don't want to have compression you'll need to use some other kind of surface structure than a sphere - possibly a sweep or something like that, a couple of ideas were mentioned previously here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4549.5
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4549.6


> is that flow script based on some sort of Buckminster Fuller type
> triangular teselation (geodesic dome type) perhaps .

The problem with that is that a triangular geodesic dome does not have a regular rectangular layout to it, so it does not map directly to a simple 2D plane.

In order for flow to be able to work, there has to be a mapping between the 2D starting object and its final 3D result.

Do you have any kind of examples that you could show for how you would rather have the 2D pattern mapped on to the sphere?

- Michael

michael

should i then try making sphere using sweep and trying the same exercise?

thanks

""""""""""The only drawback I notice when playing with MOi3D is the viewport speed.
When I start filleting objects the frame rate drops badly."""""""""

Rememebr that MoI is a NURBS modeler and you are making comparison to Polygon modeler.. They are different, especially when you start adding Finite detail like little fillets on everything...

In a NURBS Cad modeler comparison, MoI's Viewport blew doors on 15-20,000 dollar software!!!!

It would not be right to call it's viewport slow (Although I do undertsand what you are describing)

Usually, those other high end app's, start to "Cull" the viewport when trying to do any manipulation in it.."culling can be good, if you are starting to work on 1,500 part assembly's, but in everyday workflow, it is a distraction...

FYI.