Setting regarding display/faceting

Next
 From:  bigseb
4728.1 
See the following images:



This is a screenshot in MoI. See the curved edges? Nice and smooth...

I export it as an iges and import into Alibre. The result is:




Now the curved edge is faceted. Why? MoI has no export setting I am aware of and in Alibre everything is set to max... what's up?
Attachments:

  Reply Reply More Options
Post Options
Reply as PM Reply as PM
Print Print
Mark as unread Mark as unread
Relationship Relationship
IP Logged

Previous
Next
 From:  Michael Gibson
4728.2 In reply to 4728.1 
Hi Sebastian - when you export from MoI to Alibre using any of the 3DM, STEP, IGES, or SAT file formats, you're actually transferring the full NURBS surface data over to Alibre, not polygon data.

When you do that kind of transfer, it is then up to Alibre to decide how to display those surfaces and edges, there is nothing in those file types for MoI to set at export time for controlling the display in other applications.

So this is an Alibre issue that you'd need to ask Alibre support about.

But really it's purely a display issue, and usually it's best to just ignore imperfections in the on-screen realtime display, it's not at all unusual for there to be various kinds of glitches in the real-time display since it's very focused on being fast and not on producing a perfect image.

Those edges look so smooth in MoI because MoI uses a different method for displaying them - in MoI edges and curves are automatically refined for each particular view until there is no more than a 1 pixel gap between the displayed lines and the actual curve geometry. That method makes for a nice display like you noticed but it's also a more complex mechanism to get working well, so it's not unusual for CAD applications to use an easier method which is to use the edges of triangles from the surface triangulation for displaying the edges.

But the slightly more jagged appearance of the edges in Alibre should not actually interfere with you actually working on the model, the real edge geometry is curved there, it's only the display of it that has that jagged look to it.

If you want that to be improved, you'd have to ask Alibre to either implement a different edge display mechanism, or to expose more settings since the "max" setting is not quite high enough for your particular case here. These are not simple things to mess with though, it's really easy to mess up the display performance if these kinds of things are not done carefully so I would not really expect for them to be able to implement a request like that anytime too soon.


For the most part you will see that same kind of display issue in most other CAD programs, it just happens to be a nice feature of MoI that it has a particularly nice edge and curve display mechanism which took a considerable amount of effort to develop.


- Michael
  Reply Reply More Options
Post Options
Reply as PM Reply as PM
Print Print
Mark as unread Mark as unread
Relationship Relationship
IP Logged

Previous
Next
 From:  Michael T. (MICTU_UTCIM)
4728.3 In reply to 4728.2 
Hi Sebastian,

Another thing you can try when you are in the Alibre file, go to file, properties, display and change some settings in there, such as the Minimum circular facets setting to something higher. This will make your edges look smoother, but will increase process time, depending on your machine.



Michael T.


Michael Tuttle a.k.a. mictu http://www.coroflot.com/DesignsByTuttle

  Reply Reply More Options
Post Options
Reply as PM Reply as PM
Print Print
Mark as unread Mark as unread
Relationship Relationship
IP Logged

Previous
 From:  bigseb
4728.4 
Michael Gibson:

You are right. It is an issue with Alibre. It has to do with its display settings. The image I posted above is taken it Alibre 2012. Everything, as always, is set to maximum. However the new display settings don't allow for adjustment beyond a particular point. To test this I imported the same file in Alibre 2011. Her one can still set the minimum circular facets. I set it to 80 et voila the edges were now nice and smooth.

Michael T:

Alibre 2012 display settings have changed since 2011. The screenshot you uploaded is no longer applicable.

Please see here for more details: http://forum.alibre.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=14080
  Reply Reply More Options
Post Options
Reply as PM Reply as PM
Print Print
Mark as unread Mark as unread
Relationship Relationship
IP Logged
 

Reply to All Reply to All