Hi Tom,

> I have a rectangular flat box with many circles booleaned out (think metal sheet
> with ventilation holes).
> Now I want to fillet the edges of the holes on one side only, but seem to be
> unable to select the edges.

Can you please e-mail (moi@moi3d.com) me the 3DM file with these problem edges in it so I can take a look at what's going wrong there?

I tried to reproduce the problem with my own box and circles booleaned out but I couldn't get it to misbehave, so it may have something to do with the particular model file.

Thanks, - Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the new beta.

Do you think it's possible to disable antialiasing completely ? or does it introduce some problems in the moi selection mechanism ?
The mean reason is to have better viewport perf ;)

Hi PaQ,

> Do you think it's possible to disable antialiasing completely ? or does it introduce some problems
> in the moi selection mechanism ?
> The mean reason is to have better viewport perf ;)

Just disabling anti-aliasing without actually changing how the drawing is done would not have any effect at all on performance because it doesn't really make much difference whether the video card is drawing textured polygons or untextured polygons, the fill rate on video cards these days is not a bottleneck at all.

It could possibly have some probably small impact to switch to draw line entities rather than sending polygon entities to the video card, but that's not exactly a minor change and still even then it's unlikely to have much effect because the process of breaking down curves into line segments would still be the same as before.

The main thing that could have a more significant effect would not be disabling anti-aliasing but by using fewer line segments to do the drawing, that would make the display not non-anti-aliased but instead more angular-polyline looking. I've experimented with that some with some of your own models, but just tweaking the current code to produce fewer line segments for each display bezier does not have much impact on many heavy models, instead it would need to work by dividing more of the entire curve into lines instead of going from the full curve to beziers first and then breaking down the beziers as the current mechanism works. So again that's a fair amount of change in order to have that option, and trying to work on full NURBS curves is not as fast as working with beziers, so it would probably have to try to divide it in 3D space only instead of doing it in screen space dynamically, and also that would probably mean caching the 3D polyline data, increasing memory consumption... (although I guess it could then not store beziers in that mode so that might be about the same for memory consumption as long as the polylines were somewhat coarse).

So there are some possible things to experiment with in the future but I've already done the "low hanging fruit" experiments and found little impact in things that are relatively easy to tweak without significant changes to the overall approach.

But I did make some major progress with display performance (not in all situations but in a lot of them) a couple of betas ago with the use of multiple cpu cores being used for the display engine now. Quite a bit of work went into that already, and currently I don't expect to do much more work on display performance through the rest of v3, the only things that I really know that could be possible now would involve degrading the display quality quite a bit. Like for example having all curves and edges display as jagged polylines that are fixed as 3D line segments will look really bad especially as you zoom in anywhere. But that's probably the main thing left to experiment with.

- Michael

Michael.

Because we're beta testing at the mo', it's easy (for me) to confuse v2 and v3, so would it be a good idea to change the logo in the upper right corner of the screen from plain old 'MoI', to 'Moi v3', or something, so as to differentiate between the old and the new? Adds a bit of bling, too ;)

Now I'm looking up there, I'm wondering if you could use that logo box as some kind of icon for, say more tools, or accessing scripts etc - nothing particular in mind, but it looks conveniently placed, whilst being far enough out of the way that it shouldn't be dangerous.



Martin (2)

Hi Martin, personally I like the minimalism of just plain "MoI" up there instead of any additional labels. But if you wish you can change your installation to have whatever label you want by editing the file SidePaneTitleBar.htm inside the \ui folder, on line 9 change the text that says MoI to MoI v3 or whatever.

That area is actually used currently for a debug menu that will be triggered if you hold down the Ctrl key and click on it, and also if you double click on it that's another way to un-minimize the main window, making it act similar to the title bar on a regular window (it's an old Windows shortcut that double clicking on a title bar does maximize/restore).

It's probably a bit too non-discoverable to use for very much stuff though, because it's more of a title looking thing and doesn't really look like a clickable control. I definitely want to have some way to organize scripts better in the UI, but I would want to have that as a more discoverable button actually labeled "Plugins" or "Scripts" or something like that which would pop up a menu, not quite so hidden.

Hopefully under normal circumstances you should be able to just run everything in the v3 beta rather than v2, but yeah I can see how you haven't been able to do that so well with the inset problems that I'm still working on tuning up. Those stem from updating the geometry library which can be one of the more disruptive types of processes that I have to go through. Once I've tracked down that remaining Inset bug is there any other reason why you'd be working in v2 rather than v3 all the time?

I mean it is good to be able to have v2 around also just in case there is something messed up in v3, but the main goal is to actually get v3 fixed and suitable for regular full time use all the time through the entire beta process. When I update the geometry library, that's one of the things that can tend to throw things a bit out of whack for a little bit though until the kinks are worked out.

- Michael

Hi Michael.

From your reply I learned at least three things about MoI and Windows, one of which is that you're way ahead of me with the idea of using that 'Icon' for something already :-)

I'm using v3 all the time, but being a newbie, if I hit a snag I'll reference back to v2 to see how things behave there, so I do get mixed up on occasion. Editing the file that you mention is easy enough and serves the purpose, so that's what I'll do - and I may just leave it there as evidence, when I upgrade.

Good luck with the bug-finding.




Martin (2).

Hi Martin, just one quick note that I forgot to mention - when you go to edit the file when you launch the text editor that you'll use to edit it (like notepad or whatever you're using) you'll probably need to right-click it and choose "Run as administrator" to run the editor with a special privilege level, because by default recent versions of Windows have kind of locked down everything in the "Program Files" folder to avoid changes to them. But if you've run the editor with elevated privileges then it will work.

- Michael

Michael.

All done now - thanks for the help!


Martin (2).

Michael, I can't find the new setting in the .ini file that turns off script caching so I can test script edits without the need to restart MoI.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the explanation.
Btw I really appreciate the ThinAntiAliasing mode.

++

Hey Michael,

thanks for your reply - I can no longer reproduce it myself. Maybe it was a fluke - on that day the latest Beta behaved rather odd.
I'll keep an eye out for this and if it happens again I'll try to create reproduction steps.

BTW. I start to hit the 32-Bit border regularly now on export. I know you don't plan to do the port to 64 Bit anytime soon, but I'm really looking forward to it.

Cheers,

Tom

Hi Martin,

> Michael, I can't find the new setting in the .ini file that turns off script caching
> so I can test script edits without the need to restart MoI.

Sorry that one is still on my todo list and didn't quite make it into this release. It should make it into the next one.

- Michael

Hi Tom,

> I know you don't plan to do the port to 64 Bit anytime soon, but I'm really looking forward to it.

It's going to involve a whole lot of work, including switching to a new compiler and updating all the various libraries that MoI uses.

I've also just recently completed a similar major porting project in producing the Mac version, and so I'm not really eager to jump again on doing many months of work for just one individual area like this would require, so a 64-bit port will not likely happen anytime soon.

Also in addition to that for larger projects I expect that some particular features like instancing will actually help more than 64-bit-ness, so I don't want to go off into 64-bit work while there are other major feature areas that still need addressing more than that.


If you're hitting limits right now, you probably need to break a really large project up into some separate files.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

There is still something I dont completely get about MoI viewport performance.
(Please forgive me, I dont want to annoy you about that topic ... it's just by curiosity).

If I understand right, it's the curve line segmentation that get the most impact in the drawing performance.

But what about the MoI mesher ? There is a really huge difference of performance when I export a model into polygones, between Shaded display and Shaded + edges.

On an average model (250.000 ngones), shade + edges is about 15fps, while shade only hit the display refresh limit : 60 fps

When I look at the same model in modo, there is no such a big gap between shaded and shaded + wire ... (for both mode I'm at 60 fps).

It's not a complain, and I dont want to compare MoI viewport engine to modo one, but I find the result very interresting.

Maybe there is something in 'modern' graphic card you don't use for compatibily purpose than can really boost lines segments drawing ?
(not sure if it makes sence for you :))

Hi PaQ - that particular area for displaying edges of polygon meshes at mesh export time is a kind of special case area of the drawing engine, before the stuff I was talking about was more for the general case area of the regular working display where there are actual curves being displayed.

Currently MoI does treat those mesh-export polygon edges with basically the same process as curves, so it handles projecting the vertices onto the screen and forming polygons and then sending those polygons to the graphics card. That whole projection process is pretty fundamental for curve drawing since curves need to be broken down into individual separate lines, but for polygon edges it's not really quite the same thing so yeah for that particular area it could be possible to get a speed increase if I were to send 3D lines to the video card rather than textured polygons with the downside being that they won't get any antialiasing on them.

I can probably do an experiment in that one particular area - basically it's not an area that I've focused on a whole lot for performance tuning since it's only something that happens at one particular time (during mesh export) rather than all the time through regular work.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Ok I get it.
I finally understand the difference between the way you draw curves on nurbs models, and polygones wireframe.

and I agree, boosting performance only during the export time is not really important.

Thanks for your time.

Hi PaQ,

> and I agree, boosting performance only during the export time is not really important.

Well at the same time I guess it's also not so bad to have the display look worse (with no antialiasing) at that time either...

Probably what I could do is use a different polygon-edge display method once you got over a certain number of polygons.

This is a lot less tricky area to experiment with than stuff involving the curve display engine so that's something that I'll take a look at.

But yeah for curve display there is certainly a lot more work being done than with a polygon display - surely you've noticed that curves are displayed in MoI very precisely, and when you zoom in they never become jagged? That's because there is a lot of work being done right "on demand" directly in the display engine to refine a curve to make it look smooth right at the current view of it.

That kind of quality makes it so with curves you're always seeing more of what the "true curve" really looks like and not only looking at some rough jagged approximation of it, and in a lot of cases that's like a kind of an always-on built in analysis tool where if you really want to know what the geometry of the curve looks like you can zoom in and see what's happening with it and not have to worry about "is it just a display artifact" ...

So anyway I've tried to focus my optimization efforts on improving speed while still maintaining that same quality level, and I haven't been all that excited about doing things that would degrade quality very much, at least not yet when there was still stuff on the table for improving the full quality speed like the multi-core use which is now in v3. But for mesh export on heavy meshes I probably don't need to worry about that high-quality aspect so much at that particular time.

- Michael

Hi PaQ, also there are a lot of CAD engines that draw NURBS curves all jaggedy looking, there are many for example that draw edges just by drawing the polygon edges of the shaded surface display mesh instead of doing the "show the true curve" way that MoI is focused on.

If you were to try one of those you would probably be surprised at how gross that would appear to you now after being used to MoI's display though... ;)

And not just gross from an aesthetic view only, but it also removes an important visualization and analysis method of being able to see more detail on what a curve is really like when you zoom into it more.

It wouldn't necessarily be bad to have a kind of hybrid mode where at certain times like when orbiting the view it would switch to a low-quality-but-faster mode and switch back again when you're actually drawing... But again it often comes down to "where to put in the effort", and so far I've decided that it's better to put more effort into making the regular full display mode to get speed improvements as more of a priority. With the multi-core work being done now I think I may have just about ran out of things that were potential things to do for that though.

- Michael

A little test of MoI's new DXF import/export functions.

This file was originally done in the '80s to exhibit the precision capabilities of AutoCAD, I think.

The text doesn't show up, but I suppose that's expected because MoI is still growing, but bear in mind this drawing is to scale...

...Try to find the Lunar Lander with its plaque (text is gone, but the frame's there).

Very nice Michael, how circles don't degenerate into very low-count polygons.



Martin (2).