Hi, Burr and Michael.

Both ways work well and I've got the fillets I wanted, so thanks to you both for your help.

Michael.

I'm pleased you found the problem and managed to fix it.

One further thing I have just noticed though.

If you select the outer boundary curve of the solid shape, the dimension is shown as 221 x 90mm which is correct. If you now extrude that shape down to say -15mm in thickness you should see that the sizes of the solid are now 220.996 x 89.993 x 15. Interestingly, when I check the size of the original solid it comes out at 221 x 89.997 x 15. Is that normal, or could it be causing a problem further down the line?

Thanks for all the help.

Martin.

Hi Martin,

> Interestingly, when I check the size of the original solid it comes out at 221 x 89.997 x 15. Is that
> normal, or could it be causing a problem further down the line?

It's normal - the top level size display is based on the bounding box of the display mesh, because it has to be calculated very quickly since it updates every time you change the selection.

If you click on that line and make the edit dropdown pop out, it will do a more accurate calculation at that time, and also the fields in the drop down show values to a higher number of decimal points than the top level display as well.

- Michael

I also noticed that if you align-horizontal the points of the original profile, the display size changes, then the bounds of the extruded solid read the same as the profile.

It makes me wonder if the profile comes from MoI natively. I also wonder about if the recess on the top of the solid comes from the "inset" command?

Cheers for the comments and explanations chaps.

Burr - the curves were all drawn in MoI and you are correct in thinking that I used the Inset tool for the recess :)


Martin.

I HAVE experienced inset producing sensitive results.....

Playing around with the .pdf output on an old Jellybean model from CreatureBox.

I noticed that it can get labor intensive with large assemblies when trying to calculate the lines

Hi Grendel, it looks good! Yeah on heavier models it can take a few minutes to generate all the stuff. It shouldn't be too terrible though, maybe something like 10 minutes for pretty complex stuff. What kind of times are you seeing, anything way out more than that?

The tasks that it needs to do at the start of the process tend to be the most time consuming so the progress bar will kind of speed up a bit after the initial 20% or so has been finished.

- Michael

What a cuty robot!
Maybe turn a little the right hand for well see the second slipper! :)

I was trying to stuff a large assembly through it to see if it could do it. This model has 2647 pieces and a lot of lines, I waited about 45 minutes and the line task bar on top right of the UI would never come up. The cursor just sat there with the "I'm thinking about your request" circle...

Hi Grendel, something of that level of complexity might need to be done in separate pieces just in order to not run out of memory.

There is a beginning phase where it is just gathering bounding information on stuff which happens before the progress bar is even shown, I have never seen that step take as long as in your example there though.

If you'd like to send me the model (e-mail a link to moi@moi3d.com) I can try to take a look and see what particular thing is taking so long with it.

- Michael

> something of that level of complexity might need to be done in separate pieces just in order to not run out of memory.

Could a large file be parsed in hard drive memory? ...this is the kind of question a non-programmer like myself thinks up. ;-)

I have an idea!

What if MoI, sensing that the output operation has taken more than a minute, puts a second progress bar on the screen. So if the current model means business... well.

Not one based on estimated (or guesstimated) time, but simply info on objects-by-objects, say: "PROGRESS: 2,340/10,000 boundaries processed."

The same way the little script that makes the frame rates pop up in the corner... non-obtrusive.

The user would probably feel less stressed seeing any type of progress instead of wondering if MoI stalled on something.

Hi Mike,

> Could a large file be parsed in hard drive memory? ...this is the kind of question a non-programmer like myself thinks up. ;-)

It's possible but accessing the disk is many many times slower than accessing things in memory so you can't just kind of stick things back and forth to disk a whole lot without it really slowing things down a huge amount.


> What if MoI, sensing that the output operation has taken more than a minute, puts
> a second progress bar on the screen. So if the current model means business... well.
>
> Not one based on estimated (or guesstimated) time, but simply info on
> objects-by-objects, say: "PROGRESS: 2,340/10,000 boundaries processed."

That is actually how it works currently - when it's actually processing surfaces and curves for the hidden line removal the progress bar you see is not based on projected time but on the number of work items that have been completed.

There is some initial setup work before that progress bar will get started, but over here I do not have any examples of that initial setup taking more than say 10 seconds or so even with heavy models.

- Michael

removed

Hi Grendel,

> I was trying to stuff a large assembly through it to see if it could do it. This model has
> 2647 pieces and a lot of lines, I waited about 45 minutes and the line task bar on top
> right of the UI would never come up. The cursor just sat there with the "I'm thinking
> about your request" circle...

Thanks for sending me the file through e-mail for me to test with.

The problem in this case is due to MoI running very close to out of 32-bit memory address space right during the setup stages of the export. When open virtual address space becomes scarce it can make memory allocator performance decrease a whole lot as it has to hunt around a whole lot to find any open memory areas.

If you free up more memory then you can avoid this and get more normal behavior for this export. The easiest way to free up memory in this particular case is to adjust the display settings to make a very rough display mesh setting before opening this file up. To do that before opening the file go to Options > View > Meshing parameters and set “Mesh angle” to 50 degrees and uncheck “Add detail to inflections”.

With those settings, then MoI does not consume as much memory just to load your file, and then there’s just barely enough space for the additional memory load required by the export itself. With those settings I was able to successfully export a PDF file of your model with the typical high complexity model behavior of about 12 seconds for the progress bar to show up and about 6 minutes total time for the export. That’s on a pretty run-of-the-mill core i5 system.

This type of model with a whole lot of repeated elements would benefit a lot from instancing, I’m hoping to implement that in the future.

Another way you could lighten the load for making a PDF export would be to delete a bunch of the objects on the back side of the view that won’t be seen anyway and save that off to a separate 3DM file. Then start up a fresh instance of MoI and load in that lightened 3DM file and then export that. That would probably be good to do to get a higher quality export because it would also be good to bump up the “Canvas megapixel resolution” option at 2D export time as well to get better fidelity in the smaller details, but that also consumes more setup memory for the export as well.

At any rate if you can avoid pushing MoI right to the very limit of running out of 32-bit memory during the export setup you should see better behavior.

Thanks,
- Michael

Hi Grendel, also some additional notes:

You'd probably get some better quality by bumping up "Canvas megapixel resolution" to something like 30 or 35 at export time, that will make a finer grained depth map to be used for determining visibility.

But since that will consume additional memory itself, you'd probably need to both set the display mesh density to very coarse and also prepare a lighter file with the back half stuff deleted as well in order to do that.

You also might get some improvement by scaling the whole thing down by 1/10 or so in size, right now some of the bias tolerances to prevent "self shadowing" type artifacts are just hard coded and not adaptive to the overall base model size like they should probably be. So keeping things more like 30 or 40 units across or so as the overall size may help to avoid some more drop-out type areas also at the moment.

- Michael

Thanks for the help Michael, I increased the mesh angle as you stated and the calculation time prior to task bar was around 10 seconds and 9 minutes to complete the lines. Worked like a charm.

Hi Grendel, also note that when you're done working with processing that heavy model you'll probably want to change the mesh angle back to it's original default of 10 degrees or maybe something more like 20 or so. If you leave it at a super coarse angle it will make for a weird viewport display when you're working with regular more simple objects.

- Michael

Ni-eece! Like Angels singing.....

Will do Michael, I typically leave it at 20deg and no inflections when working

Hi, Michael.

I've attached another file I'm finding hard to fillet, that might not be related to the one I posted previously, as it doesn't respond well to the 'scale up' treatment - sometimes the whole part disappears leaving only the fillet.
The green edge is the one in question here and it can be done at 3mm, but not really above or below that figure.

Many thanks.

Martin.