Hi Michael,

i'm currently working on a Voronoi Mesh, inspired by a previous post from Gunter…

As you can see in the image, part of the model, consists of many closed lines.
In order to work with the Nsided tool, i thought i apply to all closed lines the planar command
and on the rest, which are non-planar the network tool. However, when using planar on all
objects at once, MoI crashes. I had also a severe crash with that, so that my screen went black
and OSX 10.8.5 rebooted and told me something in several languages when booting, which i have
never seen before on OSX.

Attached is the error log and part of the model.

Best regards
Stefan

P.S. Michael,

the thing with the reboot and black screen happened, when i had the whole model loaded
while working on this part. the above attached file contains only part of the model.

best regards
Stefan

Hi Stefan, usually a severe system crash like you describe is due to some kind of bug at the video driver level.

The way operating systems are designed, regular application code like MoI are run at a contained level of privilege so that they can't interfere with other applications or with core parts of the system.

But typically drivers operate at a higher level of privilege and if there is some bug where a driver accidentally scrambles some section of memory or something like that, it can stomp over core parts of the operating system.

Since this probably involves some particular driver that is specific to your particular machine, it's generally a difficult thing for me to do anything about. On a Windows machine I'd recommend updating your video driver to the latest version. On OSX that tends to be more difficult because you only get drivers with operating system updates and not separately.

One thing you might check is if the machine has been running under a particularly heavy workload for a while and running hot, make sure there is decent airflow to it, like you have some space around any fans it might have instead of having it pushed up right close to something in a spot where it has an exhaust fan.

From your crash log, it seems that MoI ran out of available memory at some point when it was trying to do some work, that's probably related to what is causing the crash. You will probably be able to get more reliable function if you break your heavy file into a couple of different pieces and work on them separately instead of having so much stuff active at the same time that MoI is right on the verge of running out of 32-bit memory space.

- Michael

Hi Stefan, yes testing with your posted model there, the issue is that you're running out of memory.

The way NURBS models are structured with a system of an "underlying surface" and trimming boundaries having several components like a UV and a 3D part of each edge in the trimming boundary, there is a higher amount of overhead in each individual surface. So things are generally meant to have larger areas of a model made up of large smooth surfaces and not having a structure of something like a hundreds of thousands of little separate facet pieces like you would have in a polygon mesh model structure.

That's why it does not generally work very well to try and convert a dense polygon mesh model directly in to a faceted NURBS model.


But now that I've done a bit of testing, in this particular case it appears that it's actually the history mechanism that is actually the first thing that's running out of memory though - a record of the inputs that went into the command is attached to every output object that is generated, and in this case since you've got so many input objects going into the command all at once each history record is pretty large and then since you also have so many output objects having that large record replicated many times on each generated object causes a substantial amount of memory consumption.

In the future I want to restructure how history works so that it's recorded in one central spot as more of a list of actions rather than tagged on individual objects like it is currently. For the next beta I'll modify the Planar command so that it won't try to save history if you've got a large number of objects being processed, that should help with this particular case.

For the moment you'll have to run Planar on a somewhat smaller set of objects simultaneously in order to avoid running out of memory due to history storage.

- Michael

Thank you very much Michael,

for your thoroughly explanations, which makes now sense to me. My iMac is an older one, which only has 256MB video memory and it runs already for several hours, while getting a bit hot. I will, like you suggested, then use much smaller sized parts from now on.

Thanks again and best regards
Stefan