Hello dear, after a creation of a network-plane - 4 sided rectangle with 8-10 points on each side, I was very happy about the first modifying - I did use only a 1d Movement-direction - but after that I did get hunderd of control points, its too smooth and to difficult to made ne modiffyings. Any way to decrease the points?

2 Screenshots you can see it here: http://i.imgur.com/0u1NtvZ.jpg
Thank you for any help :)

Select a curve : Show View Points
Press Tab and write Rebuild

Hi Lordfox - are you showing the control points of a surface built using Construct > Network there, or is it an offset surface which was offset from a Network surface?

For the network surface itself there are options in the Network command to build a lighter surface, at the cost of the surface not going through the curves with as much accuracy.

For an offset surface that's pretty normal that it will have a lot of points like that. If you want to do control point editing you'll need to rebuild the surface. There is a "rebuild" command in MoI but it currently only works on curves, not surfaces, so you'll need to do a type of manual rebuild which can be done by using the Construct > Curve > Iso command to generate a bunch of isoparm curves on the surface (an Isoparm is a curve that travels along either the U or V directions of a surface), one set in U and one set in V and then use those to do a new Construct > Network and modify the options as needed to make it lighter.

Hope that helps, if you're still stuck please post a 3DM file with the surface in it so I can take a look.

- Michael

Hey thank your for your answers. It was just copy from the network below or from the top .. and I made my next deformations ... thats nice too. Rebuild the curve is good too, but I did get the same value of surface points (means also it slows down my pc a bit) - I think it will be better if we will have 64bit in Version 4 :)

Hi Lordfox,

re:
> Rebuild the curve is good too, but I did get the same value of surface
> points (means also it slows down my pc a bit)

The Network command does not directly use the control points of the curves (unless it's only a 4 sided network), it does a type of automatic fitting/rebuilding process on the curves and the number of control points in the generated surface is more dependent on the shapes of the curves (wiggly ones will get more points generated to fit them), and also the options used in the Network command. So rebuilding the curves will not directly control the control point structure of the network surface.

When you run the Network command, the options for it will appear in the upper-right area of the main window, here:



The default Mode = Normal option is more focused on accuracy and uses a tight tolerance so the surface will pass very closely through the input curves, this is good if you are going to be joining the generated surface to other nearby surfaces built from the same edge curves, but it will tend to make for a fairly dense number of control points.

You can try changing that option to "Mode = Lighter" and see if that works better for your case, or also set "Mode = Uniform" and then set something like 1, 2, or 3 for the "Point count" option that shows up below it - that will make a much lighter surface that only samples just 1, 2, or 3 points between each of the input curve intersections. The surface generated from that will not follow the curves too closely except at those sample points but it will be a lot lighter.

If you want more tips, it would probably help if you could post a 3DM file with the curves in it which you are constructing the Network from - that might give me some other ideas on what you could do, for example if you're using a large number of curves it would probably help if you would not do that and use a smaller number.

Hope this helps!

- Michael

Hi Lordfox, also, re:

> I think it will be better if we will have 64bit in Version 4 :)

The 64-bit version will help with problems related to running out of memory when trying to work with heavy models. But slowness is a different problem from that. The main thing you can do currently if your display is getting bogged down is to change the display options to make a coarser display mesh.

To do that, go to Options > View > "Meshing options", and set the "Mesh angle" value to 25 degrees and uncheck "Add details to inflections". That will make for a somewhat rougher and more jaggedy looking shaded display but a much lighter display mesh should boost display speed by quite a bit as well.

- Michael