I use MoI extensively for jewelry design/modeling work that has hundreds of components, stones, prongs, design elements and I find MoI bogging down a bit on extensive jobs. I do CAD design and model making for a living, so every minute counts for me- the faster I can work, the better. I'm not very knowledgeable about computers so please forgive my ignorance, but perhaps I can upgrade my hardware to improve the performance of MoI? Right now I am using a laptop, the processor is an i7 2.4 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, 64 bit operating system / x64 based processor. I am open to building a new machine, would I be able to achieve substantially better performance within a budget of around US$ 2K? Any information is helpful, thanks in advance.

Try setting options-view-mesh angle to 20 or 30...

I like my SSD, solid state drive.
- Brian

Hi woods, yeah I'd definitely second what Burr writes - in MoI with an empty scene before you load the complex one, go to Options > View > Meshing parameters and set "Mesh angle" to a rougher angle like 25 degrees and uncheck "Add detail to inflections". That will make for a somewhat rougher looking shaded display but will greatly reduce the density of the display mesh and that can help a lot.

The specs that you mention on your laptop all look great, but you left out one important piece which is the video card, does your laptop use an Intel card that's integrated with the CPU or does it have a dedicated nVidia or AMD graphics card? A dedicated card could possibly help, but I'd recommend just adjusting the display mesh density settings to start with and see if that has a big impact or not.

There are a few other areas that I'd like to tune in the future to balance quality versus speed as well.

- Michael

Thank you all for your feedback! I checked and I do have an intel graphics device, DAC type internal, I also set the mesh settings as suggested and perhaps there is a bit of an improvement- the lag I'm referring to is the time to performs operations, like moving, booleaning, deforming, etc on large numbers of objects - there is a bit of a delay, say five to ten seconds or so depending on the number of objects being operated on, between the input of the command and the seeing the result- is that mainly affected by the graphics card, or the processor speed, or RAM?

It is not a deal breaker- I have to say I have been nothing but pleased with MoI! It was the first CAD program I got into and I wouldn't be doing what I do without it- but I do so many operations in the course of my workday that these little delays add up, as well as break up the flow of work as I wait for commands to finish executing. Since it is a commercial activity and there's a significant monetary value to efficieny improvement, I'm willing to throw money at the problem, just don't know where to aim or even if I'm likely to see a substantial improvement. It's worth it to me to have a machine that can tear through the operations, just don't know if it's achievable.

Brian, I do indeed have a HDD, not SDD, is that likely to make a difference? Is there any way to benchmark our computers' performance on MoI's tasks?

I like the faster Windows7 bootup with the SSD, but have been saving files to a regular HDD.
I doubt that MoI geometric processing would be any different with an SSD.
Recently, at bootup, a lot of the on screen icons loaded up very slowly, and even remained "white" as they seemed to cease loading.
Yesterday, I ran msconfig.exe with the start orb, and closed some non-crucial programs which were "looking for updates" on the internet.
Now bootup is back to SSD normal. With Malwarebytes anti-malware active, there do not seem to be any "viruses" or other nuisance
programs clogging up the computer. Hooked up a new 5TB Costco Seagate Backup drive Plus USB 3.0 Hub tonight.
- Brian

Hi woods, well for operations like that, it will mainly be the CPU involved, the graphics card will be for spinning the view around. RAM is only an issue if you run out of it.

When you are operating on a whole lot of objects, there's just a whole lot of number crunching to be done and it's going to take some time.

If you have a good example file that demonstrates that kind of delay, can you send it over to me so I can give it a try over here? If it's a large file you may need to use a file sharing service like OneDrive or Dropbox and e-mail the link to me at moi@moi3d.com .

- Michael

Thanks Michael, I've sent you a file with a pave Bart Simpson- this file is taking me about 25sec to load, and about 25 sec to boolean out the spheres from the shorts section of the piece- does that seem right? Bigger projects might have 2 or 3 times as many elements- right now I'm trying to break them up into smaller files and work on them independently to keep things reasonable. Many thanks in advance!

Hi Woods

I also do jewellery design and manufacture also.
I find my laptop struggles as they are often only a dual core and the graphics cards are not the best.
My desktop system which is a quad core i7 on a SSD with a good graphics card is probably twice as fast.
A lot of filleted beads (like 1600 of them) will really slow you down as they take a lot of time for the graphics card to render.

A good script to use on a shortcut key is
script: /* Toggle mesh angle */ var newang, ang = moi.view.meshAngle; if ( ang == 5 ) newang = 10; else if ( ang == 10 ) newang = 25; else newang = 5; moi.view.meshAngle = newang; var sidepane = moi.ui.getUIPanel( 'moi://ui/SidePane.htm' ); var endsection = sidepane.document.getElementById('MiddleBody').nextSibling; if ( endsection.lastChild.id != 'angval' ) endsection.insertAdjacentHTML( 'beforeEnd', '' ); endsection.lastChild.innerText = newang;

This will toggle between a mesh angle of 5 10 and 25

It should help

Cheers shayne

The "EDGES" will be making things really sluggish.

So instead of making 200 separate files to work on, use the naming conventions to separate objects and hide what your not working on.

For transforms, you can hide the edges of the selected objects also. This will allow you to use face snaps to move the object.