Hi knightxor, there is currently no really easy way to do that. MoI is currently set up to only work on NURBS objects, not polygon objects.

However, I have been meaning to create a method to extract the wireframe of a polygon mesh object and let you bring that in to MoI as line segments. I'll see if I can make some progress on that later today.

- Michael

I didn't make progress on this today, but hopefully I will tomorrow. It will be a stand-alone converter program called Obj23dmWireframe.exe, which will read in an .obj polygon file and output a .3dm file with line segments for the polygon edges.

- Michael

Hi Michael. Since Moi has no method for grouping objects, it can get really messy if a mesh has a lot of polygon faces. I know in Rhino you can easily rotate a mesh of several hundred thousand faces. But try rotating several hundred thousand line objects, and it's a disaster... Same thing happens in Moi. Maybe there needs to be a warning when converting a mesh with more than a specified quantity of faces? Or rmaybe it should run the Join command when converting, to reduce the total # of seperate line objects?

jonah

Hi Jonah, the tricky thing is that Join is not really set up to work with a totally branching type structure like the mesh edges will create. To really streamline the number of objects it should probably try to find edge loops or stuff like that but I won't have time to make that kind of variant of join right now.

I just did a quick test, and with 100,000 lines it is sluggish but usable (~3fps) on my pretty basic system. With a really dense mesh you'll probably have to hide different parts and work just on one section at a time.

It can be hard to guess when to put up warnings for larger quantities of stuff because it is pretty machine dependent.

- Michael

yeah, i made a test array of 200,000 line segments and Moi was crawling. i know that joining a big network, the program will have to decide which ends to connect to which nieghbors. But i figure that might reduce the total # of objects by a significant count, no matter how they get joined up. So in turn might speed things up (?)... Just a thought...

jonah

Hi knightxor, I just made the converter program, you can download it from here:
http://moi3d.com/download/Obj23dmWireframe.zip

Unzip it to some folder, and then you can run the Obj23dmWireframe.exe program.

It will prompt you for the name of an OBJ file, and then the name of a 3DM file - it will read all the polygon data from the OBJ file and convert the edges of polygons into line segments and save those line segments to the 3DM file. You can then load that 3DM file into MoI.

So this gives a method to bring the wireframe outline of polygon mesh objects into MoI to use as construction guides.

I hope this helps, and please let me know if you run into any problems.

- Michael

Hi Jonah, I haven't really worked on this particular area for dealing with a high volume of separate individual simple entities.

I took a look over some stuff and it looks like I can do some pretty easy optimizations to tune this up a notch, an initial test looks like a 2x speed increase, possibly more at higher volumes.

I'll dig into it a bit more tomorrow.

- Michael