I'm making a model of a gyroscope that I want to export for rendering when I'm done, but I ran a quick meshing test and there are some problems.

The problem is this cap piece:


As you can see, this looks fine normally.

When I go to mesh it though, there are some nasty artifacts that I've highlighted in the pic below. These remain no matter what meshing angle I use.


Is this a problem with my settings, or is it a bug that has to be fixed?

Hi LOTRJ,

> Is this a problem with my settings, or is it a bug that has to be fixed?

It's a bug - it is something that I'm actually working on fixing today.

This bug can happen with polygons that are pretty small in size - specifically when they are around the 0.001 unit tolerance level.

Until I release the next version with the fix in it, the easiest way to solve it is to scale your model up in size somewhat, like by a factor of 10 - that will increase the size of those polygons and when they are larger than 0.001 units in size that bug will not be triggered.

To scale your objects, select it and run Transform/Scale, then type 0 [enter] to pick 0,0,0 as the origin point for the scale, then type in 10 [enter] to set a scale factor of 10 times.

If that doesn't solve the problem then maybe you are running into a different bug than the one that I'm working on - if that is the case can you please post your model or e-mail it to me at moi@moi3d.com so I can check it out?

- Michael

Oh yeah the other thing that I should mention is that you can also get things similar to that if you have independent surfaces that are next to one another, rather than surfaces that are joined together to have shared joined edges.

But from the image you show there I think it is likely to be a case of this bug that I am working on though.

- Michael

Thanks, scaling the model up as you suggested appears to have solved the problem. I'm looking forward to cleaner meshing in future versions!

> type 0 [enter] to pick 0,0,0 as the origin point for the scale

I must have missed that one... Really, really convenient.

Hi LOTRJ,

> Thanks, scaling the model up as you suggested appears
> to have solved the problem.

That definitely means it is this problem I'm working on. But at least you can use that method to work around the problem for the moment.


> I'm looking forward to cleaner meshing in future versions!

I should have a new v2 beta with a fix pretty soon here, I'm kind of in the home stretch with a few last bug fixes to finish before releasing a new beta, maybe just a few more days left.

There has been a major overhaul for meshing in this next release - some bug fixes but mostly a huge increase in meshing speed, also it will take advantage of multiple cpu cores now. Also some major UI improvements - there is now a progress bar and you can alter the settings without waiting for the current mesh calculation to be finished, the calculation runs more in the background and if you change a setting the background calculation is automatically canceled and restarted with your new settings.

So pretty much the whole process of meshing will just be way smoother with this next release.

- Michael

Ditto on the easy origin picking comment! Before I was turning off all snaps except for the origin... :p

Hi Lars,

> I must have missed that one... Really, really convenient.

The other thing that I should mention is that if you want to type in a coordinate or value most of the time you don't need to click first.

Like if you are in the line command and you want to start a line at a particular coordinate value, just start typing that value and your keystrokes will automatically go into the xyz coordinate entry box without needing to click on it before that.

Or another example - if you are in the circle command at the step where you specify a radius, you can type in a numeric value and your keystrokes will automatically go into the Radius: edit box without actually needing a click on it first.

On a command that has more than one entry box, you can also use the [tab] key to commit the current value and move to the next field. So for example with the Rectangle command after you pick the corner point and you are at the stage where you can enter width and height, to type in a width of 5 and a height of 3, you can type: 5 [tab] 3 [enter], again with no clicks needed.

- Michael

>>New Mesher with speed and multi CPU support.
This is exciting!!! How do you think it will handle with 2 quad cores?? :) (of the Xeon type!)

Hard to believe your mesher can get better! But then again, you are "The Gibber"! (Sorry, couldnt resist)

Burr

Hi Burr,

> How do you think it will handle with 2 quad cores??
> :) (of the Xeon type!)

It should work great with that! I have not had a chance to test it myself with an 8-core system yet, but it is all set up to make use of how many every cores you have.

- Michael

How can we all sleep-----WAITING!

Brian

I'll let you know a couple day's after you release. I'm going to take my time setting the new system up properly before I dive in. Still waiting for delivery of the 30 inch blind guy's viewer!

I have a tire waiting to get rimmed because the old system was maxed with the rubber only.

Hi Burr, so are you custom building your new 8-core system?

Are you going to be using that Intel Skulltrail motherboard, or is there some kind of special server one that you are using?

I was glancing around recently for what it takes to make an 8-core system and there did not seem to be a whole lot of choices available yet.

- Michael

I had been researching the intel boards for the past few years (I am an Intel motherboard guy) and just came to the conclusion that I couldnt keep up with what would work well together. And with past experience of failure with dual processor builds, I put my trust in DELL. I bought a precision T7400. If you have any insight for me now would be the time. I hope it works well.

Hi Burr, it looks like a killer system!

I have not been really following every single detail of the latest CPUs to be able to give much specific advice...

I think it's a pretty good idea to just let DELL worry about having all compatible stuff put together for you, definitely saves a lot of potential problems!

I guess the only thing that is maybe not quite optimal is pricing - the Xeon should work great but they may be pretty expensive compared to the brand new Core i7. But I'm not sure if there is any way right now to set up a 2-socket Core i7 system to get 8 cores instead of only 4, that's why I was interested in what you were doing for that.

But actually I'm surprised that the DELL 8-core system is not really as expensive as I would have thought neither. It actually looks pretty good in that department overall as well,

- Michael

> How do you think it will handle with 2 quad cores??
> :) (of the Xeon type!)


I only have two cores :-(


But still, two is better than one :-)

Seems your more up than I . Didnt even know about a "Core i7" :) Maybe 4 core i7 is faster than my 8 core xeon?? (Thats usually what happens) still stuck in old core technology.

The I7 has four cores but they are hyper threaded so you get eight virtual cores. It's slower than actual double quad xeons but I am waiting for them to make dual cpu I7 boards so I can get 16 cores running in one box for under $4000. I too have a Dell with dual quad xeons and I can't wait to run mesh comparison times.

Hey. That means I will make models and renders "JUST LIKE GRENDEL!" :o

Wait just a biiiit longer and get the core 8! (Actual 8, not virtual)

Hi Grendel,

> I too have a Dell with dual quad xeons and I can't wait
> to run mesh comparison times.

I'll also add in a moi.ini switch that can be set to limit the mesher to only one thread, that would be good to get a benchmark of the new mesher with that limited as well to see how well it is scaling out to a higher number of cores.

There are also quite a lot of optimizations that improve just single-core meshing speed by a significant factor as well, so without a thread-limiter setting it won't be easy to know what factor is coming from multi-core and what is coming from the other optimizations.


It is possible for certain kinds of scalability problems to get magnified when the number of cores gets fairly large. I don't think that I should have much of that but it is hard to know for sure without actual testing on a higher number of cores, I have been testing mostly on quad core.

Are you using XP or Vista? There appears to be some tweaks in Vista to make a certain kind of multi-core scaling problem kind of go away ("lock convoys"), but I'm not quite sure right now how much that affects MoI in particular.

- Michael