>>So, in a restated sentence, can in the near future VC convert meshes to >>a skin/surface equivalent? It would take my file size down to 3 MB vs >>90MB.

Anytime we convert from a simple structure like a triangle to ACIS, the file size goes up significantly. Although they are not converted to NURBS (which are even heavier), they are converted to bounded planar analytics which still includes a bunch of topology that adds to the size. What was three vertices defining a simple triangle structure becomes a plane equation bounded by three straight edges where each edge has two vertices.

Tim

Thanks Norbert for the clarification. We did look at that for some work we did with Immersion but found it outside our area of expertise. I believe GeoMagic is a company that specializes in that type of reverse engineering task.

Tim

http://www.tsplines.com/

ttrw (and others) were talking about this last year on the forum.

The benefits of subdivision modeling with precise conversion to NURB surfaces.

Unfortunately, only available as plugin for Rhino or Maya, and not cheap.

tom

Say, Tom/Tim,

I'm not on my laptop so i have to try later to find out whether or not i can change the iso u/v on the .obj wavefront mesh i imported into VC. I am pretty sure i recall not finding a way to trim and i don't think i tried to thicken the mesh, either. But someone told me:

--

"To me, there is no difference between a mesh and a surface. In a surface you will see lines inside called isolines. This is nothing more than a 2D mesh. 3D meshing is still a surface with points that can lie above or below a set plane. The mesh/surface has no real thickness but can have it assigned as a property. In Rhino a hull is one surface."

--

But, is there a way to so a Surface/Mesh Intersect? For doing the plan views of the decks and generating boundaries to the , it would be nice. I will try again to see if SSI works. That could prove quite useful to me.

zumer, THANKS for reminding me... i have so many things going on that i had forgotten to pursue that avenue...

Zumer,

I checked out PolyCAD, but i felt intimidated. For the life of me i just simply could not figure out how to get a surface drawn. I thought Rhino 3.x was intimidating, but picked it up in a few hours.

As for my kvetching/lamenting over meshes and my inability to use a mesh as a cutting surface, i just successfully got to manipulate the mesh into faces/surfaces and join together several faces at a time. I exported from DelftShip the hull as .stl, then before mirroring the starboard side (and possibly doubling the size to some 6 or 8 MB), i decided to draw in a surface as a representative deck. I switched the view to a right side view and windowed a few surfaces/faces at a time to be joined. Then, i took the surface break/split tool and successfully trimmed the "deck" to two pieces, changed colors and visually looked it over for any jaggies i might not want. Even if i found any, they seem very small considering the scale/size of my ship. Now, i have a way to move forward.

Also, after doing this exercise, i realised that i must further smoothen my hull back in DelfShip before bringing it to ViaCAD. If i had DelftShip Pro, the automated line/point fairing would be IMMENSELY valuable in pre-export work.

However, i think i need to revisit my steps to find out if it mattered what kind of mesh i made. The one i thought that i could not trim/successfully break down may have been because i started it out from the .iges model. Or, maybe because it was both sides of the hull as one selectable mesh and maybe geometrically compounded the CPU/RAM problems that made me give up after 5 or so minutes (to where VCP and VC just "not respond") and kill the VCP process. Being able to turn on points in the mesh/subsequent surface geometry could be useful in that for local issues of outward bulging i can move the point to an acceptable coordinate.

Zumer,

Thanks! Saturday i spent some time paying closer attention to my model in the mesh form. I noticed that lots of circular patterns in the mesh could be cleaned up so they are more grid like. Tho VC & Delftship are not interactive between each other (unless the products' companies mutually wrote scripts to enbable things like Rhino and another app maker do...), it is easy enough to periodically dump updated .obj files and look at them in VCP. This is actually a good exercise for me as it even more forces me to pay more attention to detail and not just presume that DelftShip (with or without automated fairing, but particularly the free version i'm using, since it lacks automated line and point fairing) will have nicely faired lines.

So, due to selecting the mesh in VCP and inspecting the curves in the mesh, i decided to remove virtually every single point that has no lines attached to it and another point. This alone significantly reduced the number of facets and all frm an original 40,000 something. This should ease the strain on my CPU, i imagine.

Last night i on a lark decided to revisit dumping a .dxf file out of Delftship. I exported DXF 3D Mesh, and realized right away that i'd forgotten about that option, and spent too much time lamenting the "non-selectability of 3D meshes" imported into ViaCAD (apologies, Tim).

But, it took about 50 meshes-to-(sur)faces just for one side of the model, and i joined enough of them to get it down to around 35 surfaces. Still, the model weighs in at some 35 MB, where a plain mesh from the .obj wavefront file type exported from Delftship is some is under some 6 mb. I suspect it's due to the sheer number of vertices and so on.

So, my plan is to temporarily import the meshes-converted-to-surfaces and use them to trim my decks' surfaces/solids where necessary, then expunge them from the model. (One person told me a drafter modeled an LNG ship over some 800' long, drew details of pipes, ladders, the "No Smoking" billboard, deck/ground tackle, rudders and all, and it was under a few megs. But, it long as heck to actually plot...)

However, as i stated before, this need to break down the meshes taught me a little bit more about ATD (Attention To Detail) and it helped me wipe out an immensely large number of vertices and cut down the file size.

Now, as i told one of my co-workers, "I feel psychologically ready to begin detailing the innards of my model" and stop spending so much time refining the hull.