Subject:
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Re: Part building advice - too many triangles/quads?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dat.parts
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Date:
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Thu, 25 Nov 2004 23:16:14 GMT
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Viewed:
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4158 times
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In lugnet.cad.dat.parts, Lee Gaiteri wrote:
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I’ve been working on 6898.dat, the cook’s hat, and I think I nearly have a
finished part to submit. The hat of course is in reality a more “sculpted”
piece without true 8-way symmetry, but I decided for simplicity to make it
symmetrical. The bottom of the hat is also not supposed to be flat, so this
I’d like to change. For completeness I threw in a homemade ring along the
bottom to join the 14-radius outer edge with the 13-radius inner edge, but
I’d have to redo that ring to fit any kind of slope I might add. (I’m
thinking a 1/10 gradient, since it scales easily and is darn close to the
real thing.) Overall I like the way it looks right now.
There’s one problem that nags me: It has a ton of triangles, quads, and
lines--more so than many curved parts. Without manually counting out the
surfaces (I don’t know if any tool I have actually does that), I figure the
“puff” of the hat--the rest is mostly primitives--has the following counts:
- 72 solid lines
- 64 triangles
- 336 quads
- 676 conditional lines
Because of the hat’s symmetry, I split the top into 4 quadrants and used a
subpart. I didn’t want to use 8 pieces, in spite of the angular symmetry,
because the ends wouldn’t join properly. (Of course if I really wanted to
trim down file size, I could probably pull out the lines along quadrant edges
and diagonals and just chuck those back into the main file, then do some sort
of diagonal mirror matrix with a BFC invert. Naturally I’m not itching to do
that.) The original file without any subpart use was around 111K. The current
files are about 2.2K for the main part, 29.2K for the subpart.
Anyway I’m wondering if the sheer number of surfaces is just too many. Right
now the hat’s puff is done with longitudinal lines at 7.5 degree increments.
I could probably reduce the number of vertices close to the puff’s vertical
center (y=-6) by taking out the lines closest to 0, 45, etc., which doesn’t
seem to sacrifice much quality, but that doesn’t work near the peak. (When
viewing edge-on, the top looks like a bunch of spikes if vertices up there
are removed.) Overall the thing just plain looks better the way it is, and
since it’ll probably be rendered only once in a scene, I’m inclined not to
change it. (Plus, I’ll run into the same issue if I ever work up enough
masochism to tackle a female hairpiece.)
You can take a look at the (very very unofficial) part files in progress
here:
http://lummoxjr.byond.com/lego/6898.dat (parts/)
http://lummoxjr.byond.com/lego/6898s.dat (parts/s/)
The files are riddled with comments I made during the build process. The
image below I made in LDView with cook.dat, which is available through the
image link.
Forgive me if I sound like I’m rambling here; I do a lot of thinking out loud
when I post. Can any more experienced part builders offer their thoughts?
Lummox JR
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I think the filesize:quality ratio is good.
I notice that almost everything is coded to 4 decimal places. Except when (and
maybe not even then) a surface joins to a circular primitive, 3 DPs should be
sufficient in parts (0.0001 LDu < 0.00002 inches). This could save ~10% of the
file size, but there’s no easy tool I know to round to 3DPs for you.
Chris
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Part building advice - too many triangles/quads?
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| Thanks everyone for the advice. After posting last night I went ahead and changed the hat puff to a 1/8 segment and called it s/6898s18.dat. Any conditional lines falling along the x, z, x+z (diagonal), or x-z axes were moved into the main file to (...) (20 years ago, 26-Nov-04, to lugnet.cad.dat.parts, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Part building advice - too many triangles/quads?
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| I've been working on 6898.dat, the cook's hat, and I think I nearly have a finished part to submit. The hat of course is in reality a more "sculpted" piece without true 8-way symmetry, but I decided for simplicity to make it symmetrical. The bottom (...) (20 years ago, 25-Nov-04, to lugnet.cad.dat.parts, FTX)
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