# Improved interaction for calculation intense commands possible?

**URL:** <https://discourse.mcneel.com/t/improved-interaction-for-calculation-intense-commands-possible/19640>\
**Category:** Serengeti (Rhino BETA)\
**Created:** [May 2, 2015, 3:01pm UTC](https://discourse.mcneel.com/t/improved-interaction-for-calculation-intense-commands-possible/19640 "2015-05-02T15:01:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![hifred](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/mcneel/user_avatar/discourse.mcneel.com/hifred/32/149224_2.png) [@hifred](https://discourse.mcneel.com/u/hifred)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2015, 3:01pm UTC](https://discourse.mcneel.com/t/improved-interaction-for-calculation-intense-commands-possible/19640/1 "2015-05-02T15:01:25Z")

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There’s quite a few computation-intese operations which require user input to fine-tune the outcome. A good example for such is remesh operations – I’ll use Rhino’s Reduce Mesh function to illustrate my case, but it’s really only intended as a placeholder here, for any sort of heavy-lifting operation which need give users the chance to visually inspect the outcome and fine-tune settings. Yup, I admit it, I also have the in development quad-mesher in mind, but other areas could be offsetting / shelling etc.

Back to ReduceMesh: The way Rhino offers that functionality currently is that one gets a modal popup, may dial in the desired change in resolution and presses the Preview button. Rhino then starts the calculation and depending on the model complexity sooner or later shows a Preview of the final result.

For testing I used a beefy scanmesh – Rhino needed to think for roughly 5 minutes, until the Preview appears.That’s long, but I have no big issues with that. My problem starts when I figure out that the outcome is not quite what I’m after. Upon changing values in the Popup window and pressing the Preview-button again Rhino essentially runs the entire command again, including all its pre-processing (which again means 5 minutes of waiting). There’s essentially no difference at all, between using such a Pseudo-Preview and directly committing the command, followed by Undo and running the command again, with different settings this time. Not good.

Wouldn’t it be greatly better to somehow cache shape-analysis /preparation data somewhere on disk? Programs like Photoshop or Zbrush for instant typically create huge Temp files in comparable operations – they may reach several gb in size. Users may set the path and files get automatically deleted upon closing the application, so there no accumulation of junk data.

[This little clip](https://www.dropbox.com/s/g3utxjxrg21m6a0/preprocessing.mp4?dl=0) hopefully demonstrates the advantages of the alternative approach, in terms of usability.  
For those who want to see for themselfes how contrasting Rhino’s implementation is, [here’s](https://www.dropbox.com/s/5mpaw8jnbvvquvk/xyzrgb_statuette.7z?dl=0) the model I used (large .7zip, containing a Rhino file). The original file is found on the [Stanford website](https://graphics.stanford.edu/data/3Dscanrep/).

![](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/mcneel/uploads/default/19613/6e2f87db16e4dfba.jpg)

Don’t click to enlarge!