MergeAllCoPlanarFaces - Curiosity Inquiry

This is not an issue but more of a curiosity question about a situation.

Is it normal for the MergeAllCoPlanarFaces command to take a very long time?
In my ‘search’ the last reference I see is to someone asking way back in 2014.
Things may have, or not, changed since then.

Right now I used the command on an imported object in a .obj file.

It has 35k polygons of a ‘closed shell’ object with all the same windings and geo normals in proper direction - It’s 3D printing ready as is.

There’s no duplicate faces, erroneous geo, etc.

I imported the geo into Rhino so I could do some filleting on edges created by a boolean difference operation.

So I created a desired closed surface cylinder and did a Mesh Boolean Difference with the object, which worked fine.

Because I don’t use Rhino very often I look at videos for hints of what to do at certain stages.

So after the Mesh Boolean I did a Mesh to Nurbs command on the imported object which worked fine and selected the resulting - ‘ 1 valid polysurface ‘; hiding the original mesh component.

Now in the tutorial I used as a hint, they then did the MergeAllCoPlanarFaces command, so I thought I should do that before attempting my filleting operation. Perhaps I don’t need to do this step but I thought I would give it a try.

However, it’s been about an hour now and the command has still not finished it’s operation.

My system cpu usage goes between 18 and 24%, so no shortage there, and I suspect it is using a lot of single threaded operations.

It’s also not eating into my memory, as that is staying at about 20% usage too.

So again, just kind of curious as to why this would take so long.

I could perhaps upload the ‘object/file’ but it’s still running the command.
Thought I would post an inquiry while I wait if anyone happens to know something offhand.

If it goes too long I will just cancel and try my filleting without going through this step.

Run MergeAllCoplanarFaces first, and only then MeshToNURBS. This is likely to be much faster in your scenario. When MergeAllCoplanarFaces is run on meshes, it creates n-gons, which will speed up the conversion to Nurbs a lot.

-A

3 Likes

Ok…that’s a good tip. The video I was watching did it the opposite for whatever reason.

But I’m going to have to try your way; As it’s now 3 hours and the command is still running, lol.

No time left today to test.

But I’ll be back to post make this thread ‘complete’ for others for future reference.

Thanks again.