V6 Goal: Make2d overhaul

What Wim said:

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Wimā€™s overview as he sees it would suggest that there isnā€™t a clear direction or target for development. Has Mcneel stated what those targets are? Thereā€™s been a lot of discussion amongst and requests from users, but thatā€™s all been very divergent. I havenā€™t read anything from a Mcneel bod to indicate that theyā€™ve absorbed the lengthy comments and subsequently tabled a plan, or at least voiced their aims.

Weā€™re still working on the Make2D output. We hope to continue to speed it up and make it work better as time goes on.

One workflow Iā€™d like to explore is the creation of layouts using the Make2D engine. Those layouts would know the view they came from, and perhaps the objects used to create them, and would then be able to recompute the 2D layout as the model changed. I think using layouts rather than spitting geometry out onto the world XY plane will help better organize the results.

But we need a functional Make2D engine first, and thatā€™s where we are focused right now.

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Tested out the Make2D command for WIP6 on a motorcycle file I made a while back off a Digital Tutors tutorial. Rhino 5 took about 45 minutes to make and Rhino WIP6 took under 4 minutes. WIP6 also had much better results and more of the line work where two separate nurbs surfaces intersect but werenā€™t trimmed to fit. Oh and the orientation of everything was much better!

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Yes, for sure, there are big improvements and going from 45 minutes to 4 minutes is just tremendous.

Butā€¦
Iā€™ve just cancelled a Make2D process in Rhino 6 WIP after 1 hour and 40 minutes. I donā€™t know if it was mere seconds or hours away from giving me any output. Granted, there were 5300 objects in the scene but that was just under half of all objects in the file (1.3 GB). Also, this is a very typical scene that Iā€™m dealing with pretty much every day and our other CAD tools spit out details on production drawings in under 1 minute. Somehow, to me, this isnā€™t computingā€¦

What tolerance are you using?

Hi Wim,
Iā€™m curious what software that is, and more important what does the output consist of? Is the 2D made from meshes or based on the actual NURBS geometry? Is the production drawing exact or does it seem a little ā€œlooseā€?

Adding a statusbar should be dead simple.
Rhino knows what phase it is working at and how many objects it has to handle, so just stating
ā€œCalculating Phase 1 of 3, object 204 of 19322ā€ would be a tremendous help for knowing how close to completion the calculation is. I do this on most of my scripts and it is really simple to do as just a little info goes a long way. There really is no need for an accurate % calculation nor an time estimation even though they would be nice(er). That can be added down the road.

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Well, yesā€¦
Thatā€™s the point Iā€™ve been trying to get across whenever this discussion comes up (also in this thread - post nr. 15). There are 2 consumers of making vector 2D: one where curve geometry is needed for downstream creation of other geometry and where one would want perfect output. The other is ā€˜justā€™ for illustration purposes - like production drawings. These are two distinct applications with totally different requirements but currently we have to use the same code to perform both of them.

Weā€™re running both NX and Creo. And yes, the output is clearly based on the display mesh and not the actual NURBS geometry. Circles become 50-sided polygons - and that is totally fine. You can print these on A4 or A1 and they get the job done.

@DavidWood, just as a test I loosened up the tolerance 1000 times now. The previous WIP crashed (report sent in) and the latest version is still working on it -
Update: the latest version also crashed on this - 20 minutes into the process.

When youā€™re working in Rhino there is really no advantage to having vectors rather than the pen viewport. All of your linework is turned into pixels by your screen, which until weā€™re all working on 16K screens, the pen viewport is just as good at. It would be good if there could be a pen like viewport that would accurately scale line weights when zooming in a layout, rather than just being 1 or 2 pixels wide. Vectors are really only important when exporting or printing, so maybe it is like @Holo suggested where a Make2D processes slowly in the background while you make changes or maybe it just calculates when you export. It could make for a slow export, but it would give you what you need.

I also think that in the absence of a real-time Make2D, it would be very helpful to be able to run a Make2D to a separate file in the background. If thereā€™s a way to capture all of my geometry as it is now, export it, and run Make2D calculations while I work on other parts of my file, then with a little planning I can really improve my efficiency. My biggest problem is that when Iā€™m running a Make2D, I canā€™t work on the rest of my file.

Jacob

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Are you willing to share the file?

Hi Jacob,

You could export your geometry to a separate 3DM file using the Export command, open it in a new session of Rhino, and then run Make2D on it.

(Or just save it and open it (in read only mode) in a new session.)

@brian, I can do that, and I often do, partly because Make2D (at least in V5) runs smoother out of a clean file with no other geometry in it. It would just be nice to have that as a single checkbox in the menu to save time and so I donā€™t end up with too many Rhino windows open.

Also, I want to revise my first statement about the need for linework in Rhino. I was typing a little bit faster than I was thinking. What I said only works if you are looking for purely a live-update output. If you want to edit the linework after the Make2D (as is most often the case) you would need to convert it before export. Of course, once you start changing layers and editing linework, it will lose all of the live-update abilities. Perhaps, there could be a command that takes a pen viewport on a layout and runs a Make2D in place to replace the viewport. If it placed it as a block onto the layout and could keep the linked viewport information attached to it, then maybe there could be a way of ā€œupdatingā€ the Make2D or converting it back to a viewport if the user wanted. But if you edit the Make2D output, you donā€™t want it to ā€œLive-updateā€ over your changes.

I was wondering if Rhino can implement the Batch Render behind the scene.

Here is how Maya handles extremely complex scene. Itā€™s a complete separate process. Itā€™s amazingā€¦

My Make 2D wishes :

-Make it interactive of course ; I still donā€™t really understand why all the other CADs have it, and not Rhinoā€¦
-Make it run in a separate process. Whatever alteration made to the geometry after the command was launched could be ignored, thatā€™s not a problem, but having to run it in an other Rhino instance with a copy of the geometry isnā€™t user-friendly.
-If ā€œEscapeā€ is pressed ; quit the process in a femtosecond, and dump whatever geometry was already created.

Cheers,

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Do you mean ā€œdumpā€ in the sense of ā€œmemory dumpā€ or ā€œcrash dumpā€, or in the sense of ā€œthrow it awayā€?

Hello Al,

What I really mean is : whatever 2D geometry was already generated when ā€œEscapeā€ is pressed should be retained and available to the user, and not discarded.
Sometimes, one can make something out of it.

Cheers,

Hi @GregArden,

I would like to start some testing with Make2D via RC SDK.
Where (which class) can I find Make2D methods?
Is any basic documentation/description is available (even very preliminary)?

Thanks,
Dmitriy

Any more work done with large files and either running out of memory in R5 or just giving a small part of the file in R6ā€¦? file is large arch model abort 1/2 a gig in size. All Iā€™m looking for is a couple of overall views to make a cover sheet with.

Brian