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Meshes take many hours to import into 3D Coat


kwhali
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I'm not sure if it's file format related(if so is it a bug and what are the ideal formats to bring into 3D Coat from other programs?), but I have given 3D Coat many meshes we have that ZBrush can load much faster, other programs can manage some of the data as well(they take a while but no where near as long as 3D Coat).

These files range from 400MB PLY to several GB, we've not bothered to try the full data without any decimation(40GB is one of our largest atm). I have tried "Import as Surface" and "Don't close holes"(not sure if that would result in faster or slower loading). A 400MB file is still loading in after 5 hours, it's peaked at 10GB of RAM and CPU usage remains around 10-15%(single threaded?).

I've had one of these files take around 7 or so hours to load. Once loaded, it was very fast to move the camera around(some operations worked others seem to make 3DC unresponsive). If saved in 3DC's native format .3b a 700MB .3b loaded in less than a second... I'm not sure what is going on with the import time for original mesh data, but it is a big barrier for us to use your software which looks very capable.

Can we possibly resolve this any time soon, or is it expected to take this long?

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9 hours ago, kwhali said:

I'm not sure if it's file format related(if so is it a bug and what are the ideal formats to bring into 3D Coat from other programs?), but I have given 3D Coat many meshes we have that ZBrush can load much faster, other programs can manage some of the data as well(they take a while but no where near as long as 3D Coat).

These files range from 400MB PLY to several GB, we've not bothered to try the full data without any decimation(40GB is one of our largest atm). I have tried "Import as Surface" and "Don't close holes"(not sure if that would result in faster or slower loading). A 400MB file is still loading in after 5 hours, it's peaked at 10GB of RAM and CPU usage remains around 10-15%(single threaded?).

I've had one of these files take around 7 or so hours to load. Once loaded, it was very fast to move the camera around(some operations worked others seem to make 3DC unresponsive). If saved in 3DC's native format .3b a 700MB .3b loaded in less than a second... I'm not sure what is going on with the import time for original mesh data, but it is a big barrier for us to use your software which looks very capable.

Can we possibly resolve this any time soon, or is it expected to take this long?

Sounds like those are massive meshes. It shouldn't take long to load as you described, but we don't know what the limits of your system resources are. If you only have 16GB RAM, for example, and you are trying to load a mesh that is several GB, then that might be part of the problem. When you get within 5GB or so of your RAM limit, Windows will try to write to your pagefile (hard drive) as if it is additional RAM and that always bogs the whole system down. I wonder if that is what is happening in your case.

Can you try to decimate (reduce poly count) your model in the application you created it in, so it isn't quite so heavy when you bring it into 3D Coat?

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16 hours ago, AbnRanger said:

Sounds like those are massive meshes. It shouldn't take long to load as you described, but we don't know what the limits of your system resources are. If you only have 16GB RAM, for example, and you are trying to load a mesh that is several GB, then that might be part of the problem. When you get within 5GB or so of your RAM limit, Windows will try to write to your pagefile (hard drive) as if it is additional RAM and that always bogs the whole system down. I wonder if that is what is happening in your case.

Can you try to decimate (reduce poly count) your model in the application you created it in, so it isn't quite so heavy when you bring it into 3D Coat?

The 400MB PLY is about 20 million triangles, larger files can be in billion or greater but we've only tried to import up to 150 million. Sounds like a reasonable size for sculpting applications? The 400MB one was already decimated from 33GB PLY in ZBrush. Once loaded in I was able to do some repair sculpting and decimate(apart from retopo/decimated mesh being a magnitude larger in volume instead of similar size to high poly mesh.

In terms of hardware resources, We have a hexacore with 128GB RAM and a GTX1080 + Titan. Another machine has 32GB RAM and a GTX980 with quad core xeon. As stated these meshes can load much faster(and easily within limit for the 400MB PLY) in other programs. Also once loaded and saved into 3DCoats native format 3b, it would load almost instantly. I'll need to find time to investigate other file formats if it's due to that, I can provide the binary data structure that we're working with for the PLY format, it's fairly simple and I have some tools I wrote myself to read them quickly for other use cases(actual data is from another vendor).

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22 hours ago, Carlosan said:

Hello

Are you using latest version ?

Please send support question to Andrew Shpagin at

support@3dcoat.com

Thx.

I am 8 days into the trial, seems we're using 4.7 not 4.8 yet. Could give it a try if you think it would make a difference?

I sent an e-mail to that address after writing forum posts here, it covered this and other big issues we had with 3DC for our needs.

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On 10/12/2017 at 6:21 AM, Carlosan said:

Updated to 4.8.04

- fixed problem of very long importing for PPP in some cases.

Can confirm that this hasn't been an issue with importing PLY or any other format now. It does not seem to handle filesize(at least binary ply/fbx) larger than 500MB. Import in chunks of that size though and is ok afterwards, just merge back together(have not tested if this cause export issues for file over 500MB).

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