Importing extremely large STL

[zuluriney]

Hi all,

I am trying to import a very large model (around 20M polys), it consists of around 30k intersecting meshes. My initial thought was to use 3D Coat as a good way to Merge those meshes and create a printable STL, after some post processing.

The problem I am facing is that once I import it and scale it to something that could be usable detail wise, i get a horrendous Estimated Polycount of a few hunded Million.

When i try AutoScale, i get around 600k but once i hit Apply I only get one single blob :/

The thing is, that most (really, maybe 90%) of the polys could be thrown away because of the intersections. (Maybe someone could suggest some program to BooleanUnion all those objects together and create one mesh in a preprocessing step before i get to 3D Coat for all the rest)

The other thing I noticed is that while importing an STL the rate at which the model is processed seems to be around 2MB/sec, which is quite slow when you have an almost 2GB file.

The OBJ importer is working much faster, but filesizes in OBJ are a lot larger than stl..

Is there any preferred import format for which 3D Coat is optimized?

btw my current machine is an i7 with 16G RAM and a Quadro 5600, but I also have access to a 24 Core Xeon with 96G and a FireGL ... which in turn doesn't support CUDA :/

I'd be very greatful for any hints concerning huge files and big polycounts..

Oh yeah, currently i'm on the free trial because i'm not sure if 3D Coat is suitable for my needs, but it looks very promising, a very nice tool to have for 3D Printing.

Thanks

[johnnycore]

Try merging it with the optionbox called: "merge without voxelization", then you can manually scale it till it reaches the 20mil polycount.

Then nothing gets messed up, afterwards you should have been left with some layers in the subtree.

Right click the subtree and press "merge subtree" so it will turn the imported polygons to booleaned voxels.

[Andrew Shpagin]

The fastest import is for PLY.

Also mesh should be closed (waterproof).

Just scale it at import to 20 M. Autoscale is not precise - just works as some initial point.

[zuluriney]

I'll try ply import, thanks. When I import without voxelization, then the whole mesh is imported, right? no merging is done...

Earlier today I tried a run with a simplified model and had to scale it to about 300M to get the necessary detail...I'm starting to think that i need to improve the creation stage of the model and not rely on later stage optimizations.

Since there are a lot of sharp edges (It's a sculpture made of thousands of Katana Swords) I guess voxelization is not really suitable for such a detailed model since I get lots of artifacts on the edges.

Anyways, thanks for the help