[jvanmetre]

JD-

Noticed an earlier post of yours about a mesh cache so that when creating animation frames meshing only needs to take place once. Is the cache size automatic?

I'm trying to reduce the time it takes to generate frames...when Rhino says "Mesh Transfer" that's an indication of a file being written and the time it takes to do so?

Thanks

jvm

[JDHill]

How it works is this:

• - the basic job of the plugin is to read mesh-triangles from Rhino and transfer them (i.e. x/y/z coordinates) in memory into a Maxwell 'scene' - once that's done, the plugin calls a function in the Maxwell SDK, which pushes the scene out to disk as an MXS file
  
  - after the file has been written, the plugin can either clear out the data it has put into the scene, thereby freeing up memory, or it can leave it where it is
  
  - if you enable 'Cache MXS Meshes', the plugin will not discard these in-memory data structures until something physically changes in the model. As long as they are still around, the plugin can re-assign the material on an existing mesh in the scene, or it can add another camera - in these cases, the transfer of triangle data can be skipped and we go straight to writing the MXS file
  
  - as soon as you move something or add geometry, the plugin will throw away what is in memory and start from scratch - when you export again, you will see the 'Mesh Transfer...' messages in the command-line

Therefore, when you do an AnimationTools animation, you should always have Cache MXS Meshes enabled - since the only thing which will change from one MXS to the next is the camera position, all that needs to change in the scene is to add another camera for the current frame. So, the basic principle to grasp here (and thereby optimize your usage of the plugin) is that there are two basic steps: (a) mesh-data transfer, and (b) writing MXS files. If what you are doing allows for skipping the first step, you stand to save alot of time and processing.

[jvanmetre]

JD-

Night and day using cache enabled...thanks very much for pointing it out.

jvm