kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Mário Luzeiro <mrluzeiro@xxxxx>]

Hi Andrew,

You are right, it will be special noticeable for very large (> 10K faces) models.
The major time consuming are now in normal calculation. The algorithm I had implemented IMO is good (probably can be optimized a little more) but it is a nature slow algorithm. (you can see lots of for loops)..

Since I post my first patch with this new additions I point some of this issues, see "Know issues / missing features"
https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg14136.html

I believe that a correct proper implementation for this will need some internal discussion with KiCad masters, because I think we have some options to be discussed:

- Calc the normals and update the original file with the processed normals so next time they don't need to be calculated. (it will change / overwrite the original file. It need some type of exporter to that file or to some unique format for all models).
- Calc the normals per project and store it in a cache folder in the project?
- Use faster normal algorithm for large models.
- Do not calc normals, just use if the model have embedded normals. (So you must use an external software to process it)
....

Meanwhile there are some options that can be made:
First read all different files, then, render it. (Now as you pointed it reads and process every copies :/ .. It was like that and I didn't had time to change)
For this, the functions
BuildFootprintShape3DList
ReadAndInsert3DComponentShape
ReadData and all S3D_MODEL_PARSER Load (for the different filetypes) must be changed in the way it removes the openGL render from Loadfile.. so it will first load then other function will call the render.

This is relative easy to be done, but sorry I don't have time now to spend on this improvement. so answering your question, I am not working on it and I don't thing anybody is working.

If you will start doing it, fell free to enter in contact with me and I can help and discuss ideas / implementation with you!

thanks!

Regards,
Mario Luzeiro

p.s.: because I will soon start using kicad again as a user and will need to load beautiful 3d models.. and faster :) so it would be nice to have this optimized feature!

________________________________________
From: Kicad-developers [kicad-developers-bounces+mrluzeiro=ua.pt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] on behalf of Andrew Zonenberg [azonenberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 02 August 2014 19:30
To: kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Kicad-developers] Very inefficient loading of 3D models

So I added a few print statements to my copy of the 3D viewer in order
to figure out why the 3D viewer was so slow...

The results were very interesting.

http://pastebin.com/7s8gXVjY

1) There is no caching whatsoever! The VRML/X3D files are loaded from
scratch each time they're instantiated in the board. If I have three
copies of a high-poly connector model, the VRML is loaded from disk and
parsed three times. This should be an O(1) operation rather than O(n),
with polygon data stored in some kind of application-wide cache and
referenced for each model instance.

2) The instantiated models are thrown out as soon as the 3D viewer
window is closed or the "reload board" button in the 3D viewer window is
clicked.

3) Models take an absurd amount of time to load. Three seconds for an
optimized release build to load a Molex HDMI connector (14k vertices and
9k faces) is completely unreasonable, FreeCad loads it in a few hundred
ms (too fast to measure easily).

Is anybody working on this already or should I start optimizing myself?

--
Andrew Zonenberg
PhD student, security group
Computer Science Department
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
http://colossus.cs.rpi.edu/~azonenberg/