Unwrella 4 released

Power Edge Mesh is just an Editable Mesh, with some edges turned invisible so that a CAD import looks as though you are still looking at a BREP. A process that nPower Translators does when converting BREPs to meshes, which results in a much easier to navigate scene since you aren’t staring at a million tris, only the edges that were originally the edges of trimmed surfaces when they existed as BREPs. It also helps with viewport performance with 1,000’s of objects when you are viewing as Edged Faces or Wireframe since it is only drawing a fraction of the edges.

In the end, it is an Editable Mesh, and works for the most part with any modifier that works with Editable Meshes. But not subdivision modifiers like Turbosmooth since it is converted CAD and is just a bunch of tris, many long and skinny. Same thing would happen if you used the vanilla 3ds Max CAD importing as mesh and tossed on a Turbosmooth.

In Hard Surface Mode, I was able to turn on keep-seams. Of course this doesn’t mean it does anything I suppose. Just a UI element that I was able to toggle.

Regarding my wishful thinking. Picture a cylinder that was bent a few degrees, and how one would unwrap the mid section (ignore the ends). In a Editable Poly, you’d have it unwrapped as one rectangular UV island in its simplest form (which does result in some stretching, yes). A trimmed surface from CAD usually results in that section being split in two, each taking up half the area, which also results in two rectangular UV islands. Normally I grab one set of those shared edges and do a stitch to attach to the other. Currently, all unwrappers may stitch these islands together, but they also cut off chunks of them as well into new islands that are not smooth but staggering since they are not following any edge flow. My wish is that those two islands could be stitched together, but also not trimming off any of their island area. This is a very niche area, so I realize why no developer has tackled it.

If I can find the time, I’ll create a file to send to the Discord, I can’t send client files for obvious reasons. :). It would make much more sense to see it with your eyes what I’m blabbing about.

I’ve only experienced performance gains from using them since it was out of beta over a decade ago. vs having them as a nest of tris that every other DCC needs to deal with. In fact, it’s one of their selling points on their webpage.

Power Edge Mesh – Convert your complex CAD data to nPower’s high quality hidden triangle mesh. This super clean NURBS like mesh dramatically improves wireframe visibility and performance.
It’s no different than displaying quads on an Editable Mesh, edges are either on or off. It was more noticeable years ago, graphics cards have improved so much now that these gains aren’t really noticeable unless you have a lot of objects in the scene. So that selling point is probably moot.

Not sure what modifiers have issues with them being off. Same exact result whether you have edges hidden or not with any deforming modifier I’ve used on them. As long as you set the edge distance or max edge length properly, you can deform them as you would any subdivided mesh. Modifiers like Unwrap are easier to use with it since you can select entire surfaces up to a visible edge instead of by angle.

I didn’t think it was as long ago as that, but yeah I remembered it being introduced as the solution to performance – GPU accelerated mesh deforms(?), and then got forgotten about.

I thought it was still in there, just unused but I loaded it up and I can’t see it anywhere.

I don’t remember anyone complaining about it being removed at all, so maybe no-one used it…

It’s mentioned in the 2016 docs, not sure if it was taken out after then…

Nice. Has the demo been updated as well so I can check it out?

Thanks