Over the past few hours I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of what takes so long in the new code. Specifically, the Jeff D reference model has been enlightening as I’ve reviewed the reams of data generated during a toolpath calculation. Given the hugely dense model, it turned out that I needed a way to make many of the triangles go away if I wanted to speed it up. I was able to come up with a final optimization that removed a lot of triangles without reducing accuracy in any significant way ( I won’t go into details but it’s not obvious). In Jeff’s model this led to a reduction of about 30% in the triangle count. Also, I tweaked all of the variables that define how much to reduce the points in a toolpath and when to subdivide the path. The bottom line is that I’ve reduced the toolpath calculation time from a starting point a week ago of something like 3000 seconds to 576 seconds. Additionally, the toolpaths look much better when viewed close up. With Jeff’s permission I’ll post a few photos.
People with “normal” models will also benefit from the optimizations but I don’t think you’ll see a 6x improvement.
I was about to post a new version and I noticed a bug in the tool rack dialog where the taper angle may not be shown. I think I’m going to fix that tomorrow and get the dialog to show the units of the dimensions. I never noticed the difficulty of finding the right tool when you have moth metric and English mills defined. I’m still shooting for a Friday night release… maybe the weekend if I run into problems.