Working with large hexagonal mesh

[steveastro]

I have a sheet metal part which, when its finished, will be perforated with 6.5mm AF hexagonal mesh - the part is fairly big, about 450mm x 450mm, and my mesh keeps breaking Alibre to the point of crashing.

How can I improve the performance ?I've tried to use more sketches of meshes, and fewer linear 3D repeats, didn't help much
Thanks

Steve

 

[Lew_Merrick]

I have a sheet metal part which, when its finished, will be perforated with 6.5mm AF hexagonal mesh - the part is fairly big, about 450mm x 450mm, and my mesh keeps breaking Alibre to the point of crashing.

Hi Steve -- Can you Post a reasonable approximation as to what you need? I often create Parts made from "Hexcell" material and, could I understand things clearly may be able to provide some "guide" information. -- Lew

 

[steveastro]

Hi Lew
Here's a sample of the piece.Its only a small sample. The mesh has to be in-phase across all the filled pockets, so I have made a piece of hex material as a separate part which I cut out with a sketch of all the pocket outlines, then boolean unite into the model of the part.

 

[HaroldL]

Steve, Creating any perf pattern of any shape will tax your computer to its limit. Did you use Sketch pattern or a Feature pattern to create the Hex material? You could try a Topology pattern, that's supposed to be less processor intensive but I've not seen that in my experience.

For additional reading on the forum do a Forum Search on perf pattern for other discussions on the matter.

 

[bigseb]

Its a tricky one. For manufacturing purposes most people usually just use a blank sheet and annotate on the drawing wrt to the hex pattern. Keyshot has perforated materials so technically you could get away with that if need. If you really have to show the hex pattern in your 3D model then there's no other way than to power through it and deal with the lag. Been there, I know what its like. Actually had to turn down work on the odd occasion because my PC could not cope.

 

[DavidJ]

Steve - one thing to perhaps try (no guarantee if it will help). If you have the Win10 Feature update 2004, turn on 'hardware accelerated graphics scheduling'. This is a new feature in Windows, it'll also need latest graphics drivers from Nvidia/AMD (or it won't show as an option).

It pushes some of the work from the CPU to the graphics processor - that might just help to avoid crashing. I'd still expect things to be slow even if it does avoid the crash.

 

[JST]

Its a tricky one. For manufacturing purposes most people usually just use a blank sheet and annotate on the drawing wrt to the hex pattern. Keyshot has perforated materials so technically you could get away with that if need. If you really have to show the hex pattern in your 3D model then there's no other way than to power through it and deal with the lag. Been there, I know what its like. Actually had to turn down work on the odd occasion because my PC could not cope.

It seems to matter how you do the pattern.

If you simply do the 2 directions and do the pattern in one shot from a single instance of the perforation, it takes rather a long time on a weak processor. If in two stages, it seems to go faster.

Apropos of not much, Task manager etc show all processors busy when running Alibre and nothing else. It is single threaded, so why are the others busy? it's an i7 CPU

 

[bigseb]

Task manager etc show all processors busy when running Alibre and nothing else. It is single threaded, so why are the others busy? it's an i7 CPU

OS. I'm watching a movie on Prime and got activity on all 16 threads. Not much activity but it's there.

 

[HaroldL]

Hi Lew
Here's a sample of the piece.Its only a small sample. The mesh has to be in-phase across all the filled pockets, so I have made a piece of hex material as a separate part which I cut out with a sketch of all the pocket outlines, then boolean unite into the model of the part.

View attachment 31380

Is this part going to be sheet metal or molded plastic? If sheet metal it could end up being an expensive piece to manufacture. I can only imagine the set-up involved to punch all the hex holes "in phase" across that part. But they can do some pretty amazing work with cluster punches on turret fabricators and lasers. Where I used to work we would just cut to size a piece of perf material and spot weld it in back of the opening(s) in the panel that needed the perf pattern. (It's that cost thing again.) Another option would be to laser cut all the holes but that would take an extremely long time. Again it's cost. If it is molded plastic, well then...maybe bigseb can speak to that.

 

[steveastro]

We had a smaller part (this is part of a family) made last week very economically with a fibre laser. The laser was running at 400 IPS. Each part which you can reckon being 9 x12 " or so, took less than 10 minutes. The final profile for the part ran at 1200 IPS. The final cost of the part was well inside our margins....and so the call's gone out for the mesh to be in the other family members....

 

[steveastro]

Steve, Creating any perf pattern of any shape will tax your computer to its limit. Did you use Sketch pattern or a Feature pattern to create the Hex material? You could try a Topology pattern, that's supposed to be less processor intensive but I've not seen that in my experience..

Will look at your suggestions. Thanks. Never have got to grips with "topology pattern" - now might be the time !
I tried a large sketch, and I tried feature pattern. I think there is probably a sweet spot somewhere, but I didnt find it. I also tried removing all the consraints in the sketches and then repeating in both sketch and feature pattern. Before I did that, the model would crash 50% of the time, after that it didn't crash.

 

[Max]

Sketch is the worst way (by far). Feature pattern is the ok way. Topology pattern is the best way, for this specifically.