Optimizing performance for repairing imported part

BenTaylor

I downloaded a shoulder screw from McMaster and am repairing it to remove the modeled knurling (link to the part studio). I set up different configurations with different techniques of removing the knurls, and they showed some interesting results. The repair reduced the number of primitives from 11,110 to 4,928, going from 422 to 26 faces (quite a significant improvement). 

My tab regeneration times:

• Import only: 32 ms
• Revolving a sketch around: 195 ms
• Deleting faces (by healing): 83 ms
• Deleting faces (by capping): 94 ms
• Extruding a face to a mate connector: 195 ms
• Extruding that face blindly: 224 ms

I'm curious why the operations I'd consider "simpler" (Revolve & Extrude) take significantly longer. Also wondering if anyone can find an even faster method.

TimRice

I would guess the extra time in Revolve/Extrude is caused by using the boolean command. Generally for complex faces like this a boolean is less performant as it needs to calculate the intersections. But that is from my FS experience and a more knowledgeable modeling team member may have a more accurate answer

EvanReese

I always favor delete/heal where I can. Tim is right, the boolean operations are what makes any solid modeling techniques heavier. I think delete/cap is a tiny bit slower because it has to still calculate and create new geometry, whereas heal just untrims the underlying faces and all of the math is already there. The only way I can think to speed up the rebuild time is to export the modified model and re-import it. I'm getting 29 seconds with that, but it's clearly a kludgy labor-intensive method if you have a lot of hardware (which I happen to know you definitely do ).