Meshing The Whole Point Cloud Using Hacksaw

• Instead of loading all points at once and attempting to produce a single mesh from them, Hacksaw subdivides the point cloud into multiple smaller sub-regions (“Cells”) and meshes them one by one.

• The resulting mesh segments (called “Partitions”) can be loaded with a single Mesh Loader object.

• The individual Hacksaw Cells can be processed in multiple parallel tasks if the hardware allows, or can be distributed to multiple network machines running DEADLINE.

Expand the “Hacksaw Settings” rollout of the Mesher.

Set the “X Cells” value to 2.

Set the “Y Cells” value to 10 - note that the length of the ship is aligned to the Y axis, so we want the most segments along it.

Set the “Z Cells” value to 4 - the ship is quite tall, so it is a good idea to split it more often vertically.

• These settings will produce 2*10*4 = 80 Cells.

• Since we disabled the Point ROI object, the whole cloud’s bounding box will be considered - this is the default Hacksaw setting anyway: “Use Input Bounding Box”.

Click the [Export World Space…]* button.

• A Save File dialog will pop up, asking for the destination folder to save the Mesh Partitions into.

• The default name proposed for saving will be the name of the Mesher.

Enter the name of the output, for example “USSKidd”.

• 80 Tasks will be added to the Task Manager, and the processing will start.

Loading The Mesh Partitions

• Thanks to the asynchronous nature of SEQUOIA, you can start loading the first Mesh Partitions processed in the background as soon as they appear on disk.

• This could be done in the same Document where we set up our Loading and Meshing, or in a completely separate Document.

• Let’s say we want to create a new empty Document with just a Mesh Loader and no Points.

Click on the File menu in the Main Menu bar and select New Document.

• Alternatively, you can press CTRL+N.

• A new Document called “Untitled2” with Orange color will be created, and a new Viewport tab will be docked next to the Green Document.

Click on the New Mesh Loader icon:

• A file dialog will open.

Navigate to the folder where the Hacksaw Meshing output is being written and select any of the Partitions.

Check the option “Multiple Partitions” : “Load” in the Mesh Loader.

Check the [Update Mesh Loader] button to reload.

Press the Z key to Zoom Extents.