Front page > How-To Use Simplebim Desktop > 14. Other Data Wrangling > Weight Watcher

Weight Watcher

This tool is part of Simplebim Prototypes addon. In order to use the tool, you need to download and install the addon from here.

Tool for adding information about the geometric density of objects to the model. This helps you find objects that have complex geometries and thus bloat model and file sizes.

The tool adds two new properties to each object that has geometry

  • Triangle Count: number of triangles in the object’s geometry
  • Triangle Count Per Cubic Metre: number of triangles in the object’s geometry for each cubic metre of the object’s net volume

You must run the Basic Quantities tool before running this tool because the ‘Triangle Count Per Cubic Metre’ relies on the volume calculated by the Basic Quantities tool

Instructions

Using the Properties palette

  1. Import or open your model
  2. Run the ‘Basic Quantities’ tool
  3. Run the ‘Weight Watcher’ tool
  4. Select all objects in the 3D palette (Ctrl+A)
  5. Drag and drop all objects from the 3D Palette to the Properties palette
  6. Select the ‘Triangle Count’ property in the Properties palette
  7. The ‘Triangle Count’ is sorted by value and the objects with the largest triangle count are found at the and of the list.
  8. The ‘Triangle Count Per Cubic Metre’ property sometimes gives a better picture, especially when you have small objects with a complex geometry. This is however limited, because the Basic Quantities tool does not calculate a volume for all objects.

Using the Appearance Editor workspace

  1. Import or open your model
  2. Run the ‘Basic Quantities’ tool
  3. Run the ‘Weight Watcher’ tool
  4. Open the Appearance Editor workspace
  5. In the ‘Please Select Object Class or Group to Visualize” dropdown select the ‘Weight Watcher’ group.  It can be found pretty much at the end of the dropdown
  6. In the ‘Please Select Property To Visualize’ dropdown select either ‘Triangle Count’ or ‘Triangle Count Per Cubic Metre’
  7. The objects are colored on a color scale from green to red, where the green objects have few triangles and the red objects have a lot. The objects with a lot of triangles can be found at the end of the list.
  8. Holding down Shift you can select multiple values at the end of the list, i.e. objects with a lot of triangles. This selects those objects in the 3D palette. Now isolate the selected objects in the 3D palette and you get a good idea of the objects with a lot of triangles.
    • To make this process easier you can set the ‘Speak and Listen’ mode in the ribbon of the 3D palette to ‘Isolate’ and the selected objects are automatically isolated.
    • One trick is to turn on Isolate for the 3D palette, then select only the last item in the Visualizer palette. This isolates the objects with the most triangles. Then hold down the Shift key and start pressing the Up Arrow key. This adds new rows to  the selection and the corresponding objects are isolated in the 3D palette.

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