Automation questions

[lendrom]

Hello,
my company is interested in buying a poly-reducing tool to be used in a chain of automatically performed operations on 3D models. We consider Polygon Cruncher but the important question for us is that it have to be able to be executed from command line. I saw some earlier posts in which it was stated that Polygon Cruncher can't be run that way, but I wanted to make sure it's still like that. So, is it possible to use it from command line? If not, are there any plans to intruduce such a possibility in future?
Another thing is that when testing trial version I could achieve very impressive results when using GUI, but the same settings for the same model gave me much worse results when I used batch mode. Am I missing something? Or maybe it's some kind of limitation of the trial version?

[mootools]

Hello,

Sorry for the late reply to your post.

my company is interested in buying a poly-reducing tool to be used in a chain of automatically performed operations on 3D models. We consider Polygon Cruncher but the important question for us is that it have to be able to be executed from command line.

This is not possible to call Polygon Cruncher from the command line.
The batch module is a kind of alternative, as it can handle a whole set of meshes.
If the command line is something really needed, you can also contact us about Polygon Cruncher SDK.

With this SDK you can customize the way Polygon Cruncher is applied and make it matches your exact pipeline. The whole Polygon Cruncher features are exposed through the API as well as many others things. In fact Polygon Cruncher SDK is a complete 3D Scene graph with many tools dedicated to mesh cleaning.

A last solution would be to implement the command line support and we can envisage that feature as a dedicated development. Contact us if it make sense.

Another thing is that when testing trial version I could achieve very impressive results when using GUI, but the same settings for the same model gave me much worse results when I used batch mode. Am I missing something? Or maybe it's some kind of limitation of the trial version?

You should have exactly the same results if you use the same optimization settings and optimize to the same ratio.
Take care of the option you entered in the batch module (optimization tab). They are really important.

Now one of the problem of the batch module is that there is no visual validation for the optimization.
This is why you have an option to optimize each mesh at different ratio.
Doing that you can then quickly validate which optimization ratio is the most appropriate for a specific file.

We will working in the next release to improved criteria for defining an appropriate ratio for each meshes.

Have a nice day,
Manuel