Exposing the Core

Banate CAD strives to follow the design cliche “Make that which is simple, simple, make that which is hard possible”, or something to that effect.  To that end, Banate CAD is structured in nicely composable layers, or at least in my mind.  This can be seen in one area, the import of mesh files.

Here, I have used the simplest of import commands:

import_stl("bowl_12.stl")


translate({100, 0, 0})
import_stl("bowl_12.stl")


The import_stl() function will simply read in the .stl, and add the mesh to the scene automatically. In this case, the second import_stl() call will load the same .stl again, crating another instance of the mesh, and add that to the scene as well.

This is pretty straight forward, and works just fine. For limited numbers of meshes, the fact that you’re replicating meshes, doesn’t really have that much of an effect. Where this is a pain though is when you want to load multiple instances of the same mesh, perhaps 10s or hundreds of them.

Here for displaying 16 of the bowls, I’d actually like to load the bowl once, and simply use that same mesh to perform many operations. So, instead of using the import_stl(), I use the import_stl_mesh() function like the following:

function test_instancing(rows, columns)
local amesh = import_stl_mesh("bowl_12.stl")

for row = 1,rows do
for col = 1,columns do
color({row/rows, (row+col)/(rows+columns), col/columns, 1})
translate({col*100,row*100,0})
addmesh(amesh)
end
end
end

In particular, it is this call at the beginning of the function that does the magic.

local amesh = import_stl_mesh("bowl_12.stl")

Here, we are loading a single instance of the mesh. Then later, we can use the addmesh() function to actually add the mesh to the scene. From then on out, it will be displayed just like in the first case, but it won’t have to replicate the mesh to do it.

It really shines when you have a whole bunch of things:

In this case, with 100 instances of the bowl, it doesn’t take much longer to load/render than simply displaying a single bowl.

What does this have to do with layering? When you call ‘import_stl’, that code is essentially doing import_stl_mesh(); addmesh(). Rather than hiding that, it is made readily available to the user. The casual user who’s not concerned with hundreds of instances, or optimizations, can simply use the import_stl() call. For those who want to get into the nitty gritty, and deal with their own instances, they can use the import_stl_mesh() call. The other benefit of doing the version where you get back the mesh, is that you can then perform operations on the mesh itself if you so choose. Let’s say for example you have some sort of smoothing routines, or something that fixes vertex normals, or an exporter, or any manner of things, you can add them easily because you have the mesh in hand, and not just a graphic representation of it on the screen.

It might be possible to write code like this:


local amesh = import_stl_mesh("file.stl")
export_dxf("file.dxf")


Banate CAD does not currently have any DXF support, but when it does show up, you’ll be able to easily do this. And while you’re at it, since you can do: export_stl(amesh, "newfile.stl"), you could write code within your file to generate multiple .stl files, one per mesh in your scene if you feel like it. The default “Export STL” from the File menu simply iterates through all the meshes in the scene (simple) and exports them all. They access and layering in Banate CAD allows anyone to do the same from within your script.

So, the system is very flexible, and gives the scripter the exact same capabilities as the guy who wrote Banate CAD in the first place (me). So, if you want to stick with the simple, you can do that. If you want to go down to the metal, from within your scripts, you can do that as well.

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