Scaling Issue...

[anon79233063]

I am having trouble with Scale in Sequoia.

Workflow is the following:

Export out PTS from Cyclone: Linear Units set to Meters refer to screen capture.

When I bring in a PTS file of a 1 meter square surface, I don’t know what the scale is…but it seems really small…Don’t know how to verify size in Sequoia yet.

Next export out a mesh…(xmesh)

Bring in the xmesh into 3ds max…size is 1.4" square and not a 1 meter square.

What am I doing wrong? How do you see units in Sequoia?

Ed

[paul]

Thank you for your report! Unfortunately our unit / scale treatment still needs some work.

Currently:

• Sequoia uses centimeters for its display and controls, and there is no way to see or change this.
• We assume that .pts files use the same unit as Sequoia (centimeters).
• We export .xmesh files without any scale information. I will log this as a bug.

I’m curious if you have any thoughts on how scaling / units should work?

Here are some of my thoughts:

• Perhaps we should explicitly show the unit in all controls? For example, perhaps the Meshing Radius control should show “0.7 cm”?
• Centimeters seem like a surprising default to me. Personally I would expect this to be meters instead.
• Eventually we will need some way to change the display units.
• As far as I know, .pts files do not have a defined unit (perhaps you know better?), so we should probably add a control to set this.

Edit: As a workaround, you should be able to scale your point cloud in Sequoia by 100x (using the Transform panel) to convert it from meters to centimeters.

In your XMesh Loader in 3ds Max, you can manually set the file’s units by changing the “Length Unit” dropdown in the Files rollout. In this case, you’ll want to set the Length Unit to “Centimeters”.

[jedfrechette]

@paul

Here are some of my thoughts:

• Perhaps we should explicitly show the unit in all controls? For example, perhaps the Meshing Radius control should show “0.7 cm”?
• Centimeters seem like a surprising default to me. Personally I would expect this to be meters instead.
• Eventually we will need some way to change the display units.
• As far as I know, .pts files do not have a defined unit (perhaps you know better?), so we should probably add a control to set this.

I agree with all of these and I would also add the ability for the user to manually specifify the units when importing from or exporting to any file formats that don’t explicitly encode units.