Performance Issue with Parametric Pulley Model (High Tooth Count)

[johancoppens]

First of all, congratulations on this impressive piece of software.

I'm currently working on an web version of "Parametric pulley – lots of tooth profiles," an SCAD script for generating parametric toothed belt pulleys: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16627. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to port this to Replicad. However, I'm running into some performance issues.

Could you take a look at the code in Studio? [link here] It works quite well with a tooth count of 10, but when I increase it to 100, it becomes very slow. The SCAD version renders in just a few milliseconds.

Is there a different approach I should consider to improve performance?

Thanks in advance!

[sgenoud]

I can see different ways you could make it faster.

The root cause is that booleans are slow with replicad (because they are slow in opencascade), especially when done in 3D.

You could work in 2D and then extrude, it would probably gain some speed (i.e. one dimension less makes things faster).

I can also see that the profile is defined as some lines (but they look a lot like arcs of circles). Any reason not to use arcs there? It would lower the number of faces (and make everything faster).

Any reason you use scale and not offset?

[johancoppens]

Your suggestions significantly improved the performance — it now takes only a few seconds! I'm continuing to work on improving the script and will share updates. Here the current version.

Tkank you!