Changing to custom shape in Mass Flow Units does not show shape in conveyor.

[JesusPR]

[ FlexSim 24.2.0 ]

Hi,

Changing to a custom shape in .skp or .dae format and adding it to the Mass flow unit Item shape does not show any content (visually) in the Mass flow conveyor although in the statistics there is content flowing through.

- Jesús

MFCShape.fsm

colacan.skp

[philboboADSK · Accepted solution]

This feature doesn't currently work with skp files. It should work fine with dae files though. Do you have a dae file that doesn't work?

[JesusPR]

Opening this file ( model.dae ) in another big model that I have does not work (same version), but opening it in the small model that I attached and putting it into the flow units works properly. So I'm not sure what is going on.

[jason_lightfootVL7B4]

We've had reports recently where shapes seem to be missing if the system resources are low - could you check that you have enough memory in the PC?

[JesusPR]

I checked running/stopped it is only 15% CPU used and 35% Memory.

[philboboADSK]

Your CPU and RAM usage aren't particularly relevant to loading 3D shapes. What matters more is the VRAM on your GPU. If you are out of allocatable space in VRAM, then the OpenGL commands that allocate objects and buffers on the GPU will fail, and they won't draw.

You can see GPU memory usage in the Details section of Task Manager by adding columns. You can use dxdiag to see how much VRAM your GPU has. (Shown below.)

You should also optimize the shape you are loading for rendering on a mass flow conveyor. For memory and performance reasons, you want this shape to be a single mesh. You can use the Customize Shape dialog (shown above) to see that your shape is actually composed of 6 different meshes. (You can also see the meshes that will be drawn for that FlowUnit in the tree at MODEL:/ConveyorSystem>variables/meshData.) When you need to draw thousands or millions of those on the Conveyor System, that's going require much more memory and processing on your GPU than if your shape were a single mesh.

You should use a 3D modeling application to merge your shape's meshes into a single mesh with a single material and a single texture. You should use a good modeling package and format that gives you that control over the exported shape file. Sketchup and skp do not give you that kind of control. The way Sketchup stores its data is very different than what a graphics API, such as OpenGL, DirectX, or Metal, expects as input. The data will go through multiple transformation and translation processes during export and import if you use Sketchup. This leads to data loss and is hard to control. Better to use a better tool and format.