I gave up in one of my recent projects...

 

So... I have been working really hard these past months/years to get my "stable" life(job, follow schedule, socialize, do projects). Currently, I a have an internship in an energy sector company, and I am working on a multitude of projects. I learned a lot from the internship and my projects so far. But this time, I can not justify the amount of time I have spent on working on this project.

I will not try to give some context without giving up a lot of specific information:
I was super eager on learning so much on the internship that I tried to get myself to experience the most I can since I will be meeting very experienced people in their field during this internship. So I had the chance to use my skills from older projects for some of the tasks that were given to me. This made me feel like I could do absolutely anything in life and I was looking for a super challenging task I could accomplish. Aaand I ended up finding a challenging task that required me to use my new 3d printing skills:

Asked someone in the workplace to share something I can 3d print but damn it was a big mistake since I did not know I was setting myself up for some really long days on how to manage the files given to me and the million processes I had to do before 3d printing the model I was given.

First of all, this model was over 4gb in size and it took a loooooot of time to open it. For context, I have on of the M Pro computers and it couldn't handle all of this 😖.  Time passed on thinking on what can I do, but I decided to just wait for the model to be imported into the tool I use to manage my models: Blender.

Model took around 15 min just to appear on the screen😩 (Blender is very memory intensive :( )! It got even worse when I tried to zoom in since I had no idea how good quality (Excellent work) was this model...  So I had the idea that maybe the computer could perform better if I somehow find a way to reduce the quality of the model. Took a lot of time to think on what could I do (at home and sometimes when wanted to chill at work). So the time came. I had no idea what to do so I asked good trustworthy ChatGPT...:

 So ChatGPT suggested me download a software called MeshLab which was more efficient with the resources you have (memory, storage, etc.) and suggested me use a decimation tool with MeshLab. Myself, having no idea on what decimate means, got into an infinite hole of research and information on this tool and the different techinques there are to decimate...

Spent multiple days reading papers on how this algorithm works to understand the "different" algorithm meshlab uses compared to blender (more ineficient for my use). Then I finnaly decide to use the decimate tool in meshlab just to find out about how the number of faces in your model could determine the efficiency of the algorithm and at the same time, MeshLab tells me my model has more than 4 million faces.

Of course that is why the model was super slow on my computer.

I try to fix this problem as much as I can but the decimation tool was not forming the polygons I wanted for my model and I was slowly starting to feel that I should give up this project. 

But no! I decided to keep going: I decimated until the model reached the point where you can still see the shapes properly in your model. I was super relieved when I saw my model decreased the number of faces by more than 25% ( not a lot but supposedly better performance, right?). So I went back to blender...

 Yes! The model works more smoothly than before and I can actually finally zoom in the model! But now, how am I going to print it? I exported the decimated model to my slicer software and realized that the slicer was taking suuuuuper long to import the model, like over 25 min which is not good. 

Oh I forgot: I even saw the resources used for decimation, and importing to slicer and my computer was getting frieeed (all memory was being used and swap storage was going over 20GBs💀.

Anyway, I was already about to give up. But days passed, and I thought: "hmmm, these engineers have super strong computers, but this is just way to much power for any machine. How could their machines handle these projects???" Reality was that yes they probably had super powerful computer BUT possibly not powerful enough to handle the whole model I had! So that's when I realized AAAAH I CAN SPLIT THE MODEL IN DIFFERENT PIECES! 

And thats what I did: used Meshlab to cut the model and then I tried importing the different parts and process them separately on blender and my slicer: THEY WORKED AND RAN SMOOTHLY! I was super happy about that, so I kept working on the project:

Next and one of my final problems: All was working great except for when I prepared my model. The slicer software was taking so long to slice and prepare my file to print (like 30 min for just 1 piece of my separated model), and when it did, the g-code was so terribly done by the software because the decimation ruined some polygons and the slicer was not recognizing them as something to be printed...

And then I decided to optimize each single project by using a solidifier modification and other modifiers in blender and it didn't helped in anyway. Found more problems after that...

I reflected about my progress in the project while having all these issues and realized that... Maybe this is just not worth my time anymore: Yes, I was learning a lot, but I was not having fun anymore since there were so many problems with this and the whole idea of these projects is to have fun and learn. Some other things I thought: Was I ever going to use the techniques and methods I learned during this process? Most likely not. Could I be learning something more useful for my career focus that could be more fun that this? Definitely yes. Do I NOW even see it feasible to finish this project on time (end of august of this year aprox)? Definitely no.

The opportunity cost of this project was very low compared to other projects... 

So after this thinking and way more other questions, I decided to abandon this project.

I feel so bad for "wasting" all this time on this project, but I realized that this is a great decision since I could instead use one of the most KEY THINGS in life to make myself feel better and just accomplish multiple of my life goals: TIME.

 

Anyway, I will go back to other projects and hopefully find the time to update this blog on more aspects of my life :)