Overview:
The purpose of this article is to explain the changes being made to the implicit body generated by the Cone block in nTop 4.0.
Table of Contents
1. Effective Release
2. Change
3. Impacted Blocks
4. Example Differences
5. How does this affect you?
6. Recommended Actions
1. Effective Release
- nTop 4.0
2. Change
- In nTop 4.0, we released an improvement to the cone primitive. The implicit body produced by the Cone block now has numerically accurate field values when the cone is not oriented with the X/Y/Z axes.
- Because the previous result was incorrect in some cases, we did not version the block when implementing this change. In nTop 4.0, version 1.0.0 of the Cone block contains the bug fix.
- You do not have to manually update the block or change your nTop notebook to benefit from this fix.
- All previous notebooks that use the Cone block can still be opened and viewed in nTop 4.0+ and all future versions.
- Geometry that nTop caches on save, such as meshes, CAD Bodies, slices, analysis results, & more, will be available as view-only.
- If you re-run the Cone block, blocks downstream that use it as input will also re-run.
- Downstream blocks that utilize gradient calculations may produce a slightly different output.
3. Impacted Blocks
- The Cone block, version 1.0.0
Details on impact:
- We guarantee that operations that discretize your cone, such as Mesh from Implicit Body, Voxel Grid from Implicit Body, etc., are within your desired tolerance.
- You may observe differences in topology, for example, a mesh’s element layout, vertex positions, and connectivity data.
- Since the numerical change is minor, these differences will often only be observed after two or more blocks downstream blocks, for example, Mesh from Implicit Body > Remesh Surface.
4. Example Differences
This section contains a few examples demonstrating the results from remeshing a cone between nTop version 3.45 and 4.0.
| Version | Edge Length (mm) | Face Count | Vertex Count |
| nTop 3.45 (Top image) | 0.5 | 3,038 | 1,521 |
| nTop 4.0 (Bottom image) | 0.5 | 2,846 | 1,425 |
5. How does this affect you?
As demonstrated in the previous section, the effect of this update on your existing workflows is minimal. You can expect a minor difference in the topology of a mesh or CAD Body generated from the Cone block, but this will not significantly affect any analysis, optimization, or downstream manufacturing processes.
6. Recommended Actions
Although we expect this update not to affect your existing workflows, we recommend that for any notebooks using the Cone, you either export and save any geometry prior to updating and/or save a copy of any notebook(s) with a different name before running the update to preserve your old results if needed.