Celestia Forums

I found a cool looking mesh of Charon on the 3D Asteroid Catalogue, and thought it would look good in Celestia. The only problem is that the lines that separate the "data" regions from the "no data" regions are very visible, and make the mesh look bad in Celestia:

Is there a way to remove these lines, or at least smooth them out so that they aren't visible on the dark side of Charon?
Here is the download link if you want to try it yourselves: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5A59f3et_cJS1hGZW5ZWHNvUEk
Note that the model is already correctly oriented, so please avoid changing the orientation, if possible.

on a low poly 9.6 MB mesh
no , not really

or maybe

open the mesh in blender and use the smooth tool on the lines
but you will need to subdivide a few times first before trying

Can you describe to me how to do that? I don't really know how to use Blender, so if you could explain this process to me, it would be most appreciated.

I sucessfully tried that with the Lutetia mesh a while ago. It is kind of a pain.

Select "Sculpt Mode"
Make sure to deselect "Symmetry/Lock"
Click on the thumbnail and select "F Smooth"
Then try out different settings of radius and strength until you get a good result

If that's not good enough the subdivide thing could help, but I would avoid it if possible.

It should be:
"Edit mode" -> Mesh -> Edges -> Subdivide
do it a bunch of times. The increases in edges/vertex count is shown within the status ba close to the program's icon. Anyhow, wait for John reply: he is the "Blender guru" here.

If I subdivide the mesh 3 times, Blender becomes too laggy to use (if I am changing my view, then Blender runs at about 1 frame every 8 seconds or so). My computer has plenty of power (16GB of DDR4 RAM!), but Blender doesn't want to use very much of it. Is it possible to allocate more RAM to Blender?

Memory usage should be displayed on the info bar: doesn't it increase along with subdivisions? Blender does use all RAM memory available on system: possibly your issues concerns the GPU (on board?). BTW, to remove those lines couldn't be matter of subdivisions/smoothing, but a more simple "make face" operation among them; i.e. some faces are missing along the mesh's border. If this latter is the case, there is no room for subdivisions: those lines will be there even after Nth subdivisions.