Soft Symmetry

The soft symmetry is activated per default. It influences the design generation so that the part is symmetric in all three dimensions if they were symmetric in the respective dimension to begin with. This is achieved for geometrical symmetrical design spaces even without the hard symmetry constraint.

Equivalence Delta Value:

This governs how far the optimization value of two symmetric elements is allowed to differ while still being considered equivalent. In theory any value works: the higher the value the more zealously the algorithm will try to keep Soft Symmetry, possibly degrading the quality of the produced geometry compared to a non-symmetric one. The default value is 5e-2.

Attempt Soft Symmetry:

Whether or not Soft Symmetry is attempted at all can be (de)activated here.

• off: Soft Symmetry is deactivated.

• always: Soft Symmetry is always on.

• dynamic: The optimisation will start with Soft Symmetry activated but turn it off once no dimension’s symmetry can be salvaged. Note that “dynamic” will never turn it back on once it has turned it off once.

Soft Symmetry Threshold:

Specifies how many asymmetric elements are sufficient for the "dynamic" setting of attemptSoftSymmetry to turn off soft symmetry. Values between 0 and 1 are allowed, where the number represents the proportion of voxels. The default value is 0.6.

The default settings can be changed with the following commands: