Hi Bard,

> So, is that will be possible to imagine a function to liquefied
> an objet; by example, a full cube (an ice cube) or one part
> of a cubic shape, may be on a plane or on others curves?
> As if, this objet flowed or melted, like water or oil?

You mean as a deformation tool to edit an existing object?

I don't really know of a method to produce that kind of an effect as deformation of an existing object.

You may need to use something more like a physics simulator type program to get some result like that to be automatically generated from an object.

I do want to add in a "cage deform" type mechanism that will let you edit a cage of points to squish the object around, but that's not the same thing as an "auto liquefy" function.

I'd recommend looking at some animation programs that have physics simulations in them as maybe a way to get that kind of an effect on polygon mesh geometry.


> I asked me also, if the METABALLS function was specific to
> polygons applications, or if we could to make a such effect
> with NURBS?

No, it's not really applicable to NURBS modeling. The way Metaballs work is that it actually creates something similar to a magnetic field, and then a boundary of that field is converted into triangles by subdividing it at some regular intervals.

Things that generate triangle output are not typically suitable for use with NURBS, generally NURBS surfaces need to be constructed out of a large rectangular UV grid of points and not a bunch of little triangle pieces with irregular topology.


Different modeling technologies tend to be stronger in particular areas - for the kind of stuff that you're mentioning here like metaballs and liquid like behavior you would want to be using a sub-d polygon modeling program (maybe one focused on animation) to make that kind of stuff.

MoI is stronger in completely different areas than that, with stuff like accurate construction, booleans, and a workflow that's more like drawing outline curves as compared to sculpting.

- Michael