creating 'Sculpties' for Second Life

 From:  Michael Gibson
597.12 In reply to 597.11 
> Well, a Programmer's work is never done. ;)

I know that feeling! :)

The nice thing about your stand-alone tool is that it can be used with a few different programs - MoI, Rhino, and I think that Ayam modeler can save a NURBS surface in a .3dm file, and possibly some other CAD programs like SolidWorks...

One other idea - probably right now you are doing that even stepping in UV space - that's a type of "uniform" tessellation.

That can be a problem if the surface has different behavior in different areas. Like if the surface is fairly flat in one half of it, but wiggly in the other half, you're still going to place a bunch of points in the flat area where it doesn't really need the points.

A different style, "adaptive" tessellation, would do something like subdivide UV space into half by placing one point in the middle, then try to analyze each of the remaining halves and if one of them was pretty flat then it would not add any more in that half and instead continue adding more in the bendy part.

That would be a way to try and optimize the point placement.

It's a bit tricky, but I could help you with it a bit at some point if it seems like it would improve the quality. It may not make much of a difference if people are doing mostly fairly evenly curved things. In fact one problem is if things are really evenly curved maybe the uniform way is actually a bit better spacing than adaptive...

- Michael