Re: Modo import
> Your 5-sided ngon imported fine (see image)...

Hmm, that is kind of confusing. It is strange that it is able to handle it by itself but not when it is included in the larger mesh. It must have some problem with handling some other face in the mesh, and then that triggers some bug that affects other things that are processed after that point...

It seems like there are quite a lot of programs that can't handle the full ngons. I'll probably have to have it turned to only generate quads and triangles by default, and you can switch on the option to do full ngons.

- Michael

> The Npower mechanism adds numerous interior vertices.
> You don't end up with slivery quads, but you do end up
> with a large quantity of small ones.

You're right, I guess the only real reason to implement this kind of output would be if you got a lot of users requiring either deformable models or subdividable/smoothable models. (Catmul-Clark and Doo-Sabin really mess up those n-gon and sliver faces)

Hi Michael,

here is another file to try your updated obj exporter.
as you can see it messes up a lot when I export it,

best regards,

Thorsten

PS:
By the way when can we expect a new version with the quad only export?

Hi Thorsten,

> here is another file to try your updated obj exporter.
> as you can see it messes up a lot when I export it,

Thanks for the sample! Here is what it looks like with n-gons: (Also .obj file attached)




> PS:
> By the way when can we expect a new version with the quad only export?

Well, it's not actually quad only, it is an "n-gon" only option where there will be polygons that have any number of sides, not just 4. But I think that there will also be more organized quads in the quad+triangle output as well.

There is still a fair amount of work to do on it, looks like it might be about a week or so before a new version with it is ready.

- Michael

Thnx a mil Michael,

I'm looking forward to it, some objects work fine by now already,
another thing very handy would be if we can export each object group with a different poly amount setting,
I had an nice spanish chair where I needed more details in the seat part and when I added it there the frame
was going insanly detailed and boosting the object from 8k polys to 50k polys.

Just a thought from myself

Regards,

Thor

PS:

It would be nice to have some kind of material setting like just colours and maybe transparency :-D

> another thing very handy would be if we can export each object group
> with a different poly amount setting, I had an nice spanish chair where I
> needed more details in the seat part and when I added it there the frame
> was going insanly detailed and boosting the object from 8k polys to 50k polys.

This should be improved quite a large amount with the new meshing system as well - it's actually what I've been working on most recently.

With the new system, the density will increase much more gradually. When you want to add a little bit more detail it shouldn't increase in such large jumps elsewhere as the current beta does.

So this should hopefully reduce the need to set a bunch of different settings per object. But we'll see, when the new beta is available let me know if you still run into situations where it is a problem.

If you happen to have that spanish chair handy, if you post it I can give it a test.


> It would be nice to have some kind of material setting like just colours and
> maybe transparency :-D

Yup, this will happen eventually. I'm not sure exactly when.

- Michael

Hi Michael here it is :-D

> Hi Michael here it is :-D

Hi Thor, thanks, I can see the problem in the mesh there. Do you have the original .3dm file that you created the mesh from? If you can post that I will try meshing it with the new mesher to see if that problem is indeed reduced or not.

- Michael

Sorry Michael,

I picked the wrong file....

here it is,

enjoy,
THor

Attached is what this looks like with the current new mesher. It seems better to me, what do you think?

There is one major area that is not handled completely - larger areas that have rather subtle shallow curves may not pick up as much detail as you would want. I might try a couple of ideas on fixing this part up too.

- Michael

Thnx Michael,

it looks now far more like what I had in mind :-D

Thor

Hi Michael,

maybe this helps you a bit:
http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~garland/papers/ssq.pdf

Best regards,

Thor

> maybe this helps you a bit:
> http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~garland/papers/ssq.pdf

Hi Thor, it's very interesting, but it is a method that builds a quad mesh from a triangle mesh.

I'd expect this kind of functionality to be added to whatever program you're using that works on meshes. I'm probably not going to add a lot of mesh to mesh processing type functionality into MoI.

- Michael

Did you notice the Moai statue on page 7 of the PDF ? ;-)))

Yes, Moai is everywhere, it's the new wave :D

I'm still in the process of working on the vertex alignment for ngons. It's one of those things where it seems like every step uncovers two more steps of other stuff before it is done. But it is moving along.

- Michael

Actually, it samples surface shape/topology So while the examples that paper is using are triangular meshes being turned into quads, it could be working with nurbs too. There is another paper by the same author on user-directed remeshing that yields models with good edge flows ( Needed for 3D animation ). Basically a automated version of Silo's topo brush.

Both would be killer features. Don't dismiss them because the examples are tri based. :)

> Both would be killer features. Don't dismiss them because the examples are tri based. :)

Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that they would be useful. But reading a research paper and making a fully functioning production ready implementation are two totally different things...

It's just far beyond the scope of what I will be able to accomplish anytime soon.

Since the technology is not specific to NURBS and works on triangle meshes, why wouldn't you want to have this functionality available inside a polygon modeler where you might be importing a bunch of other triangle-based models already? It seems like it would be a lot more useful and more general purpose if it was implemented over there rather than only as a specialized NURBS export option.

- Michael

I`ll check that with the silo guys :-D

Thnx for the tip Michael,

Thorsten