Hi Ed, are you talking about something that applies only to the polygon mesh data, not anything to do with the actual NURBS model itself?
Yeah, ideally stuff like that would happen at render time, for example similar to how applying a displacement map modifies the altitude of the mesh geometry when it is rendered.
That kind of polygon-mesh focused processing is just not really what MoI is focused on - I mean it does focus on creating a mesh from NURBS surfaces, but there are a whole lot of different kinds of polygon mesh editing functions that are generally outside of the realm of what MoI is focused on handling itself...
Generally the focus is - if you want to do different kinds of editing of the polygon mesh data after it has been generated, you would use a polygon mesh editing program to do that, not MoI.
I'd be kind of worried about trying to build in some variety of mesh editing tools directly into the export step, because it could possibly turn the export process into some kind of complex process with a lot of various stages and options in it... Anyway that's what I would be concerned about with opening up this kind of feature avenue.
The other issue is that it's actually pretty complicated to do a good job of that - it's not just only a modification of the normals all by themselves, the surrounding polygons need to be kind of trimmed back and a little new polygon inserted in there. Just tweaking only the normals alone of something like a large polygon face of a box would have an effect that would spread things across the whole large face, in order to localize it a small polygon has to be put in there. It's pretty easy for there to be difficulties if the polygons around the edge are already of a small size, because that could mean that you would have to alter the mesh more substantially by pruning out several little polygons until finding one to cut back, I think that the Rhino labs one you linked to can run into difficulties due to this problem.
- Michael
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