Hi Maximus,

A Rhino Labs plug-in

http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.aspx/McNeel/QuadMesh.html

For contact: Tim Hemmelman is the author of this plug-in.

Yes, but the original post showed a method of the re-topoly of an arbitrary mesh into quads.
The QuadMesh plugin looks like it only works with triangulated meshes.
I don't think it would give you nice continuous quads in many cases, which I think is what the original poster was looking for
(with loop continuity etc...)

I think this is maybe more in line with the idea:
http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.aspx/McNeel/PanelingTools.html

Hi Magnus,

> It might not be worth all the hard work required.

Well, it certainly could be useful but it is hard to say in advance exactly how well it would work.

The authors of that paper do not seem to have released any actual running program code for people to test their method with any mesh input.

So that makes it hard to really judge how "bulletproof" that method is, whether it has problems with certain situations or certain kinds of models, stuff like that.

That tends to make it quite a big risk for me to dedicate several months to working on it, since that would mean taking time off of other feature areas to achieve that...


It looks like a good area to watch though, maybe if the authors would release some program code for testing or make a library available for licensing it could make things more feasible.

- Michael

Rhino's QuadMesh plugin does work on polysurfaces too. But it's not producing sub-d ready meshes. I asked and was told it's generally required to have an all-quad mesh for exporting to finite element analysis software... I did a few tests trying to send those meshes to Modo for sculpting. It handled a bit more predictably than the normal mesher, but far from ideal...

jonah

Maybe the T-Spline team could help, there was an interest:

http://www.tsplines.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=29027&p=31617&hilit=quad&sid=fe7e4bfa241a2ed0843d4c496c3f5389#p31617

http://www.tsplines.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=28981&hilit=quad&sid=fe7e4bfa241a2ed0843d4c496c3f5389

Or you ask npowersoftware.com.

Hi Micha, no I don't think either of those will help at least not yet.

Those T-splines links seem to be discussing some possibility of working on a mesher at some point in the future and not about one that they currently have, is that correct?

I actually have the nPower mesher available to me, it is included in the Solids++ geometry library that I use. I've tried using the quad meshing part of it but it did not seem to be robust enough for regular use.

- Michael

Could be nice to get access to the npower mesher. Maybe you could add the quadmesher for advanced use. So, the user could try it for some projects.

Yes, the quad meshing per T-Spline isn't available yet, only some short talks at the forum about it, but nothing concrete.

Hi Micha,

> Could be nice to get access to the npower mesher.
> Maybe you could add the quadmesher for advanced use.
> So, the user could try it for some projects.

No, I just do not think it is good enough to set up like that.

It would probably cause a lot of bug reports to be sent in without very much that I could do about them currently.

Also when I experimented with it, I only set things up to test on planar surfaces where big planar n-gons were generated. To make it work on curved surfaces as well would need additional work.

- Michael

a little bit related to this topic... micha discovered the latest Rhino update now has support for n-gon meshes via OBJ import and OBJ export. It can't generate them. But at least it can support them now. This might be useful to some MoI-Rhino users... Any chance you will add mesh export directly to 3DM in the future? Or it would create a mess of the current export dialogue? If you prefer not, then OBJ still works fine. Just one extra step is all...

jonah

Hi jonah,

> Any chance you will add mesh export directly
> to 3DM in the future?

Yeah I think it should be feasible in the future.

But first McNeel would need to release an OpenNURBS toolkit that supported writing the n-gon data.

Just having it built directly into Rhino only doesn't really do the job - it needs to be exposed in the OpenNURBS library for me to be able to use it in 3DM files generated from MoI.

- Michael