Hi Jason, well that is pretty mysterious as to why triangulating should make such a big difference, especially if exporting from MoI with "Quads & Triangles" instead of n-gons still has the same kind of issue.

But I'm glad you have a method that works anyway.

- Michael

"When you have a joined object, if you uncheck that "Weld vertices along edges" option, it will still produce a watertight no-crack mesh but the mesh will be clustered into separate non-connected (non-connected in a topological sense, but actually physically touching in location) sets of vertices with one set for each original surface. This will then allow you to use your polygon modeler's mesh processing functions to separate the mesh into individual objects."

I asked for the "mesh like joined" function, because I don't want to get all surfaces of a polysurface unwelded, only selected one. I need the meshes for a mesh unfolder (UV texture coordinates unfolding). Welded mesh parts are treated as one object and each unwelded connection is treated as cut in the mesh.

Attached an example of a seat cushion. I like to get separate side parts, but the mesh should be generated like from a closed polysurface. It's easier to extract NURBS surfaces than mesh parts. If I would disable the MoI weld function than I would get to much cuts in the mesh.

Thanks,
Micha

Hi Micha, I think you'll need to use a polygon mesh modeler for that kind of "just unweld this one particular surface and not other stuff" kind of level of detail on the mesh processing.

It's difficult to include such very specific detailed functions in MoI's mesher, if it did all kinds of special purpose mesh editing functions like that it will end up getting a really complex UI pretty quickly.

Many polygon mesh editing programs should be able to handle what you need - you probably would want to export from MoI with welding turned off, then select the mesh pieces that you want to keep unwelded, invert the selection and then perform a merge vertices / weld type operation on everything else to weld all the other points together where they had multiple vertices stacked in the same location.


Also maybe I have misunderstood what you are asking for - do you want to actually keep the surfaces as separate unjoined surfaces in MoI but still make them mesh as if they were joined? But if so, that's not really feasible to do, the mesher can't make things work like they are joined without actually knowing which things are joined to one another, so there would have to be an additional full joining calculation done at meshing time in order to know that. That joining calculation can be a time consuming operation, so that's something that you need to do to objects before running them through the mesher, it's not something that the mesher can easily handle in addition to meshing.


> It's easier to extract NURBS surfaces than mesh parts.

This is not usually the case if you're using a mesh modeling program.

- Michael

Thank you Michael. Right, I will ask the developer of the unfolder for more extraction tools.