Hi Peter - the problem is that only a pretty limited subset of organic shapes could actually be reconstructed using that particular method.
Imagine if you had any kind of pieces sticking out from that blob like little arms or stuff like that - you can't just simply build a single loft through a shape that has branching areas in it like that.
Much more robust reverse engineering usually involves fitting a variety of smaller sub patches along the object, sometimes with guidelines that you sketch into place to divide the shape into different patch regions. Of course, it's a whole lot of work to make a really good reverse engineering toolkit like that, so it's not very likely that it's going to be an area that I would actually be able to integrate directly into MoI. That's something that you're going to need to find other more specialized software to handle for you.
One of the easiest things to try would be Rhino which has some various reverse engineering plugins for it, see here for a list: http://www.rhino3d.com/resources/default.asp?category=13&language=en you would probably want to look at some of those there like RhinoResurf, RhinoReverse, Smurf, or VSR Shape Modeling.
This is a pretty specialized area and I just do not see how it would be possible for me to come up with the large block of time that would be required for me to develop such features directly into MoI. So since it's not going to happen directly in MoI you need to look to other software which is already available to do stuff like this...
There are also some other solutions that are not Rhino plug-ins like Geomagic wrap, but they tend to be quite expensive, so if you need something that's not too terribly expensive those Rhino plug-ins are probably a good place to look at first.
- Michael |
