I'm after finding a function to get rid of isolated vertexes (on the fly) that appear as result of slicing along hidden edges, anyone know a solution?
Note: The slice operation is performed in simple object plugin that has a pick object function.
The meshing result needs to be clean and not present those extra points that generate all sorts of problems in smoothing etc.
See screenshot,
Anyone?
Thanks,
You'd have to rebuild those polygons yourself (get invis edges with 2-edge non-border vert, get the polygon, remove and create new polygon, transfer SG/VC/map data if any). TriMesh is not really good when dealing with polygons.
Editable poly objects have a completely different structure, they don't use TriMesh (Mesh), that's why I said it's easy with PolyMesh (MNMesh). With TriMesh, the whole mesh is defined by a collection of faces and each of them has three edges. If you slice them, the edges get sliced, too. With polymesh (whole another structure, see winged edge), the defining structure are the edges that create polygons, their triangulation is secondary. If you use slice there, no such problems will arise. It also makes it possible to use concepts such as loops, rings etc.
To further address your 'I know it must exist' plea, no one bothered with it with the built-in modifiers either: make a box, convert it to editable mesh and apply a symmetry modifier on it and you will see that as soon as the underlying object is a mesh, it will exhibit the exactly same problems with vertices inserted at invisible edges where sliced. So no, it doesn't really.
Proper way to do that would be to create a modifier that modifies MNMesh instead, but seeing that you're not experienced at maxscripting and this would reuquire C++, I can only suggest asking for a MNMesh scripted modifier on the Ideas page. Scripted plugins currently only work with TriMesh values and maxscript cannot convert from that to PolyMesh without creating a scene node (and it wouldn't be a good idea either as the conversion time overhead everytime anything changes would make it crawl).
@Anonymous wrote:
you can convert it with MaxPlus... what you have to do is to make empty PolyObject, set its mesh using the current(derived) mesh, do whatever you want using polyop, and finally return a modified mesh of your polyobject.
True, you can do that, I wouldn't like this approach in a modifier but as a simpleObject... you could create the polyobjects upon picking the nodes, save them in a RefTargContainer in a #maxObject parameter and only update when needed.
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I wouldn't like this approach in a modifier ...
what's wrong with using it in a modifier? i do it all the time if i want to handle an object as a epoly object ...
It feels dirty to do it that way, especially using MaxPlus and its wrappers. I would probably opt for just passing the mesh to a separate .NET function in that case (avoiding the MaxPlus library completely, it's subject to change and can be quite limiting), only using the scripted modifier to pass it and nothing else.
I was reading this topic and I thougt I have some questions about this topic too.
So I read that you can make your own rules to allow only poly-objects to the plug-in, what'wrong with converting a mesh to a poly object?
In general, you want to avoid creating (and deleting) new scene nodes with each update, and you want to avoid collapsing the picked nodes and converting them to poly. Accepting only objects that are already editable poly shifts the responsibility to think twice about doing that to the user.
Is there any performance issue with converttopoly, or polyop instead of meshop or is there something else more important that I must know?
This is just an idea and I hope someone can correct me if this approach isn't that good or why it isn't preferd too do it this way? (learninpath boost 🙂 )
So is it possible to make copies from the 'picked object' one a mesh and another with a mesh converted to a poly?
You can do your slices, mirror before you do some other stuff on both of them, make from each seperantly a collections of vertices.
Derive the 'isolated vertices' --> rearrange all faces and delete this vertices.
look for the vertices indexes in the facelist--> look how many faces are with this number, rearrange the faces and delete that vertice.and do this in a loop until the islated vertices are away.
If you already make a copy and convert that to poly to do the slice, just grab the resulting mesh directly. I've hinted above how you can identify the offending verts (no need for any duplicate objects), plus instead of 'deleting verts' you would need to rebuild the faces and transfer existing mapping/smoothing/ID/etc data. Not easy, though of course doable. For examples on polyop.slice feel free to search cgtalk forums, there's plenty of examples.
