Mesh Scope

[dangermouse82]

Hey everyone,

I've been learning Bifrost for a while now and have been learning a lot from the forum. This is the first time I'll show anything I've been working on.

In order to try and better understand how the offset array's for mesh construction work I created myself a little node I'm calling mesh_scope. You can basically plug any mesh into it, give it a face id and it will visualize that face, the vertices that are used to create it and their vert id's. It's basically visualizing the a mesh structures face_vertex and face_offset. You can change the colours and offset the specified face if you want too as well. It works very much the same as the setup in the first 5 mins of the I'm not sure how useful it would be to anyone else but I was thinking I might do a break down of how it works if it would help anyone learning

Here is a video of it in action

Thanks

James

[Anonymous]

This is very cool!

I really struggled with wrangling the vertex ids and face offset. Could you elaborate on the numbers in the "diagnostic geo"?
Also a range of face ids might be useful, possibly as a sequence array, so you can visualize multiple faces at the same time instead of copying the compound.

[dangermouse82]

Heya @Anonymous ,

the numbers in the diagnostic geo are actually showing the vertex numbers that make up the face. It's done by using the point scopes display numeric, however the issue with that is it displays a vector3 so the first number is the vetex id and the other 2 are empty so you end up with something like 81, 000, 000. It looks like for now there isn't a better way visualising the numbers in the HUD from bifrost. If you look really carefully in the video when im rotating around the torus example at the end you should be able to make out some of the numbers. It could be that my point shapes are too big and masking them.

Having a range of faces is a good idea and I think wouldn't be too hard to implement. I think I might have accidentally deleted part of my previous post but basically its based on the first 5mins of the bifrost masterclass where he is getting all the offset face and vertex face array data and slicing them. For now im doing exactly the same but I limited to 1 element of the offset face array but I could def select multiple and do a for each loop. I'll try and implement that next. Im happy to put up some screen grabs of the compound too if it helps 🙂

Thanks for the feedback and comments

James 

[labbejason]

Lovely!

[anthony.dreaming]

Hi James, I too have been struggling to get the numeric shape feature to work. Do you think you can upload your .ma file demonstrated in your video?

That would be greatly appreciated!

[anthony.dreaming]

If anyone else is struggling to get numeric display working on the latetest version of Bifrost 2.2.0.1 - it does not work. According to Maya tech support:  "There are currently some known problems with the Numeric display of the point_scope node, so I expect this to be fixed in near future."

[syracoj]

yes, point_scope numeric has some issues, I believe the set_point_shape numeric display should still work though so you could try using that instead. It could have some issues though during selection. In some cases you may need to deselect the graph shape in order to see the numeric display. All these issues are known internally and are catalogued in our system for future fixes.

[dangermouse82]

@anthony.dreaming 

Hey sure no problem, I will try find my file and upload it. It's a while ago since I made it but I think it was based on part of something I saw in the first part of the bifrost masterclass from a few months ago. I think as before though it's still not really working 100% as you get all the additional 000 000's.

[dangermouse82]

@anthony.dreaming so I opened up my old file and looks like now I have upgraded to bifrst 2.2.0.1 the numeric display isn't working for me either. Previously I had been using the point scope node and putting the point_id into the numeric value. I tried this with a set_point_shape and it's not working either so it looks like for now until there is a fix its not possible I'm afraid :S

[Anonymous]

point_scope and set_point_shape still not working for numeric display.🤣

[morten.bojsen-hansen]

@Anonymous, Numeric display is still buggy, but you can make it work by deselecting the bifrostGraph1 shape in the Maya outliner. The following graph works for me:

Sorry for any inconvenience!