Mesh Fusion- Power Booleans

[John Bigboote]

 

I know we are supposed to stay A:M here, thought some may be interested in this Mesh Fusion plug-in which works within modo... it speeds the bool process of adding, subtracting or co-joining meshes and generates a final model which is airtight with no extra geometry or 'upon render' booleans. Pretty danged cool!

[jason1025]

Game Changer.

Easily creates a fillet and joins objects in seconds vs Minutes or hours for us.

 

How can we implement something like this as a plugin for AM or export a model from Modo and import it into AM as splines is that possible?

 

I personally think we should ask Stephen how much money it would take for him to make a plugin that can this.

 

Then we pool our money together to get it.

[nemyax]

Making it work with splines would be an insane increase in complexity. With polygons, it's enough to make meshes continuous by creating shared edges at plane–plane intersections. You don't have to bother with curvature, and the derived subdiv surface is very forgiving when it comes to a convergence of 3, 5 or 6 edges at a vertex (which is common in this kind of workflow). Or a 6-sided face, for example.
With spline patches, however, you'd have to both maintain curvature and rearrange topology on the fly.

[Fuchur]

cutting out can be done with boolean cutter bones. it is non destructive and animateable. but you can not use it destructivly no matter what you do and union and other additive operations are not possible neighter.

[thefreshestever]

this is really really cool!

[John Bigboote]

There is substantial cost involved with these softwares... modo runs USD $1400 and can be had on sale once a while for $900- and MF will be another $400. I see MF is available in maya flavour now too. If A:M's cost was in this league and had the number of users- perhaps development might be feasible... once all the concerns Nemyax brings-up are resolved.

[pixelplucker]

Would be nice to have real booleans in AM for mechanical modeling. The live booleans I have used in the past worked pretty well with Amapi Pro. Manifold volumes were also pretty great but as with all of these functions, having them live and editable came with a stability cost to the file. Often as geometries got more and more complex the rebuild would get iffy. Mostly because eventually the programs will run out of memory.

 

AM has one huge advantage with their bone cutters is that they can be animated. Perfect for showing cutaways and something I could have used in the past where I ended up using morph targets or animated transparency maps. So much easier to control.

 

For the money I still think MOI is a good complimentary program to AM. Very few cad programs produce clean artifact free poly models. One's that I had success with is MOI and Rhino. FormZ also has good optimization exports but is still pretty hard to use and pricey.

 

MOI allows you to tag faces as groups which are recognized in AM in the surface menu allowing you to change texture properties on parts of the model. Great way to easily fill the scene with simple props.

 

An advantage to the props is you can have a low res model to work with and a high res to replace it without losing anything. This allows to use a low res for proxy. Simply keep a folder with the low res models in one, high in another with same names. When you want to go for the high res simply exit AM and rename the high res folder to the same name as the low res and change the low res folder name so you don't lose them or move it out of the directory.

 

Transforms and textures are preserved. Model was exported out as a low res and high res from MOI.

 

What would be cool is the ability to use boolean cutters from AM on props, not sure if that is possible.

[Rodney]

What would be cool is the ability to use boolean cutters from AM on props, not sure if that is possible.

 

The issue there is that Props don't have Bones. The Boolean Cutter setting and (I assume) therefore whole management of Boolean rendering is set in the properties of Bones.

 

Aside: The only aspect of Boolean cutters that affects Props is shadowing. For some reason A:M Models with Bones set as Boolean Cutters do cast shadows on Props. I'm not sure what to make of that.

[nemyax]

There is substantial cost involved with these softwares...

Blender's booleans ain't bad.

[John Bigboote]

I took a look at a demo of Blendrs bool capabilities here:

 

Not bad for the price! It does the same basic 3 operations (blend, add, subtract) however it works in a triangular non-SDS way... which could be a drawback... keep in mind in the MF demo that SDS are ON and the boolean end-product is fully sub-div-surfed. I think all 3 programs (A:M, modo, Blend) can animate the positions of the surfaces. Another feature worth pointing-out with MF is the controllable bevel you can get betwixt the bool surfaces- I didn't see that in this Blendr demo... and that is a DELUXE feature.

[pixelplucker]

I see a lot of people looking at Modo, personally if your going to dive in to a program like that then take a serious look at Maxons C4D. From what I have used in C4D the program is rock solid stable, renderer is nice, has a great paint module and nice booleans that can be animated like AM.

 

I never jumped to it because I wasn't crazy about the interface, reminded me of EIAS's modeler or Maya.Too many icons and menus making the actual workspace tiny.

 

I have Blender loaded and price is about right for what it's worth. IMO it has to be one of the clumsiest convoluted programs out requiring the memorization of an extended dictionary to get anything done.

 

AM is timeless, tools are simple and straight forward, easy to find options and properties without the cloddy bloated gui. Not sure about anyone else but I find "Reading" a menu item easier than trying to recognize some abstract icon representation of a function.

 

Do just the cutters cast shadows? Can you turn off shadows on an object by object basis?

[nemyax]

Another feature worth pointing-out with MF is the controllable bevel you can get betwixt the bool surfaces- I didn't see that in this Blendr demo... and that is a DELUXE feature.

Absolutely. Of course, you can apply the modifier and throw in a few loops, but that negates the interactive animatable nature of Boolean ops.

[pixelplucker]

Isn't there a problem with animating booleans poly based geometry and UV mapping? If a subtractive shape is partially intersecting the main object or completely then the uv sets would be different. You would be limited to shaders rather than bitmaps. Any decals would be a problem also. Correct?

[nemyax]

Isn't there a problem with animating booleans poly based geometry and UV mapping?

Nope. Can't see why there should.

 

[pixelplucker]

So booleans must be post process?

[nemyax]

What do you mean by post-process? Booleans generate real geometry dynamically, whether the source objects are still or animated.

In the case of UVs, the operation is very straightforward: polygon edges are linear, so if you have to divide a geometry edge 28% the way from one vertex to the other, then you also have to divide each of its UV edges 28% the way from one UV to the other.

[Fuchur]

"Post-Process" is not the right term... Think of them as Masks... A:M's booleans are more or less like post process, since the boolean effect is only visible when rendering something out.

The UVs are easy... nemyax described it. A:M uses the material (I nevered tried it with UVs, but maybe it uses textures too) of the object with which you cut something out of another one.

 

A:Ms booleans are actually quite nice for animation-purposes... but they are not very useful as a modeling-operator which needs to be followed by other operations. But I think, the way Moi does it, could be a workable way for A:M...

They use Nurbs, which are a little closer to A:Ms patches...

 

http://moi3d.com/wiki/FAQ#Q:_Why_does_show_points_work_for_some_objects_but_not_others.3F