Border Fill - modeler's dream come true

Swordslayer

Final (?) Edit: looks like everyone and his duck made a variation of this at one point, and I'd like to point out the most universal solution so far:

CrazyButcher said:

Nice work, had done similar for 3dsmax some years back, released on polycount as well and also covering the non "perfect grid" cases, and extended control on interpolation etc.
http://polycount.com/discussion/130016/alles-im-fluss-3ds-max-modelling-plugin-released/p1



I no longer actively code on the tool, but made it available for free
http://allesimfluss.biz/

It also uses a different approach based on tangents instead of lerping the values:



Original message:
Decided to share one of the tools I use really often and anyway, I already released MeshSurface that's based on it before, so why not.

So here it is, Border Fill:



Yeah, I know, the headline was far-fetched, it's just a small utility to bind to shortcut or quadmenu but it made my life easier and I'd be happy it makes your life easier too.

For everyone who wants to tweak it, go ahead, it's not encrypted (if you do, it would be nice if you could share it).

Edit: Several people pointed me to an existing script that does the same:

pi3c3 said:

Rav3 said:

Thank you for sharing! Rapidtools quad cap doing something similar I guess but your is more advance and thanks for all your advanced primitives scripts as quad cylinder, gear etc. they are awesome!

RapidTools rapidQCap is doing the exact same thing... It can do this on multiple selection as well, and it has a built in corner search algorithm, which always try to search for the best result, and a lot more!

Anyways! Nice One! 

And there's a topic for it now, so give the guy some love as well! Comes with many other goodies, be sure to check it.

Edit2: and rappatools do that too, it seems – I wouldn't be surprised if there are even more implementations in the wild

Edit3: there's also MCG Morph to Spline that's something like a DIY Curve Fill

Synaesthesia

Awesome stuff. You're a king amongst men, my kind sir.

o0_themilkybarkid_0o

You're doing god's work, Swordslayer

Sunray

That looks fkng great.

Kanni3d

:') beautiful!

monster

Excellent!

Ruflse

This is amazing.
Much aprecciated!

Edit: I can't seem to get it to work. I ran and added it to a toolbar, but the button doesn't light up when I pass the cursor over neither it works when I click it. I also tried linking the script to a hotkey, but same result. Any help?

This is how it should react:



This is how it reacts:

R3D

This is god damn amazing!!!

Any chance someone could port it over to Maya

gfelton

Swordslayer said:

the headline was far-fetched

Your tool is a little far-fetched! This is awesome, thanks so much for sharing!

Nolt

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing!

Swordslayer

Ruflse said:

This is amazing.
Much aprecciated!

Edit: I can't seem to get it to work. I ran and added it to a toolbar, but the button doesn't light up when I pass the cursor over neither it works when I click it. I also tried linking the script to a hotkey, but same result. Any help?

Hi, sorry about it, it only supports editable poly at the moment, not the edit poly mod (basically because I had problems with getting edit poly mod vertex positions reliably, everything else worked but I was too lazy to tackle this little piece of offset transformations...).

Ruflse

Swordslayer said:

Ruflse said:

This is amazing.
Much aprecciated!

Edit: I can't seem to get it to work. I ran and added it to a toolbar, but the button doesn't light up when I pass the cursor over neither it works when I click it. I also tried linking the script to a hotkey, but same result. Any help?

Hi, sorry about it, it only supports editable poly at the moment, not the edit poly mod (basically because I had problems with getting edit poly mod vertex positions reliably, everything else worked but I was too lazy to tackle this little piece of offset transformations...).

 Oh okay. It works flawlessly with editable poly tho, so thanks again for sharing!

[HP]

where was this all my life, lol

Odow

I would kill to have this in maya.

leslievdb

awesome! thanks for sharing this

Schnittbr0t

R3D said:

Any chance someone could port it over to Maya

Exactly my thoughts
Time to bring an offer to the almighty MEL/Python gods

Cybroxide

Thank you for writing this, great work.

Rav3

Thank you for sharing! Rapidtools quad cap doing something similar I guess but your is more advance and thanks for all your advanced primitives scripts as quad cylinder, gear etc. they are awesome!

Mossbros

Great script, Will definitely be using this one.  

bmobius6

Oh wow! This is going to save me an insane amount of time. Thanks a bunch!

holypoly

Lifechanging! Immediately testing!

TyAnlauf

This truly is a dream come true! Thank you kind sir!

Isunoj

Awesome. Thanks, man!

Dominique_

Great title, great script!
Thank you so much for sharing!

throttlekitty

Schnittbr0t said:

R3D said:

Any chance someone could port it over to Maya

Exactly my thoughts
Time to bring an offer to the almighty MEL/Python gods

I'm no scripting god but I may give this a shot over the weekend, we have most the tools we need already via nurbs.

KennyW

Looks similar to grid fill in blender

handy especially added to a shrtcut key..

Toku

This is dank

shubham kumar

Does studios allow to install scripts ? 

pi3c3

Rav3 said:

Thank you for sharing! Rapidtools quad cap doing something similar I guess but your is more advance and thanks for all your advanced primitives scripts as quad cylinder, gear etc. they are awesome!

RapidTools rapidQCap is doing the exact same thing... It can do this on multiple selection as well, and it has a built in corner search algorithm, which always try to search for the best result, and a lot more!

Anyways! Nice One! 

Swordslayer

Whipper_snapper said:

Looks similar to grid fill in blender

handy especially added to a shrtcut key..

Yes, that was the inspiration, together with modo's Fill Quads.

pi3c3 said:

Rav3 said:

Thank you for sharing! Rapidtools quad cap doing something similar I guess but your is more advance and thanks for all your advanced primitives scripts as quad cylinder, gear etc. they are awesome!

RapidTools rapidQCap is doing the exact same thing... It can do this on multiple selection as well, and it has a built in corner search algorithm, which always try to search for the best result, and a lot more!

Anyways! Nice One! 

Nifty, I'll update the main post, thanks for mentioning it!

Swordslayer

Btw. would anyone of you guys be interested if I extended it to support more than four corners? What I mean is the middle one is what it's currently capable of, those to the left and to the right would be possible if I extended it:

musashidan

Another gem, swordslayer. Appreciated. It's also a feature in Rappatools. And yes, I'm sure everyone would be interested.

This might be a cheeky request and probably hard to implement(as the Rappatools equivalent fails the test) when the missing faces are not a perfect grid but an L-shape.(the bottom sphere in the image) There is also a tool in Rappatools to gradually build up the surface in steps.

Swordslayer

musashidan said:

Another gem, swordslayer. Appreciated. It's also a feature in Rappatools. And yes, I'm sure everyone would be interested.

Oh well, at least this one is not closed source so the maya folks can get some code inspiration

xvampire

and never too shy promoting your patreon  

https://www.patreon.com/swordslayer

Swordslayer

xvampire said:

and never too shy promoting your patreon  

https://www.patreon.com/swordslayer

Yeah, well, I have like.. huge following Seriously though, I first set it up to back creating maxscript tutorials (you can see WIP here) and found geogebra in the process that has a license conflicting with for-profit use and if I have to choose, I prefer releasing it for free and without backing, with nicer and interactive graphic (although the geogebra output breaks randomly, for example the first applet used to work, now doesn't and I have no idea why).

So as soon as I have a tool idea or a tool to tweak I'll switch to task-based milestones instead. Could be the multi-corner extension of this script, for example.

So much to do and so little time...

Swordslayer

musashidan said:

This might be a cheeky request and probably hard to implement(as the Rappatools equivalent fails the test) when the missing faces are not a perfect grid but an L-shape.(the bottom sphere in the image) There is also a tool in Rappatools to gradually build up the surface in steps.

It would be doable (and harder, yes), the thing is this would require more user input than picking one or two points (it could be done without that but that would mean taking some assumptions that are not always true and would result in a wrong interpretation and wrong output). For example for a hole like this you'd have to pick 12 verts and get it right – it might seem simple but that's mainly because it's a nice regular mesh and the border has low vert count – and is valid in the sense of being able to filled this way, that won't be true more often than the contrary:



I usually go the way of least resistance, which in this case would be bridge + swiftloop, then fill. Yeah, I know, not always applicable but in the year or so that I've been using it, I could count the occassions when I had to do something like that on fingers of one hand (it might be because I avoid creating such situations in the first place).

Swordslayer

And by the way if you have tool suggestions (I'm into meshbuilding) or even better new parametric primitive suggestions (no furniture, though), send me message or make a topic requesting one so that others can chime in too, and then send me the link so that I don't miss that. Thanks.

musashidan

@swordslayer , yes I thought as much. My thinking though was how great it would be to have a tool to fill irregular holes whilst maintaining curvature specifically for organic retopology. If retoping a face, for instance, I'll place all the primary loops and then fill in the remaining topo.

pi3c3

Swordslayer said:

Btw. would anyone of you guys be interested if I extended it to support more than four corners? What I mean is the middle one is what it's currently capable of, those to the left and to the right would be possible if I extended it:

These are the other things that would be awesome to implement... I figured out, that on a case of a triangle, it would be a good approach to use simple baricentric interpolation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_coordinate_system

In case of more then 4 sides, I have no idea currently. But it would be awesome to know.

Swordslayer

musashidan said:

@swordslayer , yes I thought as much. My thinking though was how great it would be to have a tool to fill irregular holes whilst maintaining curvature specifically for organic retopology. If retoping a face, for instance, I'll place all the primary loops and then fill in the remaining topo.

I rarely retopo stuff and when I do, they're harsurface models anyway, but what I use in those cases is drawing a few splines that define the surface, splitting them at intersections to create 'quad' panels and fill with the help of the aforementioned MeshSurface – that way I know they will be always the right number of segments per side. Of course the smaller details and branching loops have to be added anyway but this works as base surface to start with.

pi3c3

Swordslayer said:

musashidan said:

This might be a cheeky request and probably hard to implement(as the Rappatools equivalent fails the test) when the missing faces are not a perfect grid but an L-shape.(the bottom sphere in the image) There is also a tool in Rappatools to gradually build up the surface in steps.

It would be doable (and harder, yes), the thing is this would require more user input than picking one or two points (it could be done without that but that would mean taking some assumptions that are not always true and would result in a wrong interpretation and wrong output). For example for a hole like this you'd have to pick 12 verts and get it right – it might seem simple but that's mainly because it's a nice regular mesh and the border has low vert count – and is valid in the sense of being able to filled this way, that won't be true more often than the contrary:



I usually go the way of least resistance, which in this case would be bridge + swiftloop, then fill. Yeah, I know, not always applicable but in the year or so that I've been using it, I could count the occassions when I had to do something like that on fingers of one hand (it might be because I avoid creating such situations in the first place).

To have this working you have to create a nifty corner search algorithm. (Mine is currently checking the pole vertices, then/or the angle between them) Fairly well working so far.

Swordslayer

pi3c3 said:

Swordslayer said:

Btw. would anyone of you guys be interested if I extended it to support more than four corners? What I mean is the middle one is what it's currently capable of, those to the left and to the right would be possible if I extended it:

These are the other things that would be awesome to implement... I figured out, that on a case of a triangle, it would be a good approach to use simple baricentric interpolation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_coordinate_system

In case of more then 4 sides, I have no idea currently. But it would be awesome to know.

The issue is not so much translating it to more sides but filling perfectly valid shapes like these:

Swordslayer

pi3c3 said:

To have this working you have to create a nifty corner search algorithm. (Mine is currently checking the pole vertices, then/or the angle between them) Fairly well working so far.

I decided early on that because of cases like this I don't wanna do that:

Digital_3d

Thanks Swordslayer

Danielmn

I would really appreciate a method to fill this type of geo in.

Swordslayer

Danielmn said:

I would really appreciate a method to fill this type of geo in.

Since that's highly irregular, I'd probably converted the borders to a spline, and either converted that to poly to get the cap (adding Subdivide or Quadify Mesh modifier if you wanted subdivided mesh), or projected that to a plane with Shape merge (cookie cutter). There's also Terrain Axe for stuff that's not all the same elevation.

RashedAlmetrami

Ruflse said:

This is amazing.
Much aprecciated!

Edit: I can't seem to get it to work. I ran and added it to a toolbar, but the button doesn't light up when I pass the cursor over neither it works when I click it. I also tried linking the script to a hotkey, but same result. Any help?

This is how it should react:



This is how it reacts:

Make sure to collapse the 'Edit Poly' modifier

Swordslayer

Added a request in 3ds max ideas, Autodesk's official feature suggestion page: Add a method to cap with quad topology

musashidan

Swordslayer said:

Added a request in 3ds max ideas, Autodesk's official feature suggestion page: Add a method to cap with quad topology

Yeah, spotted you on the beta forums last night.

pi3c3

Swordslayer said:

Added a request in 3ds max ideas, Autodesk's official feature suggestion page: Add a method to cap with quad topology

+1

It would be really good to see these things built inside 3dsmax. I hope they don't want to make some weird over-complicated, slow UI for it. Same methodology would be awesome what we created...  

pi3c3

Other thing!

I converted the my version from maxscript to python and I was insanely surprised, when I realized that the same code (or almost 99% the same) is about 4x -8x times faster under maya python then in maxscript. Then I made a simple test. Simple addition inside maya python is about 10x faster then in maxscript, which is really annoying. 

I made a simple addition test as well, which was also 10x faster in python.

msVSpy.jpg