Intresting Max Script Idea "find Nearest Quad or nearest Tri"

seforin

Hello everyone,

Many times I often will build shapes for sub D reasons that often I am tracing a image from a plane

lets say for this example




I can either

A: Cut the shape out (which I like more gives you more control over where you put your edges/verts


or

B:Spline render it out


Now with spline it will create the shape fine but there will be more time cleaning up to make it "game ready" more then cutting it out will

BUT

cutting it out leaves it a rough shape

so now you have your mesh cut out nicely but no conneting points

yes at this point you can manually connect them

But is there a way to have it auto mate to find its nearest 3 or 4 sided point and connet auto matically on a surface?

I really believe a tool like this can help increase work flow for more tedious work I was just wondering if theres either a tool such as this or how difficult it would be to create a tool such as this or if theres one out there


Thank you for your time

glynnsmith

Are you wanting something like a clean auto boolean type feature, where anything that intersects gets booleaned together?

The sweep modifier might be what you need, if so, especially if you're tracing out your shapes with splines.

seforin

well no the idea is more along the lines if I were to cut out a image from a plane till I got the rough shape how I wanted every area there was a verticy if it could make a quad it would connect to it

so heres the example of something I cut out from a flat plane and the shape I got near the end, now naturally I could connect this manually and make every verticy connect to one another and make nice quads //proper tri areas all around but its very tedious





so the ideas is every 4 verticies would connect to one another


If theres a faster method im not knowing about perhaps I will adapt to that but for reasons right now this is what im trying to achieve

Ben Apuna

I think I know what you are talking about now, like this? at about 1:30 in it demonstrates quad strip creation with the pen tool in Modo. It would be a cool feature to have in Max.

EDIT:

I think Illusion Catalyst has something like this.

http://illusioncatalyst.com/

Also Polyboost seems to have something like it as well.

http://www.polyboost.com/

Muzzoid

modifier> turn to poly

pior

You can also draw that as splines, make them 'renderable' in viewport (that is to say, using that one option to give them thickness) using the square profile, and deleting the back and side faces of that shape. If you perform the delete inside an edit poly modifier on top of your spline, you'll even be able to edit the curvature in realtime.

RickFX

you can import AI files from illustrator wich are technically traced lines.

arrangemonk

cool was a script or plugin that rotates an selected edge to the ditection where the mouse is going, with the cursor as rotation point (like a brush), this would be cool to be acrivated with "ALt shift + random key" or something.
would make spahe extrude work much faster

SyncViewS

Arrangemonk, are you talking about this?

http://www.illusioncatalyst.com/ic_shape_ref.html#DrawTool <-- Create Polygons [ALT + Left Mouse Button]

CodeFather

There is such feature in the polyboost tool set , called Solve surface. You can find it in the PolyDraw toolbar

Mark Dygert

You know my thoughts on this. 10-15 min with splines, and you would have better results that are all quads and its dynamic, meaning you can sweep different shapes down the splines and play with the settings at any time, just like Per and Pior mentioned.

I think once you get used to the spline work flow you'll start using them all over the place.

But the spline tools menu is a mess. It seems like they placed all the commonly used tools on opposite ends of the menu.
Attach, at the top.
Detach down at the bottom.
There is a big blank hole right next to the attach button... but it belongs down with the hide/unhide tools. Brilliant! ha ha ha
Insert and refine are the same kind of tool but insert is down with fuse and make first, Majestic! heh.

Mark Dygert

Personally I think that's adding 3-4 steps to get a spline when it should be one.

- Create plane.
- Apply edit poly.
- Cut edges and hope it cuts correctly.
- Select the edges, its never a loop thanks to the half dozen crazy facing hidden edges.
- Reset scale. Because no doubt you used non uniform scale on the plane at some point which will effect the height/width of your new spline because scale is inherited.
- Clean up the Y branches you cut in. Y branches will create two splines not one. A spline must be one continuous line.


VS
Create spline.
OR
Use a spline painter script (see Neil Blevins SoulBurn Scripts) to paint/trace right on the plane.



The spline line/edit spline menu might be an organizational mess but its faster than hacking up planes. And you're more likely to need to go digging through its options if you use the create shape method VS just drawing a spline.

You get cleaner lines with less fuss.

Mark Dygert

Per, I love ya like a brother but you're smokin crack.

perna wrote: »

the key is in your "create spline" step. That's where most of the work lies.

Because its too hard to click a few points? Or paint out a spline?

perna wrote: »

If you have a large number of poly tool extensions installed like a lot of us do, those tools are not available in editable spline mode, so there's no way you'll be able to be as efficient there. The editable spline tools are horrid, absolutely horrid... What you say is 100% true if you are running a default install of max however.

If you're doing something in the spline menu besides check on auto gen UV's and render you're doing something wrong.

To do this task I'll take the 3 options in spline menu over the crazy convoluted ribbon or any army of poly tools. Doing it without splines just leads to a messy inflexible end result.

PolyDraw? Why not paint a spline and be able to adjust the thickness later? Why lock the thickness?
What else could use that would be easier than painting or creating a spline? Instead of alluding to some set of tools I've probably used, lets see a concrete example?

perna wrote: »

Epoly is not the problem, it's your workflow that's the problem For example I can't remember the last time I non-uniformly scaled an object, and the y-branch problem will exist regardless of whether you use epoly or not.

It inherits a lot more than just scale. You may not use the scale tool but a lot of people do and they then turn around and blame the spline when 2x2 is a rectangle.

Seriously try the things I suggest it kicks ass. Since you don't mind using helpful tools, go get the spline painter script, and sketch it out in a few min. Way better than crazy cuts and clean up.

I've made a lot of this type of iron work when I was doing enviro art, the hack-a-plane method is more work than its worth, thats how I started out doing it. The only time I've had to even touch the spline tools is when I did the crazy cut a plane method.

Hack-a-plane is tedious, rigid and prone to error.

As for advanced tools like polydraw you define the thickness and you're stuck you can't go back and easily adjust it. It also won't generate UV's for you. I've used polyboost since max9 and the latest interface (max2010 ribbon) is 100x more horrid than the spline tools.

When you create a spline its point to point. You won't inadvertently create a Y branch unless you want to, so there are no unexpected Y's to clean up unlike the crazy cut method.

MoP

you guys should have a modelling race, i think per might win, vig a close second, and seforin will come in last if he keeps using the method described in the original post

Ghostscape

Can you guys go thoroughly through your workflow here? It seems like one of you is using poly tools (what are you using here aside from cut) to make a spline and one of you is making a spline directly, and you're both working off the spline after the fact. It also seems like one of you is advocating poly tools because you have a polydraw tool, and the other one is advocating spline tools because you have a splinedraw tool. I don't see what spline work you're going to be doing that is going to benefit from one method versus the other.

I don't do this kind of work personally so I'm not even sure what the Y-branch pitfalls you guys are talking about are, because I can't see any reason you would need to merge the splines at a Y-branch for either a low or high poly, because I can't imagine the merger being visible at any regular game resolution.

I haven't really done much of this wrought-iron scrollwork stuff before but I really don't see what is so hard about what looks like some simple 3d 'lines' that wouldn't need to be more advanced than a renderable-spline.

seforin

Im like really to afraid to post back after all of this 0_0

I just wound up using splines and remodling parts that splines could not trace, its not my original intent of what I was trying to do, this sucks for later things I will be trying to cut// make shapes from but whatever.

splines , remodeling and just doing it manually seems what the answer came out to be

edit:

mop- yea I was trying to find a faster method, seems I found more confusion and got 2 people to argue instead :X my appologise's for that

Mark Dygert

MoP wrote: »

you guys should have a modelling race, i think per might win, vig a close second, and seforin will come in last if he keeps using the method described in the original post

It has been a while since we've had a good penis tank thread... And yea Per would come in first. Crack has a way of boosting legless hobos up to super human speeds just imagine what it does to Per... woa... but you have to wonder how flexible it is and

Per, its cool I won't ask you to spill your super secrets.

Ghost here is how the draw spline workflow goes.
- Create a plane with the pattern.
- Activate Neil Blevins spline painter script and add the plane to the draw on list.
- Turn on normalize and adjust the thickness.
- Draw splines on the plane call it a day.

If the spline needs to taper to a point you would toss a edit poly on top of the spline, select the end cap, detach it to copy then "extrude along the spline" using the taper controls.

EDIT:
Just for the record Per's first post sounded a lot like Sef's first method only convert the cut line into a spline which made no sense to me. Why not draw a spline instead of cut a line? Same amount of work but you get a cleaner spline.

Mark Dygert

I'm a little confused why it would need to be one continuous flowing mesh?

Ironwork is a bunch of iron bars rolled and curled together then tacked together with welds. Why not treat the splines like iron bars and use the same construction methods using separate pieces.

Examples:


Is that what slows you down in the spline menu Per trying to join all the branches?

Ghostscape

Vig wrote: »

Ghost here is how the draw spline workflow goes.
- Create a plane with the pattern.
- Activate Neil Blevins spline painter script and add the plane to the draw on list.
- Turn on normalize and adjust the thickness.
- Draw splines on the plane call it a day.

Just for the record Per's first post sounded a lot like Sef's first method only convert the cut line into a spline which made no sense to me. Why not draw a spline instead of cut a line? Same amount of work but you get a cleaner spline.

Thanks, that was pretty much the workflow I was expecting/would use myself (although I didn't know about Neil's script so I'd probably do it by hand...or use the cut tool and convert the new edges to a shape/spline.

Reading it seemed like there was some later step after 'draw splines and call it a day' and I don't get why that would happen.

Mark Dygert

It really depends on the pattern and how close you intend to stick to it. Like Per was thinking if the pattern has a lot of variance and requires some pretty custom shapes to be made, then its probably smart to poly model like he is suggesting. But if its all the same thickness like a lot of patterns might as well do it with splines.

If you pick a pattern with a lot of crazy bits you don't always have to model all that detail, sometimes you can imply most of it with a few simple splines. Iron work is one of those things if it has just enough twists it passes the quick visual check as people quickly move onto the more interesting things in the scene.

You also have to take into account what its going to be used for.
Is it going to be rendered out to a transparent plane? You probably want max detail so maybe poly model if you have time.
Is it going to be polys dropped in an engine? Probably simple splines with just enough detail to read as fancy.