HI! My name is Jaevixa McNomera. I've been told by a few people on #blendercoders that I ought to let you all know that I'm quite far along the process of making a hi quality surface simplifier for Blender. It is currently running well as a stand alone app. I'm a long time c / c++ programmer, but I'm rather new to the Blender code and just trying to get it all working inside blender as a modifier.
It's all written from scratch so there wont be any copyright issues or special patches to link to it. I'm making this specifically FOR inclusion in Blender. Here are the basics right now: 1. Currently it supports triangle and quad input. I spoke with joeedh and Briggs and BMesh support and ngons are going to be working fine, so far as I can see in my tests with my system. I do have it working with non-planar ngons as well. 2. It supports poly counts well over 100k. The highest poly count I've tested it with was about 198k. 3. Right now, it will ray trace new materials for the output mesh to make it look as close as possible to the original. 4. Currently I do also produce normal maps as well to preserve as much surface detail as I can. This does even work against non-planar ngons. The way I have it implemented seems to produce good results. 5. I haven't yet settled on how I'm going to get vertex group simplification working. I have 2 different methods I'm testing, but if I can't get it right then that just wont go in my first patch of this. 6. Run times are fast. For pure geometric simplification without materials at all, a 98k mesh downsampled to 5k took only 0.03 seconds :) 7. There are 3 different quality / speed settings right now, and some edge preservation settings that can be adjusted. I'm still debating how exactly these will be presented to the end user. Here are a few screens of what it currently does. All models were provided by users on #blender and/or #blendercoders for my tests. http://www.pasteall.org/pic/1077 http://www.pasteall.org/pic/1078 http://www.pasteall.org/pic/1079 http://www.pasteall.org/pic/1080 http://www.pasteall.org/pic/1081 http://www.pasteall.org/pic/1082 http://www.pasteall.org/pic/1083 http://www.pasteall.org/pic/1084 It pretty far along but I am still working out a few parts. If anyone out there has lots of experience with Vertex Groups and animation with them, I'd like some input on few things in that area. It may help me determine how to handle that part. Thanks everyone! :) Jae _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
