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Old 10th August 2006, 05:38 PM   #1
steve_hill
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Default PLUGIN: Meta

I've been going on about it in the work-in-progress section and here it is. The first public outing of my metaball plugin. This should be seen as an alpha release, so don't use it in the middle of any valuable modelling. I am holding on to the source for now as I don't feel happy letting it out in its current state.

Be aware that you now have the potential to easily generate millions of triangles. My machine gets rather sluggish with a 2 million triangle model!

The mechanism for associating metaball parameters with vertices is a bit clunky, but I can't think of anything better. I might implement a save/load for the parameters so that you don't lose the information each session.

Let me know if there are any problems.

Steve.
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Old 10th August 2006, 07:50 PM   #2
tbd
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Meta

Works just great on my "puter" And it really gets sluggish when you up the resolution
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Old 10th August 2006, 10:19 PM   #3
Dennis
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Meta

Excellent plugin Steve! Works wonderfully on this end.
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Old 11th August 2006, 04:35 AM   #4
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Meta

Quote:
Originally Posted by tbd
Works just great on my "puter" And it really gets sluggish when you up the resolution
Thanks for the feedback, Thor. I notice on your image that there is a small glitch in one of the near blobs near the middle. I see this occasionally on my PC also. I am not sure what the cause is. I try to make sure that shared vertices are actually shared in the model and not duplicated, so there shouldn't be any gaps. It may be that the graphics cards behave badly with the very small triangles, but again I don't see why. Normally the triangles should be snapped to a sub-pixel grid prior to rasterisation so there should be at least one triangle covering each sample point (and there will be many degenerate ones too).

Steve.
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Old 11th August 2006, 04:39 AM   #5
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Meta

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dennis
Excellent plugin Steve! Works wonderfully on this end.
Dennis, thanks for the feedback.

I think I may have a go at "Bender" next, although I am tempted to use the isosurface code to process some 3D datasets e.g. MRI scans etc. There will be a slight pause as I am away for a few days ... maybe I should take the laptop with me
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Old 11th August 2006, 01:27 PM   #6
nightoftheroundtable
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Meta

awsome work man. is there anyway to cut back on the triangle count.
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Old 11th August 2006, 03:03 PM   #7
steve_hill
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Meta

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Originally Posted by nightoftheroundtable
awsome work man. is there anyway to cut back on the triangle count.
Thanks. I am pleased if people enjoy it.

The triangle count is a function of the grid size and the number/size of the metaballs. Unfortunately if you reduce the grid size, you get chunkier models. One option is to then use the AC3D smooth or subdivision mechanism.

I can't think of any clever way to reduce the count of triangles. Sorry!

Steve.
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Old 11th August 2006, 03:39 PM   #8
griff
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Quote:
although I am tempted to use the isosurface code to process some 3D datasets e.g. MRI scans
Now that is interesting ... I know some people who might be interested in that

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Old 11th August 2006, 05:13 PM   #9
steve_hill
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Meta

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Originally Posted by griff
Now that is interesting ... I know some people who might be interested in that

griff
I think the best way to render volume data is to throw a ray tracer at it. You get to be able to show more detail and softer transitions and you can base the surface normals on the dataset which can make it look smoother.

However, I think I will probably have a go at rendering some of the 3D datasets in AC3D to see what I can get out of them.

Steve.
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Old 11th August 2006, 05:24 PM   #10
griff
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Meta

Appreciate what you are saying Steve .... just know some people in the whole body imaging field who are looking at building 3d images from magnetic resonance datasets.

Keep us (or me at least) informed on your progress.

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