United3dArtists Archive

froo · Post by **froo** » 22 Aug 2011, 03:16

Ok I don't know what to call it; maybe we can have a contest.

So here's the deal.
The OBJ Exporter already has to get the number of vertices in a face, using
edge neighbors I think. So, the 'hard part' of this plugin-to-be-developed is already done.

Maybe an even harder part is naming it.

Well, not really. That's the fun part.
What do you think? I think "Dick Tracy" sounds pretty cool but no one will know
what it's for.

Steinie · Post by **Steinie** » 22 Aug 2011, 11:30

1) N-Gone
2) Your_Face_Is_A_Disgrace
3) N-Gon_Fishin
4) Poly-Gone
5) Poly-Splitters
6) >4 NoMore
7) N-Gon-B-Gon
8) Myriagon Minus 9996

MikomDude · Post by **MikomDude** » 22 Aug 2011, 11:40

Brilliant names Steinie. Nr 1 and 2 are my favorites.

jamesmc · Post by **jamesmc** » 22 Aug 2011, 14:24

N-GONE is my favorite.

I don't think I can upload flash, if not will upload GIF.

pugman 1 · Post by **pugman 1** » 22 Aug 2011, 14:55

cool stuff here . way to go

froo · Post by **froo** » 22 Aug 2011, 18:02

I spoke with Tomas today. I asked him if the Quadrify script command (and the quadrify tool)
would combine two adjacent triangle-faces into a single quad-face. He said the tool would not do that.
So, I am thinking, I could try to do that. But, my question is this.
If the triangles do not lie in the same plane (like two triangles on one face of a basic cube),
will that cause problems when exported?
For example, if one triangle was picked from one side of a cube, and the other triangle was picked
from another side of the cube.
Would that cause a problem?

One thing I may be able to do is, for one triangle (triangle A), find all its neighbors, and pick the triangle whose 'angle'
is closest to that of triangle A.
For example, the cube again. It makes more sense to combine two triangles that make up a flat side (a face),
than it does to take one triangle from each of two faces.

froo · Post by **froo** » 22 Aug 2011, 20:46

I took another look at trueBlue's steps. I got the quadrify tool to work.
So I have a question.
For this plugin, do you only want to highlight the nGons on a mesh, so you can
select those, and quadrify them? Or do you want the plugin to do more than that?

I also have a question about triangles. What do you want to do with them? A couple
things could be done:
1) find a neighboring triangle, and combine the two into a single face, similar to the Merge Polygons tool.
2) quadrify the triangles.

What will usually happen, if we use (1) is, we will end up with single triangles, who do not have a triangle-face
neighbor. So those would have to be quadrified using (2).
But the problem becomes the edge flow, as jamesmc discussed in another thread. When we quadrify a triangle,
we end up with a vertex in the middle of the triangle.

Steinie · Post by **Steinie** » 23 Aug 2011, 00:09

I personally wanted a tool that would highlight all the NGons > 4 so that I can correct them.
It might be by merging two vertexes or adding an edge depending on where it is on the model.
The tools are very good in trueSpace and easy to use so a N-Gone tool that can help the user find bad
geometry would be fantastic. If it can do more with options that would make it even better but not necessary
for my needs.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 23 Aug 2011, 01:25

If this helps the Object information script half way down this page
http://www.clintons3d.com/plugins/trues ... index.html"
has buttons for selecting 3 sided, 4 sided and more than 4 sided polygons. It is written in jscript, maybe some of it will translate to c++ plugin.

froo · Post by **froo** » 23 Aug 2011, 02:12

Hey Clinton.
Thanks for that!

Yeah this will help.

Steinie, ok. I did do what trueBlue did, and I got it to work:
To see it work, I went into Object mode, and increased the
visibility of triangle edges. Then, I selected a face with more than 4 vertices,
then selected the Quadrify tool. When I did this, I saw an edge get added.

Basically I can harvest code from the OBJ exporter (to get the faces),
he nurbs tool (maybe), and clinton's package (to get the mesh, for counting
triangles/faces.

froo · Post by **froo** » 23 Aug 2011, 03:49

Well N-GONE is definitely more cool than

Poly Analyzer.

That is such a nerdy name!

Ok; So N-GONE it is!

froo · Post by **froo** » 23 Aug 2011, 05:01

Ok so I stripped out everything I don't need, from the OBJ Exporter.
I need to remove the OBJ Importer part as well since that's not needed.
But that code is not even touched in the exporter code anyway, so I
can leave it alone for now.

Next up is getting the visualization code from the nurbs tool.
Now that part may get a little tricky since I had trouble with
the triangle visualization stream (in edit mode) before.
I would say, for the first run at this, I won't worry about
highlighting ngons in edit mode. The first challenge will be
to highlight the desired ngons while not in edit mode.

froo · Post by **froo** » 23 Aug 2011, 23:31

So, this is where I'm at.
I am trying to update the mesh connector, from a trueSpace command.
This is different from updating the mesh connector from the node itself.
It should be possible, but I have not done it before. It may require a
considerable amount of work/effort, in which case, it may not be worth
that effort. I'll see if I can get it going. If not, as trueBlue said,
the quadrify tool does work.

Another thing I can do is, see if there is a way to force truespace to NOT
generate ngons when I hand it the triangle stream, during obj import.
Though, that does not help the situation where editing is done in trueSpace.

froo · Post by **froo** » 24 Aug 2011, 14:29

I took a look at the file that Norm created, the arena ring demo. It just turns the edge and
vertex opacity on and off. So it does not deal with enabling the visualization streams.
I also could not seem to modify the vertex stream: I tried moving a vertex out, and putting
the mesh back onto the connector, in C++. No go. So I found my flag script that I made
some time ago, with the help of Dele - he wrote some scripts which modified vertex positions.
I may end up trying to do this in script. It may be easier; we'll see. I am not sure. I will have
to port the C++ code to jscript if I do that, I think. I've been wanting to do some script code anyway. Arighty clinton.

I may need a hand!

froo · Post by **froo** » 24 Aug 2011, 14:54

Long story short:
We may be able to use Clinton's script to identify the face indexes whose triangle count is > 4; I think it does that now. For those, we can paint them a different color/texture/material. I can use the jscript macro record button to record my actions as I paint a face on an object, and put that into clinton's code. Worth a shot.

Steinie · Post by **Steinie** » 24 Aug 2011, 15:10

Looks promising!

froo · Post by **froo** » 24 Aug 2011, 18:10

Man I hope so.

froo · Post by **froo** » 24 Aug 2011, 21:14

Well I ran the jscript macro.
Naturally, there's no script command available (according to the comments in the macro)
for the 'Paint The Face with This texture/material' command.

So, I'll have to think of something else.
Thing is, I see in the RsExamples plugin, where the node is accessed, and connectors
are modified, from a command. That is what I am doing. So, I guess I will run those and
see if they actually work.

I can also try making the object into an editable shape (if it is not already), and
set the visualization stream items (triangles), maybe.

I got the flag script example that I made before. I will study it. I was able to affect the mesh with it,
making a 'waving flag'.

froo · Post by **froo** » 24 Aug 2011, 21:24

Here's another thing.
The OBJ Exporter *should* be sorting the triangles by material index. So, it is 'getting' the triangles
according to material index. I want to 'Set' the material for specific triangle indexes.
So, maybe I can reuse more of that code. Hm. Lookin at this from every angle I can.

Another possibility:
If Clinton's code identifies triangle indexes or vertex indexes that are part of an Ngon,
I could use that; if there was only a way to paint a face with a color (vertex colors?) in script.
Not the whole stream; just those ones.

froo · Post by **froo** » 24 Aug 2011, 23:24

Does anyone know of a currently existing script that selects a face and attaches a bitmap/texture to it?
I doubt it, but it's worth a shot.

froo · Post by **froo** » 25 Aug 2011, 02:08

Here's another approach, though, it's not pretty. But it will work.
With clinton's script, I did some testing, and where it identifies
a ngon, I get the coordinates of one of the vertices that is part of that
face. Then, I can add a sphere, or cube, the size of that face, at that vertex location.
A slight improvement would be to average the vertex coordinates and put an object there.
Yeah it's not pretty but you could then use the LE, to select the new objects, and go to them.
Delete them, and you see the ngon.

Hey, it's a start.

froo · Post by **froo** » 25 Aug 2011, 14:34

Hm. While that can be done it's not a very good idea, because if there are
1000 ngons then we'll have 1000 new items in the scene and the LE.
That's the long and short of it.

Visualization streams are not available unless we're in edit mode. And,
in edit mode, many folks prefer to keep AutoTriangulation enabled. In
that case, the triangle and vertex streams are sorted. I'd have to get
the visualization streams unsorted before setting them: turning triangle highlighting
on and off. I had problems with that before. That would need to be resolved
before going any further with this approach.

Not using edit mode, I'd need to create a material list / material manager node,
and paint all triangles belonging to an ngon with a texture. For some reason
I really don't find this solution very appealing.

It looks like the best solution would be to enter edit mode and mess with the visualization streams. Solving this dilemna would apply to many plugins.

In any of the cases above, the user will enter edit mode to fix the ngons. Most of the time
they will end up fixing all of the ngons. If, after doing this, some vertices look out of place,
then the user will end up doing some point editing.

Therefore, we may as well use the quadrify tool available with trueSpace.
So, I don't think I will be pursuing this particular plugin anymore as it's not necessary,
since we already have a quadrify tool.

But, I would like to work with the autotriangulate issue.

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