frigi
03-14-2009, 12:36 PM
Hi everybody,
as Dominance War is finally approaching I finished a script which helps me analyzing my meshes in order to make optimizing easier and faster and I wanted to share it with you.
When building lowpoly meshes with quads for ease of modelling there almost always are non-planar quads which sometimes mess up the silhouette and produce unpredictable results when automatically triangulating them later on. Most of them are no problem to detect with the naked eye but every once in a while I miss a hand-full of them and the whole process gets even more tedious and time consuming. To speed this up the script highlights faces with a lot of torsion in different colors and you can see them straightaway.
(Klick here (http://frigi.designdevil.de/Scripts/Analytics/AnalyticsAngle.gif) for a little clarification of the issue. The one in the middle shows how it looks like in the viwport and the two on the sides show what could happen when triangulating. The script measures the angle and if it's too acute it will highlight the whole face accordingly.)
Additionaly the script allows checks for the relevance of faces for the overall silhouette of the model to detect faces which might not be significant enough as well as two functions that are probably not too useful for lowpoly modeling but could be used elsewhere: Detecting and visualizing the stretching and sizes of faces.
For a more detailed documentation and the download please take a look here (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:Py/Scripts/Manual/Misc/Analytics).
If you find this to be interesting I unfortunately have a small downer: The vast majority of you are not Blender users but I still am and the script works exclusively in Blender. It's not like you would have to know much about Blender in order to use the script but you would certainly have to be able to open it up and navigate around. (But even there this is very basic stuff ;) )
If there's demand I can write a small how-to for those who can't deal with Blender but still want to use the script, just let me know.
So here are two little eyecatcher images to get you heated up a bit after the text:
The GUI:
http://frigi.designdevil.de/Scripts/Analytics/ana_gui_2.gif
And how a result might look like (not really a practical example but it looks somewhat interesting ;) ):
http://frigi.designdevil.de/Scripts/Analytics/ana_area_f003.gif
That's it for now and I hope you can take as much advanatge of it as I can,
Fabian
as Dominance War is finally approaching I finished a script which helps me analyzing my meshes in order to make optimizing easier and faster and I wanted to share it with you.
When building lowpoly meshes with quads for ease of modelling there almost always are non-planar quads which sometimes mess up the silhouette and produce unpredictable results when automatically triangulating them later on. Most of them are no problem to detect with the naked eye but every once in a while I miss a hand-full of them and the whole process gets even more tedious and time consuming. To speed this up the script highlights faces with a lot of torsion in different colors and you can see them straightaway.
(Klick here (http://frigi.designdevil.de/Scripts/Analytics/AnalyticsAngle.gif) for a little clarification of the issue. The one in the middle shows how it looks like in the viwport and the two on the sides show what could happen when triangulating. The script measures the angle and if it's too acute it will highlight the whole face accordingly.)
Additionaly the script allows checks for the relevance of faces for the overall silhouette of the model to detect faces which might not be significant enough as well as two functions that are probably not too useful for lowpoly modeling but could be used elsewhere: Detecting and visualizing the stretching and sizes of faces.
For a more detailed documentation and the download please take a look here (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:Py/Scripts/Manual/Misc/Analytics).
If you find this to be interesting I unfortunately have a small downer: The vast majority of you are not Blender users but I still am and the script works exclusively in Blender. It's not like you would have to know much about Blender in order to use the script but you would certainly have to be able to open it up and navigate around. (But even there this is very basic stuff ;) )
If there's demand I can write a small how-to for those who can't deal with Blender but still want to use the script, just let me know.
So here are two little eyecatcher images to get you heated up a bit after the text:
The GUI:
http://frigi.designdevil.de/Scripts/Analytics/ana_gui_2.gif
And how a result might look like (not really a practical example but it looks somewhat interesting ;) ):
http://frigi.designdevil.de/Scripts/Analytics/ana_area_f003.gif
That's it for now and I hope you can take as much advanatge of it as I can,
Fabian