[Plugin] Bitmap To Mesh

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 12:14

Overview
Generates a mesh from a given BMP image.

Note! Generates two triangles per pixel!
250x250 pixel image generates a mesh of ~125K faces! ( 250 * 250 * 2 )

[flash=600,338:2gnylh6l]http://www.youtube.com/v/oGU7NABqEeU[/flash:2gnylh6l]

Beware!
This is a quick experimental beta release!
Gremlings might lurk!

Access
Draw > Mesh From Heightmap
Context Menu > Mesh From Heightmap
Context Menu > Mesh From Bitmap

Compatibility

SketchUp 2018 or newer

All features

SketchUp 2014 to SketchUp 2017

No down-sampling of heightmaps.
Limited image formats supported.

SketchUp 2014 to SketchUp 2016

Degraded text display.

SketchUp Plugins | PluginStore | SketchUcation

SketchUp Plugin and Extension Store by SketchUcation provides free downloads of hundreds of SketchUp extensions and plugins

(sketchucation.com)

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 12:21

Recognize it?

pilou · 30 Sept 2010, 12:22

Yes, it's the beast who makes some crazzy copter and boat

Have you a ratio x*y time elapsed?

tald311 · 30 Sept 2010, 13:39

wow - thats amazing!
Quick question - if you were to import a BPM image of contours and terrain, could you generate a DEM with this?
Really amazing work. Thank you!
Daniel

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 13:45

@tald311 said:

Quick question - if you were to import a BPM image of contours and terrain, could you generate a DEM with this?

"DEM" ?

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 13:49

@tald311 said:

Quick question - if you were to import a BPM image of contours [...]

It does not find contour edges - if that is what you mean. It simply uses the grey scale value of each pixel.
The type of image you feed it should be like those you feed to bump maps and displacement maps in render engines. White is high point and black is low point - then you have shades of grey in between.

Detecting contours in an image is not easy (beyond me) - and even if you managed to find the contours - I'd no idea how you'd determine the Z order of them.

tbd · 30 Sept 2010, 13:58

did something like this some years ago (2005 i think) and used it for quick creation of landscape hills/mountains.
version 2 that was work in progress (and killed) had an openGL viewer to quickly see the output before importing in Sketchup.

nice work Thomas

pilou · 30 Sept 2010, 14:03

Format Dem

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 14:10

@unknownuser said:

did something like this some years ago (2005 i think) and used it for quick creation of landscape hills/mountains.
version 2 that was work in progress (and killed) had an openGL viewer to quickly see the output before importing in Sketchup.

None of these versions are available anywhere?
OpenGL viewer within SU?

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 14:12

@unknownuser said:

Yes, it's the beast who makes some crazzy copter and boat

Have you a ratio x*y time elapsed?

No detailed progress indication, no. But I did this very quickly. I'll improve it - with a tool for visually indicating the size of the mesh. Maybe with option to map with the heightmap as a material.

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 14:15

@unknownuser said:

Format Dem

@tald311 said:

could you generate a DEM with this?

I see now - no you can't. It would be the other way around, you could generate a SketchUp mesh from a DEM. (Though a very large DEM would most likely kill SU.)

tbd · 30 Sept 2010, 14:19

@thomthom said:

None of these versions are available anywhere?

nope. it was on old @Last Sketchup forums and lost.

@thomthom said:

OpenGL viewer within SU?

yep. in a separate window and it worked pretty well.

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 14:25

@unknownuser said:

nope. it was on old @Last Sketchup forums and lost.

And v2?

@unknownuser said:

yep. in a separate window and it worked pretty well.

C-Extension? How did you generate and interface with this window?

tbd · 30 Sept 2010, 14:43

v2 lost on a hdd crash. yup, via a CExt using http://glew.sourceforge.net/basic.html to create and interact with the openGL window. used only a simple wireframe view for testing but it is possible to create a textured/shader scene as well.

shura · 30 Sept 2010, 14:45

Genius!
Thomas you have a great fan in me. Many times I thought "glad that I have insisted on paying for our lunch the day we met, dunno when I get the next chance to buy him cookies".
With this release my credit is definitely used up...
...playing for time I extruded a cookie for you, until I get a better ideas

Thanks for this plugin, I bet there are a thousand interesting ways to use it.

cheers
alex

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 15:24

That's great Alex!

Btw - you wouldn't happen to be around München next week? The office is going for a trip - Wednesday 'til Sunday... I think.

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 15:30

@unknownuser said:

v2 lost on a hdd crash. yup, via a CExt using http://glew.sourceforge.net/basic.html to create and interact with the openGL window. used only a simple wireframe view for testing but it is possible to create a textured/shader scene as well.

Sounds like you had all sorts of fun experimental things lost in this HDD crash...

EarthMover · 30 Sept 2010, 15:35

This is great Thomas.

Do you think it's possible to use the bitmap data to do other things besides generate a point cloud terrain? Could you transfer black lines on a bit map to lines on a face? Could you offset and pushpull based on pixel color data? Just thinking of how to take Silver Shadow's original request to generate a brick wall with depth using a bitmap and make it more polygon friendly. It's great, but using a point cloud terrain to generate several wall textures will bring SU to it's knees.

Could you possibly glean the UVW coordinates of a texture applied to a face and tile the 3D geometry as components over those coordinates?

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 15:48

@earthmover said:

Could you offset and pushpull based on pixel color data?

It's possible - but not easy - I don't know how.

@earthmover said:

It's great, but using a point cloud terrain to generate several wall textures will bring SU to it's knees.

You could use CleanUp to reduce excess faces/edges for uniform textures.
But in any case - keep the texture files small.

@earthmover said:

Could you possibly glean the UVW coordinates of a texture applied to a face and tile the 3D geometry as components over those coordinates?

The texture would have to be BMP - as there is no built in method to get access to the texture data in SU. But it is possible - however, this is also something that turns rather complicated. Though would be an interesting project I can't see myself taking it in this direction - I got at the moment UV Tools, Bezier Surface and Vertex Tools as my main focus (that is not including smaller updates/projects).

I will be updating it with some smaller improvements, but if anyone want to take it further then be my guest. I just threw this together today during a break as I realised that most the code would be reading the image files - which I already had the codes for from Vertex Tool's toolbar system.

thomthom · 30 Sept 2010, 21:42

Test with simple displacement map: