Shape Bender - preview

Chris Fullmer

ok, I'vebeen toying with this for a while and I finally have a working version. Barely. Its called shape bender.

[flash=696,601:12z5oz43]http://www.chrisfullmer.com/chrisfullmer/forums/shape_bender_preview.swf[/flash:12z5oz43]

It really truly has bugs galore, so I can't post it. It behaved surprisingly well in the video, but only after I found examples that it liked. 3d text for example freaks it out - a lot. Which is too bad because that was what I wanted to use in the last example in the video.

Chris

remus

oooh, thats very cool. You really sure we cant have an alpha release to test?

thomthom

"I am Bender. Insert Girder"
Whoo! Not to long ago we didn't have any bending tools in SU. Now there seems to be a bending extravaganza!

fredo6

Chris,

This is an amazing piece of plugin and I can figure out the kind of complexity of such work. Hat off! and very impressed by your talent.
So I use the dedicated smiley

Fredo

MALAISE

Hi Chris

Bending shape with guides: surely an important improvement. I like the way we can
reverse the direction. It will simplify complex following shapes too (railways, roads,stairs..)

Cheers
MALAISE

Chris Fullmer

@unknownuser said:

If I good understand I can use your future plug for slice a box if my line is a simple straight line?

Or your fist box is yet sliced?

The script slices the model as necessary. In fact, it really mangles the original geometry at this point. So you'd better have a back-up copy of whatever shape your bending

@unknownuser said:

Ps it is not a little war with the last Fredo6 Bend?

Oh goodness I hope not. My script only focuses on bending a shape from one shape to match another shape. Its really quite different than Fredo's bend tool in the incredible freescale 2.0 toolset.
I've been thinking of it as shape bending while I've been working on it, but maybe it more like shape morphing? Though morphing sounds like I'd be promising an awful lot, and I'm not

Chris

dylan

This looks very cool Chris and will be an awesome addition to my toolset

TIG

@unknownuser said:

The script slices the model as necessary. In fact, it really mangles the original geometry at this point. So you'd better have a back-up copy of whatever shape your bending

Although it could all be one-step undo-able if the code were done within a start_op'/commit_op' pairing anyway - to avoid that potential mess/loss why not have it group the shape and copy it if desired***, you'd do your slicing and bending etc and finish with the copy kept if specified first. Its probably best to group the shape anyway and leave it grouped [and its copy if specified] to avoid geometry clashes between the stuff and the rest of the model ?
***You could have 'Alt'+'select' shape [or something like it] to keep a copy or raw 'select' shape NOT to keep a copy...

.

sepo

Wow..this looks like one very interesting plugin.

pilou

If I good understand I can use your future plug for slice a box if my line is a simple straight line?

Or your first box is yet sliced?

Ps it is not a little war with the last Fredo6 Bend?

ely862me

@sepo said:

Wow..this looks like one very interesting plugin.

Second that.

princedragoncok

Brilliant!

Daniel S

Amazing!!!

About the last example of the video: Do you think that will work if the endline is directly into the surface? (for example using Fredo´s Line On Surface).

Or for making it easier to bend on surface, do you think that can work like the SU drape tool where you select the group and then the mesh on which you want to bend? (Of course that instead of edges it will bend the group)

Daniel S

jeff hammond

geez chris, this looks great.

i sure hope you can work the bugs out of it

i'm curious if you're testing it with (or even concerned with) sharp bends as well?

screenshot 1.jpg

[edit] well, i know arcs are basically a bunch of sharp bends so it shouldn't be a problem.. just wondering if the shape needs to be bent to an actual arc (as in - if you check the entity info, SU will know it as an arc)

solo

Great looking new attraction mate!

I hope you do not mind me making a request that i believe is relevant, I've always wanted a sweep function, like the .gif below, is this at all possible?

david_h

Very cool. here's the ICON png. (Copywright issues notwithstanding of course)

craigbic

Totally awesome! I can't wait to get my hands on this! Bending along a path with reversible start and end points is a true advancement for SU. On a side note, excellent video.

@unknownuser said:

:thumb: Very cool. here's the ICON png. (Copywright issues notwithstanding of course)[attachment=0:1dicu6oi]bender-futurama.png[/attachment:1dicu6oi]

LMAO! I am such a huge Futurama fan so that icon is just PERFECT on so many levels!

boofredlay

Moving... too... fast...

Too... many... improvements... can't... keep... up...

Great stuff. Add my vote for the Futurama Bender Icon

Chris Fullmer

WOW go to bed and wake up to a whole bunch of comments, excellent! Thanks for the support, compliments, suggestions, requests and mascots. There are 3 major bugs that I think will fix a lot of crashes.
Problems:

When the geometry is longer than the provided line
The bending is not quite accurate. I've got a small error in the calculation somewhere because it actually skews it just a bit. It just wasn't noticeable in the video.
Write in a snippet to deal with the first and last segments of the curve.

I think those 3 improvemnts will be enough to get this script ready to put it out to be played with.

Anyhow, enough with the boring details. Thanks for watching the video. I will consider and discuss all suggestions.

@Solo, I like the sweep idea. That would require me learning how regular sweeps work. And while it is similar to this script, I think it is a script of its own. Though it seems like it shouldn't be impossible to write. Its on my list of scripts I wish I had written (along with quite a few others).

@TIG, the script is actually already set to work with groups. I think the only reason I explode it was to get the vertices quickly, but I have since found .flatten! and .uniq! so I can get a clean array of vertices very quickly. So my script works with groups as long as they are not rotated - which I want to fix. I want it to work with a group/component no matter the orientation. I have not sat and thought that through yet, but I'm sure it will take some thinking to do the slicing through a component which has been rotated. It requires transforming all the calaculations, which my brain gets tired just thinking about. So ideally, at some point, the script will accept a group/component with any transformation (including scale too, I forgot about that).

All right, again, thanks for the support!

Chris

Chris Fullmer

OH yeah, @Daniel, yes, it should work just fine on a line drawn on a face like in your example. I'm pretty sure that will work. The line and curve selection and reversal portion of the script is pretty stable. I put a lot of time on that while I was sitting around, completely unable to figure out the bending function