[Plugin] Bitmap To Mesh

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:

Whaat · 30 Sept 2010, 21:53

cool stuff! I'm guessing that with some work, you could take a BMP texture applied to an existing mesh and use it to displace the mesh?

Great work Thom!

jeff hammond · 30 Sept 2010, 22:03

Krisidious · 30 Sept 2010, 22:10

you ROCK!!!

where are my old bump maps? time to go play...

EarthMover · 30 Sept 2010, 22:29

@whaat said:

cool stuff! I'm guessing that with some work, you could take a BMP texture applied to an existing mesh and use it to displace the mesh?

Great work Thom!

I'm looking forward to that...with perhaps a poly count adjustment.

thomthom · 1 Oct 2010, 06:09

@whaat said:

cool stuff! I'm guessing that with some work, you could take a BMP texture applied to an existing mesh and use it to displace the mesh?

Possible - but you'd risk an insanely heavy mesh...

@earthmover said:

with perhaps a poly count adjustment.

Well, one could sample less of the image...

If I was better at math I could work out where the contrasts where and use more points from those areas...

david_h · 1 Oct 2010, 16:39

I finally got it to work. I had to the LIB2 thing. It always takes me a little longer. At first i thought it was hanging on me and on some images it did, but I played around with my BMP in phoshop and got the mesh to work. Take a look: see if you can figure it out. Cool plugin. Don't know how I will use it yet but it's cool!

Dave R · 1 Oct 2010, 16:47

This does seem like a plugin with a lot of potential. I gave it a try with a BMP version of the following image but it didn't appear that anything was happening. It seemed to lock up my computer but it should probably be chalked up to the lousy computer I have at work.

This height map was actually created in SU to begin with.

dedmin · 1 Oct 2010, 17:09

Quick test in Rhino:

Dave R · 1 Oct 2010, 17:25

Dedmin, did you try to do it with ThomThom's script in SU?

By the way, I think it looks nicer in SketchUp.

Dave R · 1 Oct 2010, 17:47

1.25 million entities? That would let the magic smoke out of this computer for sure.

jeff hammond · 1 Oct 2010, 17:58

with this bmp, i added a few extra pixels along the top and bottom making it an even 125x500px which brought the entities down by 75%..
(make sure to scale the y axis to 25% in order to fix the proportions)

zipped on a mac.. ignore the ds files etc..

jeff hammond · 1 Oct 2010, 18:10

yeah, it works in sketchup..
tt's script scales everything to a square so i made the mistake of adding more black for an overall 500x500 px (4times the recommended resolution of 250x250)..

it came in at a modest 1.25 million entities

dedmin · 1 Oct 2010, 18:59

No, there is a similar command in Rhino - Mesh Heightfield. I just used your image to test it - the mesh is quite small 33 by 8 by 1,3 mm. I doubt this can be done in SketchUP.

dedmin · 1 Oct 2010, 19:13

And Rhino maps the image as a texture

notareal · 1 Oct 2010, 19:18

Nice one! I can imagine that one day this will be in need.

Dave R · 1 Oct 2010, 19:47

Dedmin, that looks nice.

I did make the heighfield map in SketchUp so I know that part can be done. Here's the mesh from which I made the map.

dedmin · 1 Oct 2010, 20:02

Sure - I mean the plugin. Can that plugin make so small mesh from an image without scaling? Looks good Dave
By the way, did You notice that Layout 3 can now paste Excel tables - very handy!