SUbD - Non-destructive subdivision with creases and quads

thomthom

It's been a while since I posted a new plugin. New job change my situation quite a bit - but I still got something in development. I showed this to a few people at BaseCamp - I guess I should show it here as well.

Quads and Subdivisions

Live crease adjustment on the limit mesh

Note: This is very early development preview. It's not even alpha stage.

Non-destructive subdivisions with soft creases that support the pseduo-quads of QuadFace Tools Anything else will be triangulated.

It perform Catmull-Clark subdivisions which is optimal with quads.

As always, this is a personal project I do on my spare time. No estimate on when it will be done. But for this project I'd trying to be strict with myself and aim for a first release with core essential features and improve in smaller increment.

What about Bezier Surface you say? To be honest it's been somewhat shelved for the time being. There is a great number of challenges in getting such surfaces be continuous without artefacts. That being said, much of the work put into it has been applied in SUbD. And an interesting property of a 3x3 patch of quads is that it will normalize into a B-Spline patch - meaning that a patch system can be implemented on top of SUbD as an abstraction. So it might be that I end up merging the two projects - but not for the initial release.

Rich O Brien

nom nom nom......

Anton_S

I still don't get the use of it, but it looks cool! It seems you migrated back to Windows. Windows is awesome

andybot

Nice work Thomthom!!!

I've been curious to know where BZ surfaces was headed, glad to see a glimpse of the future

I can see how using subD instead of the BZ patches as the base structure can be significantly more flexible. That was one thing I was really wondering with seeing the early bits and pieces of BZsurfaces how it would work to make much larger structures when you basically have to add one patch at a time.

Keep up the good work!

thomthom

@anton_s said:

I still don't get the use of it, but it looks cool!

At the moment I've been working on the subdivision algorithm. Still some stuff to do on that before I begin tackling the tools.

@anton_s said:

:thumb: It seems you migrated back to Windows. Windows is awesome

Never really migrated away. I jump into OSX for testing and platform development, but I'm a long time user of Windows and feel more comfortable there. Also, Visual Studio is a far better tool than Xcode IMO.
So I sit there, working on my Mac Book Pro using Windows - enfuriating every Apple zealot.

@andybot said:

That was one thing I was really wondering with seeing the early bits and pieces of BZsurfaces how it would work to make much larger structures when you basically have to add one patch at a time.

Exactly - that's what I was struggling with. There was a huge amount of tools required to make a patch workflow work reasonable.
With subdivisions you use existing tools on the control mesh. Less new things to learn. Though it would help if you took to heart quads - which is where new tools are needed.

It's also be nice with some tools to modify the limit surface live without needing to jump back to the control mesh. I'll be looking into that, but I'm still on the fence to whether any of that make it into the initial release. I don't want to run into the same trap as before in trying to solve everything at once.

jiminy-billy-bob

Awesome!

numerobis

very cool!

cotty

You've got my vote for doing it in your spare time AND at work!

Dave R

Shut up and take my money!

jolran

Sweetness!

Are you using your "drawcache" class and hiding the original, or is the original geometry altered back and forth?

Krisidious

sooo much awesome.

thomthom

@jolran said:

Are you using your "drawcache" class and hiding the original, or is the original geometry altered back and forth?

I did that in my very first prototype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19BnGnR7bSs

But for this I've not had to yield to tricks like that. It's all native SketchUp geometry.

jolran

Yeah, I figured that. I had to ask, since I remember you did do so before(the link) and I thought somehow Sketchup now could render shaded mode in Tools drawing methods

Nevertheless, It's even more impressive doing it the way you do now..

thomthom

@jolran said:

Yeah, I figured that. I had to ask, since I remember you did do so before(the link) and I thought somehow Sketchup now could render shaded mode in Tools drawing methods

Ah - I wish!