Version 2 is out!
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Hi Thomthom !
First of all, many thanks for all your wonderful plugins, they save me such a precious time in my daily work on SketchUp. I've just bought vertex tools and SubD plugins few week ago and I'm slowly starting to get used to them.
One thing I'm working on is a curved wall with glass panels applied on it. This was achieved using Curviloft and Flowify and it's just an experimentation, not a work that has to be finished. I was wondering if there was a way (with SubD or another maybe) to subdivide only the iner faces of the glass panels.The faces outside that link the glass panels to one another would stay straight whereas the inside faces would be smoothed to have a kind of Gaudi result in the end. Not sure if I'm being clear but that's one thing I couldn't achieve until now with Subd. When I smooth an object, I'd like to be able to decide when it's smoothing a geometry including its bounding edges or not.
I'm thinking here of an example with a water basin. I wanted to subdivide the stopper hole (where the water goes away)so that it's doing a smooth surved transition between the horizontal surface of the water basin but obviously Subd will also subdivide the edges of the horizontal surfaces, which I don't want. Of course, there's always a way to solve things so I just recreated the bounding edges to a rectangle and removed the undesired subdivided edges. Just wondered if you could implant a feature like that...
Thanks for your support.
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Have you looked into the creasing tool? It let you control how much things a smoothed by.
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Yeah I did but looks like this shape is too complex and SubD can't handle it. I guess that's way too much polygons at once and the mesh is not properly made so it would crash everytime I try to crease, the whole mesh selected or simply a part of it. Never mind, I guess I should find another way to model this thing.
But still, I do believe that being able to decide directly from the beginning to keep bounding edges sharp or not would be a good feature to have. That would avoid having to edit the mesh after toggling on Subdivision. Even on simple geometries, the crease tool is very slow to show up and process on my side. I think my computer is good enough to run it (I have an overclocked i7 3770K)
I don't know if that would be hard to implement because it requires that the plugin is able to recognize the different bounding edges of each separate mesh composing the group. But maybe, that's not much of a big deal given the complex plugins you've made until now
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Can you share a sample model?
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There you go ! Just downloaded Fixit 101, it removed a lot of geometry and it's running smoother. Also, I had this geometry in a file with a lot of polygons so I isolated it in a new file and it's processing faster. Dumbly, I thought It would be the same processing speed but I guess SubD is actually processing the whole sketchUp file to display the crease tool stickers so it's asking a lot of ressources. Anyway, Maybe the file will help to understand my request : being able to crease the whole different meshes inside the group at once.
The problem is the geomtry is so badly done that some of them got subdivided with sharp corners and other got smoothed at corners resulting in a fail when trying to crease them sharp all at once. So the thing would be to crease manually each one desired.
That's why I'm asking if there would be a way to disable from the beginning the edges smoothing.Thanks for helping !
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Hello Thom,
Is there a quick way to select the rim edges of a quad mesh?
I have to keep the vertices at their place so I need to crease the corners , yet their selection can take some time and I was wondering if there's some script for this.
Usually I use Select Outer Edges by Chris Fullmer but it seems it's not supported anymore in SU2017.
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@optimaforever said:
Hello Thom,
Is there a quick way to select the rim edges of a quad mesh?Selection Toys will to that for you.
@optimaforever said:
I have to keep the vertices at their place so I need to crease the corners , yet their selection can take some time and I was wondering if there's some script for this.
Usually I use Select Outer Edges by Chris Fullmer but it seems it's not supported anymore in SU2017.In SUbD v2 you can set corners to always be sharp - then you only need to crease the "inner corners".
Creasing the edges will have little effect - you want to crease the vertices.
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Thanks Thom for the reply,
Actually the sharp border option didn't work at all.
Perhaps had I to convert the sandbox mesh (+ artisan) to QFT quad first? -
@optimaforever said:
Thanks Thom for the reply,
Actually the sharp border option didn't work at all.
Perhaps had I to convert the sandbox mesh (+ artisan) to QFT quad first?That might be it... using QFT there is a toolbar button to convert Sandbox Tools meshes to QFT meshes.
Can you share a sample model?
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@thomthom said:
That might be it... using QFT there is a toolbar button to convert Sandbox Tools meshes to QFT meshes.
That was it. Obviously something went wrong when subdividing...
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Yes, from that screenshot it looks like SUbD treated each triangle as a separate face. Converting the mesh to QFT mesh will ensure the two sets of triangles from the Sandbox mesh will be treated as a single quad.
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Well I noticed this option smooth or sharp boundary corners but whenever I subdivide a group, even a very simple one (just a rectangle surface subdivided with artisan before), the result I get when pressing the first subdivision iteration is a mesh with round corners even though SubD is set at sharp option. So I try to switch it to smooth instead and then it goes in an endless loading and stucks in the the process until I get a windows saying that a script slows down my web navigator ??? What's the link to the navigator ??
Here is a screen of the geometry I made (basic one), as you can see the option is set to "sharp" but corners are subdivided and it gets stuck like if I change any of the options from the info windows.
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Look at the subdivided mesh and you'll realize it's not quad at all.
It's a triangle based mesh.
So of course it will not work. You have the same problem as I had earlier.
Convert to quad before launching Subd. -
Can you share an example model?
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@optimaforever said:
Look at the subdivided mesh and you'll realize it's not quad at all.
It's a triangle based mesh.
So of course it will not work. You have the same problem as I had earlier.
Convert to quad before launching Subd.Well, the difference between quads and triangles is quite unclear to me. Basically, a quad divided in two becomes two triangles, no ?
Anyway, I just drawn a square in wireframe, converted to quad and subdivided directly from subD, the plugin still getting stuck when switching from sharp to smooth corners. Not getting where the problem comes from... I'll end up thinking that's my computer
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A QuadFace Tools compatible "quad" (by extension SUbD compatible quad) is either a coplanar face with four vertices, or two triangles where their shared edge is soft+smooth and casts-shadows turned off.
Have a look at the QFT wiki for more details: https://bitbucket.org/thomthom/quadface-tools/wiki/Overview#!quadface-definition
When Sandbox Tools create it's mesh it creates just soft+smooth edge between the triangles. So it's not automatically a compatible QFT quad. For that you need to use the "Convert Sandbox Quads to QuadFace Quads" function in QFT:
https://bitbucket.org/thomthom/quadface-tools/wiki/Features#!convert-sandbox-quads-to-quadface-quads -
I looked at your attached model, and it looks like you modified the subdivided mesh. Those changes will be lost if you toggle back from subdivided.
But as for the getting stuck when switching, I'm not seeing that - here is what I observe:
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Well I converted to quads using quad tools then I shaped the thing using vertex tools while it was smoothed edges and when switching to sharp edges, it removes the stuff I did with Vertex tools. As I remember, I didn't do any changes in the mesh but I'll work more with SubD, maybe I'm just not doing things in the proper order. And maybe my computer is actually not so good, don't know...
Thanks for helping at least.
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If you make changes after you subdivide you will lose those changes as soon as you interact with SUbD again.
The workflow for subdividing is that you manipulate the original control mesh and subdivide as a final result.
I'm a little unclear to exactly what you do, if you are able to do a video capture that would help a lot.
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