quad mesh from Tri's

[RErender]

Anybody have a good method for auto generating a nice clean quad mesh fro a ugly ass tri?

[RErender]

for example:

[mike.edel]

i can only think of this:
http://www.polyboost.com/features_modelling.htm

[ene.xis]

i don´t....but wish for!

[RErender]

I just read that blender can do it or atleast try (no pun intended)

[plastic_]

pro booleans, included with the max 8 subscription, can do it to some degree.
you have to perform a boolean operation with a dummy object, like substracting a box that doesn't intersect.
then you can use the "make quads" option.

[RErender]

nice one, plastic, I'll try that.

[RErender]

doesn't work very well

[instinct]

There´s also a script on scriptspot that tries to do it...but it doesnt really work too well either :/

Thorsten

[mike.edel]

seems silo (standalone modeller for $100) has a nice feature to paint topology over an existing mesh
not automagic, but at least something
looks really cool
http://www.nevercenter.com/videos/in...lter%20Behrnes

free trial availlable, imports obj, 3ds, dxf

btw: your quad mesh isnt "clean", either
(trifaces at the borders)
are these terrain contours? i guess the best topology would be edge-loops instead of regular grids

[RErender]

btw: your quad mesh isnt "clean", either Wink
(trifaces at the borders)
are these terrain contours? i guess the best topology would be edge-loops instead of regular grids

Heh, I was wondering if someone would say that

right of course but it's clean enough for me in this case I just need it to smooth well and take uvw's correctly.

Turns out that pro booleans subdivides the mesh in a way that allows texture layers to work for me so it is probably good enough. The terrain has already been very labor intensive, it started as semi hi res scans of hand drawn topos that have required a lot of clean up just to vectorize so I need to automate what ever I can to get it usable. It is a 18 whole golf course with a lot of detail.

In the image above I used simcloth to drape a clean mesh over the existing and then just cut it out, sort of works but would require a lot of time to stitch the edges back to the surrounding meshes and calc time would end up huge for the hundreds of tees, fairways and greens.

I probably give silo a try too, thanks for the input everyone.

[mike.edel]

cant you use dem data or similar stuff to generate the terrain? (expensive for high res data, though)

[dellis]

I may be missing the problem here but why not use the glue plugin from Itoosoft and drop splines to the surface....then use the cross section and surface modifiers. if you use the same number of vertices in each of the contour lines that you drop you should get a nice even mesh. let me know if you need more clarification.

[RErender]

well the grading is proposed and only exists in hand drawn topos , so no dem's.

That's and interesting method delliss, might see if it works. I imagine it might take years to glue that many splines to the whole course.

Our script guy was working on a script Friday that took a plane object and moved it's verts down to the topo mesh. It was working pretty sweet on small chunks will see if it works on big ones later today.

[mike.edel]

just for clarification: are you trying to recreate real world terrain based on height-lines from maps or are those splines the borders of greens/fairways/roughs on the course

if you already have an existing terrain mesh you can probably project the green/fairway/rough mesh onto it (cant' remember if it was scatter or something else that did this)

other than that you could try scanning the maps, converting them to grayscale (or coloring the vectorized topo lines) and then using the grayscale map for displacing a regular mesh

edit:
base mesh (regular plane, in this case 300 m x 150 m with 1 m resolution/quad-size)


16-bit displacement map with color-filled topolines (hand-drawn mockup with guessed height scale for the topo lines)
50% black = 0 displacement
100% black = full positive displacement (half of what you set in the modifier)
0% black = full negative displacement


displaced mesh
turbosmooth on top of the stack could help to smooth out the hard borders of the topolines (disabled right now)


same mesh with softer borders around the heights (both positive and negative)


mike