heya would love some help getting a smooth mesh. pretty simple setup.
2 meshes. think peanut butter glob on knife tip though smooth peanut butter. want to mesh them as one
i imported a fresh alembic of just 2 meshes already animated. add frost. i need it to wrap right onto the existing surfaces. if i do a fat radius with low density the mesh is smooth but doesn’t match the mesh (pushed way out). but when i try and get it to match the surfaces and increase rez (decreasing particle radius/viewport rez) i get banding. trying as many variations of settings as i can…tried and un-smoothed mesh, but when if i add smoothing after frost i loose the mesh detail, tried high density mesh and still get banding/stepping. tried vertex refinement,view port rez etc, cant get an actual smooth result.
i just want to wrap 2 meshes and have it stick to the surface as close as possible. any help would be huge, happy to drop a good tip if i can get some help.
First thing to try would be Zhu/Bridson mode, Mesh Quality 3.0, turn off Low Density Trimming, and start increasing the Blend to 2.5 and possibly higher.
The Zhu/Bridson Blending has an effect of adding more influence between separated particles, as if there were additional particles between them.
In the following example, a simple plane with 10x10 subdivisions is meshed first with Union Of Spheres, then with default Zhu/Bridson. Once the Low Density Trim is disabled, the results are quite similar. Then increasing the Blend Radius Scale value starts introducing more more matter between the distant base points, at around 5.0 producing a continuous surface despite the huge gaps between the vertices. With higher values the mesh becomes thinner and starts losing detail at the edges…
If that does not solve the problem, you might need to tessellate the source meshes to produce a higher density point cloud from the start.
If that does not work either, you might need to seed particles on the surfaces of the meshes and mesh those.
The Krakatoa PRT Surface would be ideal, and we will be looking into allowing all PRT object of Krakatoa MY to be usable as Frost sources without the need for an expensive Krakatoa-Maya license. If the above suggestions do not work, we might cut you an eval. license of Krakatoa MY to try the PRT Surface approach…
Thank you so much for the reply. if you pm a bitcoin/papall adress, happy to tip!
ill tried more of the settings in ZHU now. still banding, and that’s with the surface pushed out still. it could barely pass for a distance shot but i have a close up…ive tried with 3 different densities of smoothing with same result, if i increase the blend radius it really starts to jack the surface up. i basically need what zbrush dynamesh does(search/re-mesh/project). i may have to hand process each frame in zbrush to get any useable results…ugh.
i don’t have Krakatoa and im in max. it would be no problem buying some usage base krakatoa time if i know i can solve it. in theory your idea sounds good, but also sounds like i could loose all my surface definition by generating particles “on top” of the mesh that then get meshed again because were generating further out from the source mesh, need to wrap right onto the source. i need to get this done today or tomorrow.
if you would be up for helping i would happily pay,if you could do it in 3-4 hrs at $100 and hour or around there (jsut setting up 1 frame). let me know but im sure its a long shot…its only 70 frames, and combining 2 meshes, i could give an alembic. it should be simple?
Oh, sorry, we just started the beta for Frost MY and I somehow mistook your question for a Beta related one. I should have looked at the topic name a bit better…
Krakatoa MX is free to use with Frost MX. Email me at bobo AT thinkboxsoftware DOT com and I will let you know how to get a free Krakatoa MX to enhance your Frost. You can try the PRT Surface to create millions of points on the surface of the original meshes, and mesh that. This would allow you to use a very small radius.
However, Frost was not designed to do what you are trying to do - it is not a retopo tool. You are always going to have a slight offset from the original surface, equal to the radius. There is a way to push the resulting Frost mesh closer to the original surface, but that requires yet another plugin, or smart usage of MCG, and would potentially lose more detail in the process.
thanks for the quick reply, no problem on the maya thing, i know enough to extrapolate the info. the Krakatoa method sounds great. may not be able to R&D it today but i will push the method through to test it…
yup, were outside the realm of what frost does so it was a stretch to begin with. thank you very much again for the time. ill keep knocking on it, see what i can get. ill post up results when i get it figured out, (might be after the project, couple weeks).
cheers!
