[Bf-committers] Bevel function

[Matt Ebb]

I find sleepless nights are the most productive, no matter how 
unclearly I think during them :) Very Well done intrr and theeth!

Perhaps it's a little premature for these sorts of suggestions (heh), 
but I have one. Manually entering the size value in blender units could 
get very cumbersome. When modelling, I often turn the grid right off, 
so I often have no concept of units in my mind. It's also difficult for 
people to track if they have scenes that are scaled up or scaled down 
further than usual. I can imagine it would take a lot of trial and 
error to get it right. If you could change the amount of bevel 
visually, by moving the mouse (think of Alt S shrink/fatten), it would 
be much faster and more painless.

It would be great if there is some sort of visual interactivity to it, 
a la Wings. Disclaimer, I don't know anything at all about how this 
bevelling code works, but anyway, I'm prepared to look like an idiot if 
there's a chance it may be useful :)...

It seems in goofster's edge cut and select that there's some way to 
previsualise an action, and then display it in yellow without actually 
enacting it. Could this be possibly done during the 4. 'shrink' step, 
or just previsualising the 4. shrink step before you commit the action 
(which goes and runs through all the steps again, with the values that 
it remembered from the previs stage). If the shrink was somehow made 
interactive (like hacking it in transform()? (could get nasty..), could 
this somehow be possible?

Anyways, just some ideas. Excellent stuff so far.

matt


On 8 Dec 2003, at 4:59 AM, Alexander Ewering wrote:

>
>
> Should there be any questions about the algorithm itself,
> here's the basic way it works (developped in a sleepless
> night :)
>
> 1. Split all faces so that they are "floating" unconnected
>
> 2. Search for edges that lie exactly on top of each other.
>    Make a quad between them.
>
> 3. Search for more than 2 vertices which lie exactly on
>    the same point. Make lists of lists of these.
>
> 4. Shrink all original faces (i.e., excluding the new quads)
>    using an algorithm that moves a face's edge towards the
>    face's center independantly of the shape of the face.
>    This algorithm has originally been inspired by #math on
>    Dalnet, theeth has later integrated a simpler, faster
>    version.
>
> 5. Take the list of lists of vertices, and make n-gons between
>    each of the "clusters".
>    n-gons are made by calculating the Boundbox and extruding
>    all outer edges towards the center, merging in the middle.
>
> Any questions on this wonderful algo? ;-)
>
>
> | alexander ewering               instinctive new media
> | ae[@]instinctive[.]de   http://www[.]instinctive[.]de
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers@blender.org
> http://www.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>