[Bf-committers] Mesh deformation and subsurfs

[Alexander Ewering]

Hello,

a generic "observation" about Blender's deform functions:

Lattices and Waves effects (as an example) work strangely on Subsurf
Meshes. They do not deform the procedural (subsurf) mesh, rather they
just affect the control vertices.

This is obviously quite useless when you just have a cube, make it a
"Sphere" by turning on subsurf, and then surrounding that with a Lattice
and moving a lattice vertex in the center, which will have no effect on the
Subsurf at all (even though it SHOULD stick a 'pit' into the sphere), as
there is no control vertex in the middle of a face.

This gets more strange, because for NURBS, the behaviour is different:
There, Lattices deform the _procedural_ mesh. I.e., you can just have
4 control points which form a surface, and a lattice _does_ dig a pit
into the surface even though there's no control point nearby.

I want to work on procedural mesh deformation (stick a cylinder into a
sphere, watch the sphere deform as if made from rubber), but I don't want
to start before thinking this over. It would be a definitive disadvantage
if this system (like all other deforms) can't work on subsurfs.

I don't have any insight into the Hypermesh stuff involved.

Can Ton shed a bit of light into this?

Thanks.


| alexander ewering               instinctive new media
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