[Bf-funboard] TopMod modeling for Blender?

Cal McGaugh cal at cal3d.com
Fri Nov 30 07:08:03 CET 2012


Hi all,
I am starting to use TopMod, and found this on page 1 of the User Manual:
 <http://www.viz.tamu.edu/faculty/ergun/research/topology/papers/system04.pdf>


"We believe that the popularity of polygonal modeling comes from
one of its under-appreciated advantages over other modeling approaches.
If the polygons are not triangles or quadrilaterals, the
faces are not geometrically well-defined. With geometrically illdefined
faces, self-intersection becomes meaningless. So, any commercial
system that allows general polygons does not check selfintersection
and avoids the cost of self-intersection computation
which can considerably slow down the application during interactive
modeling.


The omission of automatic self-intersection avoidance is typically
not of concern to most users, since they can easily avoid selfintersection
manually. Given a choice users usually prefer interactivity
and higher speed in their applications.

On the other hand,
when users become more advanced, their main complaint becomes
the limitations of the tools. For instance, opening a hole or adding a
handle can require huge amount of manual work. Therefore, modeling
a very complicated shape with huge number of holes and handles
can be an uphill task even for experienced users.
The limitations of the polygonal modeling tools in commercial systems
stems from polygonal mesh representations.

Most commercial
systems, for convenience, allow many non-manifold representations
and manifolds with boundaries. Several manifold representations
that are particularly useful for algorithm development are
not considered valid even if the underlying data structure can support
them. These decisions make sense in the early stages of commercial
system development but eventually become a burden for
tool development."

My question is,  is this type of modeling something that could/should be added
to Blender?
I can always export a mesh from TopMod to Blender, but thought this might be
something to consider.

Thanks,
Cal McGaugh


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