[Bf-funboard] TopMod modeling for Blender?

[Campbell Barton]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 5:08 PM, Cal McGaugh <cal at cal3d.com> wrote:
>
> 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

The PDF document you link to has a lot of novel wireframe/topology tools.

As for weather this is useful to have in blender, I guess we could
have a wireframe modifier that includes methods like this, though Im
not sure its all that important to have quite so many as this document
shows.

Re-meshing operations are more useful IMHO too.

Though doing a google image search for `topmod`, it creates really
odd/interesting models with very similar characteristics that can be
nice for some modern art - but I get the impression this isnt a
general purpose tool.
-- 
- Campbell