[Bf-modeling] inset options

[Howard Trickey]

Well I've answered my own questions with a bit more searching and trying
things out.

It seems that 'offset relative' is useful if one is doing a lot of
individual insets all at once, and the polygons you are insetting vary in
size from large to small. You might like the thickness of the inset to
scale down as the polygon scales down. I saw a discussion about making
shells where this was true, for instance.

And I do see that Boundary can make a useful difference when insetting a
region, so now I see the point of that one.

I do question the method used for 'offset relative', however. What it does
now is multiply the thickness at each corner by the average length of the
two adjacent sides. For rectangles this gives an even inset, but for
polygons with differing lengths and angles at each corner, the result is
that the inset shape does not match the shape of the original (that is,
there is not a constant thickness between the original edges and the inset
ones).  Is this desired and useful? I would have thought that most people
would want and expect the 'even thickness' property. Maybe a better way to
calculate the factor for offset relative would be to multiply the thickness
by the average edge length of the whole polgyon? That would lead to an even
offset. Or, even better, multiply by the ratio of the average edge length
of the whole polygon to the max average edge length over all polygons in
the selection? That way, the user-specified 'thickness' value would have an
intuitive meaning (the inset thickness for the biggest polygon) whereas
right now you have to specify a really small thickness if your polygon
edges happen to have a large scale -- only the relative change in thickness
makes any sense.

Also, the current ability to specify 'offset relative' and 'offset even'
independently of each other seems a bit strange. Don't people always want
'offset even'? (And thus, why have the option). With 'offset relative'
being an added feature on top of that to get the 'polygon scale' scaling of
the thickness, but remaining even?

Marc: your question about UV interpolation for Depth. I think you mean this
case: if you give a non-zero depth but a zero thickness, so that the effect
of the inset is the same as extrude region, then the walls of the extrusion
get mapped into zero-area rectangles (they appear to be lines) in the
original UV map. And you'd like some non-zero area there to play with.
Extrude has the same problem.  The issue here is that it is not clear what
math to use to get this, because then the top face(s) will not get the
ideal UV interpolation compared to the original UV map -- some kind of
artificially made-up shrink factor has to be applied to those faces in the
UV map in order to make room for the walls to have non-zero area.  What
shrink factor should be used?



On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 5:20 AM Marc Dion <marcdion1974 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Correction, I meant "Depth" when I said "Offset" in the previous post.
>
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Marc Dion <marcdion1974 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> To me, those changes seem good.  I feel like they all produce the same
>> results with only the slider value being at a different place depending on
>> the choice made.  Those extra options seem like redundant clutter.
>>
>> ----
>> In addition to the changes you mentioned, would you be willing to put
>> some thought into adding UV interpolation for the Offset option?
>>
>> When using UV's/Inset, it's almost certain a person would like to see
>> some area of the UV's assigned to any new geometry since not having UV
>> space assigned to new faces does tend to cause baked textures to fail at
>> what they do.  Same for texture painting.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 6:57 PM, metalliandy <
>> metalliandy666 at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hey Howard,
>>>
>>> I don't usually touch the Offset controls but quite regularly toggle the
>>> boundary option. It can be very useful to quickly create equidistant edge
>>> loops for example.
>>>
>>> As a side note I think Edge Rail would benefit from being on by default
>>> as having it off can cause some some subd smoothing issues and somewhat
>>> messier geometry.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> -Andy
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 27/08/2015 02:07, Howard Trickey wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm working on a possible change to inset (optional corrections for self
>>> intersections/crossings) and was wondering about several options in the
>>> existing tool.
>>>
>>> Boundary - does anyone ever turn this off?
>>> Offset Even - does anyone ever turn this off?
>>> Offset Relative - does anyone ever turn this on?
>>>
>>> In particular, 'offset relative' makes the geometry of what happens
>>> after self intersections much more complicated, so I was wondering if
>>> anyone would miss these options if they were gone and if also acted like
>>> just 'Offset Even' is on.  (And Boundary; I don't really care about
>>> Boundary, but it does seem unlikely to me that people would turn that one
>>> off.)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Bf-modeling mailing listBf-modeling at blender.orghttp://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-modeling
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Bf-modeling mailing list
>>> Bf-modeling at blender.org
>>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-modeling
>>>
>>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-modeling mailing list
> Bf-modeling at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-modeling
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-modeling/attachments/20150827/49296f75/attachment.html>