Voxel request

[Mix Mash]

From my interpretation of the voxels used in 3d Coat, voxel objects are created using the volume of all three axes of the object you import. However, sometimes when you import an object you can get ugly triangular geometry because the voxel process is based on a uniform distribution of polygons. So, certain edges and curves do not translate well. In this case, I was wondering if it were possible to have voxel creation based on polygon surface flow rather than the current uniform distribution method.

I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement something like this but I believe that voxel meshes would show up better and more accurately.

Cheers,

Paul

[philnolan3d]

From my interpretation of the voxels used in 3d Coat, voxel objects are created using the volume of all three axes of the object you import. However, sometimes when you import an object you can get ugly triangular geometry because the voxel process is based on a uniform distribution of polygons. So, certain edges and curves do not translate well. In this case, I was wondering if it were possible to have voxel creation based on polygon surface flow rather than the current uniform distribution method.

I've not had much problems with importing models like you suggest, the only main importing problem I've had is when there are open edges on the model sometimes it causes streaks of voxels. Also occasionally I've seen a small hole or two but this is easily smoothed or filled. If you can get YouTube this is a model I imported (a 3D scan from Stanford University):

If your resolution is not high enough the lines may not look smooth. This can be solved by scaling up the proxy model before pressing Enter. As you scale it up watch the Estimated Polycount in the Params window. If you press Enter and it's not smooth enough, you can Undo and scale the proxy up more.

[Mix Mash]

The object I used to turn into a voxel object was a sword IE A hard edged object. I could have manually smoothed out the blade edge (which was the biggest issue with the ugly triangulation) but I'd risk losing my hard edges. Scaling up didn't work as well as I thought because the finer edged detail still didn't get better. The issue is that the voxelisation process blankets the object with a uniform spread of polygons so there is no fair distribution between the areas that need more polygons than others.

I was hoping that voxelisation of an object was an easier way of getting a mass boolean unification done than with Lightwave (the boolean tools in Lightwave suck with lots of polygons and intersecting objects) when I first bought 3dcoat but I found out the hard way that the process is different.

It would be nice to be able to have a boolean function in 3d coat that is a mix of ordinary boolean operations and voxels. Here's how the process would work for a unification process, for example:

1) the mesh object is imported into 3DCoat and all hidden polygons are deleted.

2) the program detects all intersecting polygons (Meshlab is an open source program (I think!) that can do this) and turns them into visible voxel polygons. None of the regular non-intersecting polygons are changed.

3) the new voxel polygons are then turned into ordinary polygons which give you your seamless mesh.

OK, I admit that it is a naive and simplistic approach but, to me, if something like this could be implemented, it would make this program much more powerful.