Just a quick drop note from Cuba! I’m fine, I keep working offline and spending some quality time with my family and friends. Recently I just found a nice algorithm to estimate mesh curvature on reconstructed surfaces and it will have a lot of implications on tools.
The good thing is that I could escape the hard winter on non tropical countries but I miss you all and I’m dying to be online again

All the best
Farsthary

What have started as a bug hunting optimization have forked an architectural update of base LC tools .

Of course, I will continue focusing on stabilizing current LC implementation toward new Beta, because new one still need some work and tests, so is unlikely artists will see it soon, also, this new rewrite is internal, so tools remain behaving the same but it “completes” the LC data structures to allow easier/faster/more efficient implementation of existing and new tools.

This was a pending debt I have had with myself since long ago and you all know I cannot be too long time doing grunt maintenance work because my brain have a high risk of generate a new idea in the process

Cheers

Farsthary

EDIT: Last minute added Selective Decompose, using freeze flag, you can specify which parts will be decomposed, useful when you only need a subset of the generated parts.

Selective decompose

New Bridge tool

hi

I have been quite busy working over a powerful new major tool: Bridge

It can robustly connect any arbitrary part of meshes, being tunnels or bridges, with any shape and any amount of polygons unlike common bridge implementation in most modelers that requires equal amount of vertices per connecting boundary. Bridges can be accurately cut, smoothed and subdivided all at user control level. One powerful feature of this tool is that , unlike cutting holes with booleans,  it can create holes with completely different endpoints shapes. And much more, the workflow possibilities of this tool are endless.

Hope you like it.

Hoy es uno de esos días en que mi vida personal tiñe lo que veo y matiza lo que siento. Se que es un estado pasajero pero no por eso menos real e intenso mientras vivo estas cíclicas depresiones. Me recuerdan que no se puede ser tan egoísta como para desear y merecer siempre la felicidad y que vivir es como caminar sobre un infinito campo minado, donde a medida que pasan los años estas se van cerrando a tu paso…hasta que das el último.

Alguien dijo que el secreto de la infelicidad es pensar en uno mismo, y es verdad, pero cuando todo lo que se tiene es tu ser, es lo mínimo que puedes hacer por ti poque nadie mas lo hara. Cada cual carga con su rosario de problemas, algunos tan virtuales como una frivolidez otros tan terribles como una enfermedad terminal, pero de común, cada ser humano siente sus problemas con igual intensidad y no discrimina en importancia.

A veces siento que tengo mi vida en “pausa”, pero no importa, ya mañana estare mejor, hoy solo quería deahogarme.

Raul.

Based on recent advances I have implemented Reconstruct, a tool that performs a remesh on the selected area, very useful for fixing or improving the mesh.

Cheers

I’ve just finishing implementing a very interesting mesh smoothing/ relaxation algorithm. previous method, the common Laplacian method tends to cluster detailed zones, thus increasing the detail contrast on a topology level. This method performs the contrary: it smooth and dissolves the detail into surrounding mesh, making detail transition smoother, achieving topology smoothing and geometry smoothing at the same time. both method can complement each other for a great artist controlled smooth tool

Surface reconstruction is now so powerful and beauty in a topological sense

Original mesh to be cut

original mesh to be cut

Reconstructed mesh

Notice how smoothly is extrapolated curvature on new mesh.

Since a picture worth thousand words, take a look:

This is the raw output of the Reconstructor, without smoothing, curvature preserving and other post-process steps that further improve the result. This is just to compare against the previous solution the fundamental of the algorithm.

Note: Click on images to see them with better resolution

Original hole test, non uniform

Original hole test, uniform

Previous base reconstruction algorithm, non uniform starting mesh

New base reconstruction algorithm, non uniform starting mesh

Previous base reconstruction algorithm, uniform starting mesh

New base reconstruction algorithm, uniform starting mesh

New base reconstruction algorithm, with all post-process improvements activated

Hope you like it!

A very good news: 3D Coat is on Steam!

Merged tools

Those who was scared of the cluttering of the UI with new tools popping every time, shall not, as devs, many times we clutter the UI with experimental tools and on going work, so what you see in screen casts are more like our flavor of the software, by no means is the release look. Feedback is very important too, I may say, crucial, because is easy to lost track on artist needs.
So, I decided to clean a bit three floating tools that, altough they have a very different inner algorithms, externaly they may behave very similar, so I’ve merged Decimate-Reduce-Remove Clay into a single Clean Clay tool, with the option to choose among the previous actions of course, so no functionality is lost, just streamlined

This is a test preview of the feature, this will not be the final GUI of the tool, it will be integrated into existent CloseHoles tool as an option.

Cheers