Anyone know state of Bmesh?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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After spending the last six months working intensively with Blender on environment/architectural style models I thought I didn’t really miss Ngons that much…

The new version of WINE (release candidate for version 1)came out yesterday and got me trying my old windows 3d software, Lightwave 8.5 was perfect, Silo 2 ran but with a black 3d screen, but Silo 1.4 was also perfect!

I started doodling around and built a head mesh in a couple of hours…thing is I really miss “box” modelling with ngons, “tweak” and a decent cut tool… like Silo…

…or Wings, if it had nice tablet support…

Neither of those programs works with a space navigator…

Just got me thinking how nice it would be to work in Blender this way, but there’s not really been any news on Bmesh for six months or so…

Has it been put aside with all the other things going on right now?

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yeah, nGons are great for box modeling. :slight_smile:

The bMesh afaik, has been integrated into blender, alas as a library,
and currently the bevel modifier is the only one thing that makes use of it.

But indeed, this is old knowledge/info, so would be interesting to hear a little more about it. :slight_smile:

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I think I read somewhere they’ll put it in if/when SDL starts offering tablet support. Allegedly, no time/resources to implement cross-platform tablet support themselves.

Er, hello, here’s Blender, and it’s open source… oh well.</ot>

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I think I remember reading a thread saying it was on hold until some part of Blender got rewritten/refactored.

On hold not dead…

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It’s a shame that, as I really like wings a lot, but I never use a mouse anymore as i cramp up after about a minute of use…
…and tablet in mouse mode never seems to work properly anyway. Silo1.4 will cover those needs for now though, and in Silo I’ve configured the viewport navigation to match both Blender and Maya simultaneously…

I think I remember reading a thread saying it was on hold until some part of Blender got rewritten/refactored.

On hold not dead…

Hmm, A lot’s riding on the re-factor I guess we’ll be waiting a while then!

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Personally I’m against n-gons,I prefer clean modelling, I hope that the new bmesh will be fast(at least as fast than now),I don’t like slowness when moving point,3 years ago blender had the fastest subdivision modelling tool on the market,now is slower than previous(modifier have advantage but not on speed),going down again for me should be a real pain…

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That’s missing the point of ngons, even if your final model will only be triangles and quads they are fantastic… The aim is still to make a clean model, but the flexibility they give when adding and re-arranging loops and edges is invaluable… rather then loosing a polygon, or getting unwanted tesselation that has to be removed or turned or otherwise fiddled about with, you can just add the loops where you want, delete vertices and edges without destroying the polys…

it’s just a lot faster to edit the mesh with ngons in the tool box

…And as for speed, I agree, fast is good! Wouldn’t call the subdiv modifier noticeably slow though

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That makes sense only is speed remains good,my point is that for modelling the most important feature is speed(I’m mainly and organic modeller),I fear that a new core can slow down this,and honestly if happens I can’t be very happy.
In my workflow the major time consuming is moving point,not creating the topology.
Btw,with good performance no problem with ngons(but they should have good support for texturing,subdivision,particle emission and so on)

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@Renderdemon

Agreed! The subdiv especially may need extra work.

Lightwave had ngons for as long as I can remember, but subdivs only supported ngons since version 9 and the performance went through the floor!

On the other hand, Silo deals with ngons fast as … well a very fast thing. After that first subdivision all you have is tris and quads anyway… it CAN be written to be as fast as the current mesh, and that was a goal on the wiki…

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I model with ngons all day. Organic modeling also. I did model many video game characters for several companies, using only Wings3d. Which is purely that technique, totally Mirai inspired (mirai was used for the modeling of Gollum head).

Its performance on what you mean is way slower than Blender’s, and can eat a much lower polygon count for a comfortable modeling. Still, and while this may sound arrogant, I was declared to be fastest modeler in the teams, usually, in those places. And merit was not mine, but the tool. At least by the times, wings ngon modeling was more flexible and had fastest methods than the comercial tools there. I wont mention which tools to not start a fight in that one.So much that i was left to do all organic modeling and even all items and objects modeling.

So, ngons need at least a good chance…Imho, if you can "convert " later to a more blender internal mesh, then is like before, but you count on a very flexible weapon more, than you had before…

I still model with wings, but animate etc in blender. And at certain job, usually model with blender for other reasons…

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It’s true… used to work at Sony Computer Entertainment and many of the character modellers there use Wings 3d right now, even for next gentitles.

The slowdown of wings is not down to Ngons per se, rather the “winged edge” data format, where every edge needs to know about its relationship to all the other edges in the mesh (or something like that anyway), which makes models get slow really quickly when the poly count goes up…

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I always figured it was due to Erlang. There are many apps out there that handle ngons without any real slowdown.

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To explain a bit better my point,maybe my thinking is not clear,my english is poor(sorry for that).
I’m interested mainly in fast subdivision,here I hope thing remain fast.
For some command I’m pretty sure the new mesh core will be faster(try now to select an edge loop for mesh with 20/30000 quad or more and you’ll see how slow is now that command)
But I don’t know how will be the performance for a ngons subdivision scheme with a new data structure,maybe can even be faster,what I’m sure is that blender now is a bit slower than some years ago with subdivision and for me the best advantage compared to maya and 3dstudio max was the fast subdivision,I simply hope things don’t get worse(maybe I’m arrogant but I have never had problem in modelling,it’s a really easier stuff for me)
Btw,when bmesh will be finished we’ll simply use it and see how it works.

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Yikes, quite a lot going on in this thread! I apologize for the lack of updates in this area, and will try to clear things up a bit.

Just got me thinking how nice it would be to work in Blender this way, but there’s not really been any news on Bmesh for six months or so…

The work to be completed is fairly straightforward and I have a pretty clear idea of what needs to be done still. However I really don’t have too much time for it as of late. “Real life” concerns like work and social obligations have kept me away from coding on it too much. I’m still working on getting the final bits of the API polished here and there where I get a chance, but even when that is finished, it will still take quite a bit of work to integrate it as an edit-mode/modifier stack replacement. This is actually something that would take a competent coder only month or couple weeks of full-time work to accomplish. Doing it piece-meal is rather difficult however, so any coder who is willing to take on the burden of integration work would get my full support/input.

The slowdown of wings is not down to Ngons per se, rather the “winged edge” data format, where every edge needs to know about its relationship to all the other edges in the mesh (or something like that anyway), which makes models get slow really quickly when the poly count goes up…

My ears perked up when you said this, hope you don’t mind me commenting on it :slight_smile:

The storage requirements for winged edge and access times are actually very good(scale linearly if I recall correctly). As far as I know, the slowdown of Wings has more to do with the Erlang language. Its a huge memory hog and wasn’t really designed for use in applications like Wings. Despite that Erlang is really nice to code in (I wrote the RWX exporter for wings yonks ago).

Another problem with Winged Edge is that it is really quite old and offers little (or no) advantages over other structures like Half-Edge. Thats a technical detail however, and the author of Wings has done a phenomenal job with the application which provides a benchmark for other modeling applications to live up to.

But I don’t know how will be the performance for a ngons subdivision scheme with a new data structure,maybe can even be faster,what I’m sure is that blender now is a bit slower than some years ago with subdivision and for me the best advantage compared to maya and 3dstudio max was the fast subdivision,I simply hope things don’t get worse(maybe I’m arrogant but I have never had problem in

Blenders subdivision modifier currently uses N-gons for its internal data structures. Its performance should remain the same regardless of B-Mesh.

Personally I’m against n-gons,I prefer clean modelling, I hope that the new bmesh will be fast(at least as fast than now),I don’t like slowness when moving point,3 years ago blender had the fastest subdivision modelling tool on the market,now is slower than previous(modifier have advantage but not on speed),going down again for me should be a real pain…

Performance is a difficult subject to discuss, because there are so many factors involved. However it seems what you are concerned most with is draw/refresh rate, which is an issue that can be tackled apart from the underlying mesh structure. Blender’s draw code uses what was ‘best practice’ for OpenGL a decade or so ago. Massive speedups in this area can be seen with a more modern approach.

It should be noted that B-Mesh does have higher memory requirements than the current Edit-Mesh structure. However this is a cost that can be more than offset through better infrastructure.

I would also like to thank the Blender community for continued interest in this project. Hopefully there will be more news to report on it soon!

Cheers,
Briggs

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err, ummm, There is a Linux version of lightwave dont use wine :stuck_out_tongue:

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Are you sure?
Maya ands XSI yes, but lightwave? that must be in the last year…Blender now covers all my needs now, but I still miss f-prime.

Thanks for the info Briggs, I know how hard it is to do stuff in your spare time!

as for data structures, I’m no coder, so You’ll know better than me!

Do you have any plans for a “cut” or “connect”/"add edges tool? like in Wings,( where you click edges to add vertices and edges join the new verts , damn it’s hard to explain, but you’ll know what i mean if you worked on wings ) or would that be for others to add once bmesh is in…

Also, it sort of breaks the “select first” then operate paradigm, but it’d be a shame not to include such a tool on that basis…

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I’m not quite sure what you mean, but I think the answer is yes. Look for yourself at:


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Yes, I’ve seen those before…

I was more talking about the “connect” tool in wings… Or have you seen the “Knife Pro” script for blender available here:

http://users.telenet.be/EWOCprojects2/index.html

It’s a pretty cool script, with exactly the functionality I’m talking about, but because blender doesn’t support Ngons you get an awful lot of messy geometry when you divide adjacent edges. Give it a try though.

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i think ton should invite briggs or another coder who is able to do it to the blender institute for 2 months. :slight_smile:

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michael, I think I kno what you mean…

the cut knife mode you can enter into with a keystroke in wings…is really fast…i detail almost everything with it…well, I mean, it almost always takes part in detailing…Very fun to draw loops-like stuff, re-wiring etc. yep, I also like to operate in a non-formed mass, and then go detailing…

Anyway, I think it’s two very valid ways of modeling…just as how much I’d like point to point modeling (i do with some trick in wings,whenever I prefer point to point for certain models, or an stage of it) , it’d be nice to have some of winged like stuff here…