Black Mesh - Procedural Modeling Tool

Coding Released Scripts and Themes
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21

Nice!
Adding booleans from selection is in plans. I assume next release.
Right now I suggest using collections. Just put cutters into one collection.

About hide/unhide - you need to press the update button.

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Also, don’t forget to download examples and check them. )

23

Here’s my impressions so far:

  • The options and sliders are going to need better tooltips. For options like half-width and iso-value you have no idea what reasonable values are, or in fact what values to use to get a difference of some kind.
  • The sliders are bad. A single-pixel nudge changes the voxel size by 200%. I suggest dividing the value of that field by 1000 or something like that before feeding it to the remesher. They should also be multiplied by the object’s dimensions so you can model both a cigarette lighter and a spaceship and still have useful sliders. That, or simply express the voxel size in thousands-of-voxels-per-diagonal of the bounding box. That way you’ll also avoid users crashing their systems by setting the voxel size too low by accident.
  • Same thing with adaptivity. There’s a huge difference between a value of 0.0001 and 0.001, and everything above that is kinda useless because of normal artefacts, so 99.99% of the useful range of the slider is wasted. Do some math on this so it’s practical to drag the slider.
  • Or, there’s a nonlinear sliders patch now committed. Is that exposed to python yet? If so maybe use that.
  • The utility layers don’t seem to do anything or else I have no idea what a useful value range for them is.
  • The erode and dilate sliders on the smooth filter doesn’t seem to do anything.
  • Why are meshes always flat-shaded?
  • Why do newly added sources lose their materials?
  • When adding a source, please get the cutters and layers from analyzing the modifier stack, don’t make us recreate it.
  • When adding a source mesh, modifiers are lost. This needs to be an option, at least for some modifiers above the booleans in the stack, like mirror and array and curve.
  • There should be an easy key you can press to delete the result mesh and get back the source mesh so you can do more modelling, tweak the modifier stack, etc.
  • The heck is MFamily? Make this tab configurable, or at least just Black Mesh.
  • There should be a single “Cleanup” button that removes all the result meshes from the file and displays their source meshes, but without removing the Blackmesh layer settings from objects, and a “Global Update” button that recalcualtes all meshes. There’s really no reason to store the heavy result meshes in your .blend files when you’re not actively working on them.
  • Needs a “Slash” boolean mode that outputs two separate objects.

Ok, that’s a pretty big list of critical stuff, however, I do in fact like the addon. It will be a nice tool to have in the toolbox after some tweaking :slight_smile:

8 Likes
24

Nice feedback, thanks. About adaptivity and voxel size: I use the same values as in blender remesher and openvdb. Not sure if I will multiply them by 100. May be I’ll add it to addon settings.

Don’t worry about Utilities yet.

I’ll do an update next week. I’m moving.

4 Likes
25

This is a ‘Mesh Fusion’ like thing, although it works through another way.

The interesting thing is that it produces -as it seems from the video above- dense mesh only on the edges of the cut objects, that’s to say only on areas that have to be smoothed-beveled.

Very nice idea in overall! Hope that it will have further development.

3 Likes
26

Thanks. This is long term project. At least I hope so. There will be not only voxels.

3 Likes
27

That’s very interesting addon. I would like to see a longer video explaining all the things and showing different use cases examples.

What I like the most it that it dense mesh only on the edges. Is that using some build-in trick with Blender modifiers, or this addon uses a completely different approach and different code that wasn’t available in Blender before?

2 Likes
28

What is needed to get this over the line for Mac? I’m a developer, FWIW - I maintain the Bforartists Mac builds.

1 Like
29

Did some test and I got pretty nice results congrats Mifth! I like this worflow a lot with only the panel and the 3D View :+1:
Looking forward for the next steps

1 Like
30

Does anyone have a fix for 2.92? Thanks

1 Like
31

I think this is oython version issue. You could try to replace python of 2.92. just take python from 2.93 folder and replace files.

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I need to install mac os and compile my openvdb.

33

I have windows 7 which will not work with the newest python. Are you able to get it working in my case. Thanks mifth.

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Just download 2.93 or 3.0 and it should work.
Also make sure you have vcredist_64 installed.

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I was told they don’t work with windows 7 because they are python 3.9 and windows 7 only works with python 3.7. Thanks

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Is that something you could use some help with (given that I’m already on it and compiling stuff pretty regularly)?

1 Like
37

I’m honestly curious - why such an old version of Windows? Wouldn’t it be worth an upgrade? There have been a lot of improvements to Blender that you’re missing out on if you can’t upgrade to 2.93.

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2.93 has python 3.9

39

Thank you, I’ll note it. I would like to try myself firstly usin kvm.

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I will definately up grade in a month or two. Just wondered if it is dooable for 2.92?