I was wondering since I do not see a tool directly available to do this in blender.
Is there a tool/workflow to fill a geometry with random points (preferably avoiding particle setups) ?
It has to be a free tool, I have Lightwave modeler that does this with the fill solid command, and if there isn´t anyone I could just use that and save out later to blender.
The resulting points will then be used to instance metaballs on to them.
So those familiar with the fill solid tool should know what I mean, otherwise as described above.
The easiest way I think is to use particles, but you don’t want to use them? Then I imagine you may have to use one of the nodes systems like svershok, animation nodes, geometry nodes etc…
You can maybe do something with array modifier and displacements and booleans as well.
Yup, just tried and you can do it with a couple of modifiers. You will not like the setup but it’s doable and completely procedural. (still easier with particles)
Exactly, I know I could do it with particles, in both lightwave and blender, but I want the simplest fastest thing, and that is in my opinion a one button click in Lightwave with fill solid or two or three clicks to fill the mesh, and just od copy and paste to blender …or save out to obj to blender.
So…unfortunately it´s not what I want, and correct assumption, I do not like the setup…to messy.
Thanks anyway mikael, I always appreciate you helping out.
the only downside to the fill solid tool in Lightwave (apart from being sort of hidden) it has no way of countrolling amount of points, and has a default amount…so several clicks with equal amount of points is added for each click.
Perhaps someone could write a script for point cloud and use fill volume, and target a mesh, with specified amount of points.
I actually took up the challange to write a script. It was really hard as I normally don’t do programming and try to avoid it, but at the same time I always wanted to learn how to code.
I have a prototype that kind of works but I need to fix much more before I will share it with someone.
I only made this for fun and for learning as I find this tool kind of limited, I thinkt the particle and geometry nodes solutions are better as they are more dynamic and flexible.
Did you look at the Lightwave code for the solid tool or did you start from scratch with the script in blender?
I see you only have random points without an option to set amount when creating it, but that is the same as with the fill solid tool in Lightwave and you could probably expand on it.
But isn´t this giving you random points much faster than the method you say you prefer?
and making your own tool and learning this as you have started with, must be very valuable in the end when you may encounter a tool issue, though just lik you, I do not like t like programming cause it takes too much time from working creatively, on the other hand …when you have aquired those skills, you can be even more creative I suppose.
This is nice to have for creating cloud volumes from point cloud and finally using mesh to volume, mostly you would model or sculpt geometry but you would often have to do so with a spherical, bulge in the geometry, with a fill solid tool then metaballs on to them, and remesh, you will get the main shape but with point distrubuted spheres.
It’s all from scratch. The hardest part was to find out how to do the calculation to find if the point is inside or outside the mesh. I can set the number of points and I plan to let the user do it by a dialog box.
It may seem faster as you get random points in one click but then when you want to tweak your settings and maybe even lower the amount of points its actually slower.
I mean you can make a script that add all the things you need for setting up the particle solution in just one click as well and it’s much more flexible and also a lot easier to code.
I agree on a script for particles, and being in blender that is a solution you actually can use unlike in blender with a need to force save partigons and despite that no modeling tools in the same module.
So I am all for that, but I don´t have time right now for scripting, If you make it publicly available for free perhaps or donation, that would be nice and perhaps more than me wanting it.
Can´t really say I would pay for it considering I can make the stuff in lightwave as I want, and actual amount of points isn´t the most crucial part.
For further refinements though, a metaball scaling method that defines the radius per procedural texture basis, and other vector scaling input values would be nice, so a particle cluster would have larger radius on some of the particles/points at the bottom of a particle cluster, then as points are at a certain height, those should take on smaller radius size, and a simple convert/freeze to mesh in the end.
Thank´s Mikael,
It works perfectly so far, yet another tool surpassing Lightwave tools, by far better than the fill solid tool in lightwave modeler I think.