How do I procedurally trim/chip off edges of a mesh?

Support Modeling
#1

I am thinking of procedurally chiseling off the edges of a “brick” mesh.

Basically a stretched cube (to make a brick shape) gets Simple Subsurf modifier to create dense mesh as base mesh.

The idea is to use pointiness and noise to mask the edges and then use a modifier to “flatten” masked portions of the mesh (as if you’d use trim brush when sculpting). How would I set up such mask ? Is there a modifier than can do the flattening ?

Basically trying to make something like pic #2 here:

QpEKVtUg.jpg728×1992 114 KB

or something like that:

Obviously I can sculpt all that, but I am short on time :frowning:

Thanks beforehand

#2

you could use the bisect tool to ship off parts of the mesh
but for fine details you could use the dynamic sculpt!

happy bl

#3

I’d do sculpting if I had a lot of free time :frowning:

I am hoping for more of an automated solution.

#4

Rendertime or realtime?

#5

Real-time. I need to end up with a mesh I can decimate, then export to be used in UE4

#6

I think you can do it if you refine what I did here. You just need to find the right combination of noises and the number of displacements. I just did a 10 min setup here. This is from a simple cube

Some areas in the top one looks a bit nicer (applied modifiers) , I used my Meshlab addon to process it in Blender. However you do not need to buy the addon, you can open your model in Meshlab and apply smoothing if you will

blender_8WNKR7Bxd0
blender_8WNKR7Bxd0.png773×783 228 KB

blender_qD2J5xdPKw
blender_qD2J5xdPKw.png603×736 114 KB

blender_sAjW7I69Mo

2 Likes
#7

That’s actually pretty cool!

I only wonder about how can you make beveling on the edges uneven, something like this:

#8

Well you can try controlling them with weights (groups) For instance you can create multiple groups on the main cube (aroudn the edges, which is what I did) Then create couple different bevel modifiers with different weights.

There are other ways that can be done, I showed the easy route. If you want to go for the black magic route, you need to use Sverchok/Animation Nodes.

And you seem to be one lucky guy, I found a video from J Gunawan explaining how that can be done in Sverchok.

#9

Is there any way to convert mask (pointiness) into vertex groups ? Or vertex colors into vertex groups?