Metaballify is an organic modelling tool. It is a fun way to sketch organic shapes on the fly. Select a group of meshes, press convert and bam, you’ve got a new cool organic shape. Easy to use and intuitive.
What it is good for?
As a creative tool, to sketch easily organics shapes, or create basemesh in Realtime before sculpting or modeling. Artists, and noobs can create will appreciate the simplicity of the process. Perhaps professionnal will use it for sketching or before retopo and sculpting.
To help, two .Blend files are available with the addon for a good starting point and experiment !
Features
Convert selected meshes to parts ( M-Objects ) that react like metaballs
Displace, scale and rotate your parts in realtime in the view in Object mode
Change Viewport display options
Tweak global shape with presets and setting
Subdivide the global shape
Add tweakable objects for fast shaping ( M-Flex, M-Egg and M-Cone )
Welcome to the community Synthomesh! I discovered your addon today, bought and tried this. This is very great idea, especially for fast sketching volumes and be able use own objects and not just primitives! See great potential for this.
One question. Is it maybe possible to add a feature with excluding meshes from recalculation? This is because of performance lack if going from big to small details. Let say if sketchin robots/ hard surface . Head, body, arms dont need to flow in each other, be one volume, they are separated. So if body is done it does not need be calculated all the time if sketching head etc. For example have a collection with no calculation, where we can put sketch parts that dont need to change/interact with each other to save perfomance for another. Basically work on smaller details parts without calculate complete model each time. Also if separated per collection to set quality/resolution for each collection would be awesome.
If you want to to avoid calculation of complex shapes with metaballify, you can create parts separately convert them to mesh ( after saving the blendfiles of each part if you want modify a thing later ).
Your suggestion is interesting, i can try to add a button that convert a selected group of metaobjects to mesh. That can be cool.
For realtime processing of a multiple group of metaobjects with their own settings, i think it is possible but complex. In fact, I have tried to implement that , but it was to complex for my skills.
I suggest you to use the method that i said earlier for your needs ( one part, one blend file, and exporting the result to your asset browser/scene when it s done for you ! ) . A bit of organization and a little time consuming, but if you grow your part collection you will be happy to assemble this organics shapes later.
If you want, you can try the Addon Livemesher to assemble parts created with Metaballify.
, but it was to complex for my skills.