NGONS and Meshed Surfaces

Support Modeling
1

Is there a way to mesh, subdivide, an ngon surface? The knife tool is not the answer I am looking for. I render with Maxwell Render and I need to mesh the surfaces to get better imaged based displacement from the surface object. I have been taking my ngons and exporting them as obj’s and importing them into Form-Z to apply a mesh to the surface. The importing them back in. I’d like to skip that step if I can.

Thanks

Aaron

2

Go to edit mode, switch face select mode. Select one [b]quad[b]. Shift + G -> Polygon Sides. In the operator panel (or F6 popup) change Compare mode from Equal to Greater. Deselect the quad. Ctrl+T to triangulate ngons. Alt+J to join adjacent triangles to quads wherever possible. Done :slight_smile:

3

Thanks. But not exactly what I am looking for. I wish blender could just subdivide a surface like shown here. Just insert a meshed grid with even spacing regarless of its shape.

Post.jpg1918×1080 785 KB

4

As a workaround you can try to use the Remesh modifier.
But the Remesh modifier only works with models that have depth, so you would be forced to extrude your ngon before running it throught the Remesh modifier.
http://i.imgur.com/CZEae1r.jpg

With the Remesh modifier to preserve your model shape you too often need to increase the octree a lot, resulting very likely a -very lot- more faces/vertices than you would want. For my example i had to go to Octree 8 to keep the shape intact !
http://i.imgur.com/l2gP8Sp.jpg

With an octree of 7 by example, the pointy part is missing a part of its length and so would not be acceptable

But the result would have your ngon roughly made of equal square.
http://i.imgur.com/OtzB5dX.jpg

So don’t hold too much hope with the Remesh modifier, it’s overall rather bad unfortunately.

5

It seems to be close to what I need. I will give it a try.

Thanks

6

You mention that you export ngons, deal with them somewhere and bring them back into blender…
I wonder if you’re not missing important bit on Knife tool there :smiley:

Instead of making long detours, take ngon’s outline and project it on Grid/subdivided Plane using Knife Project.

Just a thought.

7

Now that’s a great trick eppo and a veryl interesting use for this recent new feature !