PopMesh free addon for Blender

Hi all,

I have just released ‘Pop Mesh’ for Blender.

  • ‘Pop Mesh’ is a free mesh generator addon, based on a custom implementation of the age-old technique known as ‘path extrusion’, ‘sweep mesh’, ‘sweep surface’, and so on…

  • The idea is that we generate a 3D mesh by sweeping a 2D path (a shape on a plane) along another path in 3D space such that the normal vector of the 2D path corresponds to the tangent vector at each point of the 3D path.

  • Hence the acronym ‘pop’, short for path-on-path. To avoid confusion, in ‘Pop Mesh’ we use the name ‘profile’ to refer to the 2D path.

  • Now, by changing the original ‘profile’ shape and by blending two or more profiles along a path the addon can generate a large number of variations in the resulting mesh.

  • A few preset paths/profiles are provided and the addon allows you to select your own custom path/profile data. The requirement here is that your profile should be a 2D (flat) path on the XY plane.

  • In addition, you can generate animated transitions between different states of the mesh when you enter ‘animation mode’. The animations are stored in NLA tracks.

  • Finally, you can save/load settings to/from .json file.

Where to download:

You can find the addon at the following github page:

I have tested the addon with Blender 2.97 up to 3.3.7 versions.
Please feel free to post any questions or feedback regarding ‘Pop Mesh’.

PS: The ‘pop’ idea was further explored and two more addons ‘Pop Curve’ and ‘Pop Array’ are currently in the final stages of development. :wink:

2 Likes

Sounds interesting, is it possible to see a video presentation?

2 Likes

Hello,

I do not have a visual presentation yet but I’m working on it. The problem is that I am also working on several projects at the moment so it might take a few days. Meantime I would recommend you give the add-on a spin and see for yourself that it is actually quite easy to use.

I have also added a ‘sample_settings’ folder to the main github repository, see link above, with several sample settings to get you started

1 Like

Generally, a few seconds GIF is enough to assess what we are dealing with, but do not rush it too much since there are more urgent things :slight_smile:

1 Like