[Suggestion] Solidify Modifier

hi
I use blender as my modelling tools,it’s good and handy,about the solidify Modifier I think It could be better if it has this feature,usually I use solidify Modifier to make my cloth look Thickness,but most of time I don’t need it really Thick,I think the faces of the Opposite side is face Waste. so I think the following image can show how I want it to be.


best regard
imdjs

In other words you only want the rim produced. Something like edges only extrude.
Fair suggestion

yes that is exactly what I mean。

fair and good suggestion, just mail it to the devs and they’ll see,
even i think this is a good suggestion for hard-surface modellers.

I came across a problem where I needed this behavior a while ago. I ended up having to extrude all the border edges and adjust them manually to fit a curvature. It would have been nice to just have been able to use this instead.

I usually do this with the material index offsets. I make a dummy material and use the index offsets to set it to the new faces. then I can select the offending faces and delete them.

bit of a drawn out workaround, and the proposal would definitely be faster.

Another suggestion is that there are no intersections.

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Merging verts would be an awesome option to have for the solidify tool when working with shells, considering that internal topology is rarely as important as outer topology.

Apparently, a link to Farsthary’s ongoing blog in another recent thread shows that he apparently has actually solved the issue for 3D Coat on what to do with shell geometry after it starts to overlap (with very good results).

I also believe I may have read a reply from HowardT concerning bevel tool merging that this won’t be a trivial thing to do, I think what needs to happen is that the merging algorithm gets written as a general function so it can be applied to the many different tools that can benefit from it (bevel, inset, and shrink/flatten to name a few).

I don’t think you would want to merge that at all. You would end up with triangles on the rim where otherwise would have bee a nice edge ring. Also sometimes the “inside” is also the “outside”.
Having a nice rim topology after solidify is paramount.

What you would want is to be able to set a minimum distance/ edge length between vertices that would have otherwise overlapped (don’t affect vertices that won’t overlap).

However I imagine it would be difficult to maintain a consistent shell thickness in these corners.

Ace Dragon: Meshlab has similar shell maker tool than 3D Coat, called “Uniform mesh resampling” and you can set Precision and Offset. Pretty good in complex meshes and its Open Source, maybe Blender can borrow that code and will make good modifier.

I know it’s been a while, but I have the impression that maintaining the original topology on the interior of a solidified mesh will be even more difficult than using a simple merging system.

With merging, all you have to do is to code a system that detects edge-face contact and cut and merge the new geometry together (even though in reality, it’s harder than it looks).

Maintaining topology would mean that you would have to have a system that tries to maintain a minimum face width and/or face size even if it means some unevenness in the thickness, you would need to make it aware of the dimensions of the face (or aware of the width of all regions in Ngons) and the positions of the edges and that wouldn’t be easy either, if not less easy than simply merging geometry.

@imdjs

Regarding to “Rim Only” with solidify modifier, sometime ago i made a patch for exactly this: https://developer.blender.org/T37296, so if you are into patching and compiling blender yourself, you can give it a try. Otherwise i could try to make a build (try, because in the meantime i updated the blender sources, i could look up the matching source version for this patch and make a build for you, if you want. Just tell me which OS you want… i have here Windows 7, Linux Mint 15 and OSX 10.7.4, all 64 bits.

@scorpion81
thank you very much scorpion81, it’s too good to be true, my OS is window7 64 bits,but I will try to compile blender myself with your patch first,and your patch is a good example for me to study.

best regard
imdjs