Dealing with Metal Sheets
Hi there,
I have to create a VR model from a machine with lots of metal sheets (with thickness obviously)
What's your preferred way of dealing with those sheets?
I'm asking for help with these:
- If I need a uper low resolution model, I'd prefer to just get a one sided sheet just by removing the thickness. Is that even possible?, How?
- Those sheets also have LOTS of holes for screws. Is it possible to fuse those holes or remove them?
- Talking about screws, is it possible to remove them or use them just for maps baking but hide them for the remesh operation?
Thanks in advance!
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Official commentHello,Please find the answers to your questions below.
- You can use the Imposterize operation in InstaLOD. It will create a single sheet and bake all details down to a texture. More about the Imposterize operation in this article: https://instalod.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015313454-Finding-the-right-Imposter
- There are a few different approaches to achieve this. You can find more information about closing holes in this article: https://instalod.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021235813-How-to-close-holes-. On a side note, we are currently developing great features that will improve the workflow for closing holes as part of a future update.
- InstaLOD's Remesher has a feature for using so-called bake meshes. Bake meshes are not used for surface construction but are baked down onto the surface texture. This is done through a mesh suffix, which means that all mesh objects in the scene that contain the suffix will be considered as bake meshes. You can find the suffix in the Bake panel of the remesh tab.
Thanks,ErhanComment actions -
Hi there Erhan;
Thanks for your fast answer, here are my comments:
- The metal sheets the model is made from, are coming from CAD data and I can't figure out how I could you imposters to simplify them. As far as I understand them, imposters are just renders from the original pieces and put into a flat plane (well, or multiple flat planes), and I don't seem to get the ide for the sheets. Please take a look of just one sheet and understand my confusion:
- As far as I can see, there is no such option inside MAYA's plugin, isn't it?, is it a feature of the standalone version only?
- That seems to be a perfect solution. My concern is that my model comes from massive CAD data and it would be a very time consuming manual process to inspect the model and find ALL screws, since the scene is not organized at all.
- The metal sheets the model is made from, are coming from CAD data and I can't figure out how I could you imposters to simplify them. As far as I understand them, imposters are just renders from the original pieces and put into a flat plane (well, or multiple flat planes), and I don't seem to get the ide for the sheets. Please take a look of just one sheet and understand my confusion:
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Hello,
I was not aware that the sheets you were referring to were bent. This makes the scenario a little bit more difficult. However, there are still a few options:
In case the interior faces are not necessary, (meaning that the sheet is only visible from the outside), you could create an AABB imposter operation with the option Alpha Cutout enabled. I tried this and the results were great:
Other options would require some manual input, like recreating a very simple shell and baking the model on the shell.
The option is available in all of our DCC integrations (Maya, 3ds Max, and Blender). You can find it here:
InstaLOD features Scene Rules. With them, you can define predicates that are applied on the scene objects based on user-specified criteria. This means you could specify a rule that identifies meshes with a certain size and renames them. Here is an example screenshot:
This will identify meshes that are smaller than the specified size. Please be aware that naming conflicts would possibly need to be resolved based on the scene hierarchy.
Thanks,Erhan -
Thank you very much Erhan,
Your AABB solution is fine for that kind of shape. Unfortunately the metal sheets of my model (one of a series, that's why I wanted a valid batch way of doing this) are not perfectly box shaped, they may have steps or 45 degree angles and that sort of things.
I assumed I have to deal with those sheets manually by selecting the visible side of the sheet and deleting everything else.
Thanks too for the bounding box trick, that's great. Regarding the naming conflicts, is there any "token" or wildcard I could use to avoid them, by adding a random number to the name or something like that?
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