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Dragging points along its own surface?


Jason

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Hi all,

I've often wanted to drag a point along its own surface interactively - and with a soft radius too. All the points would be constrained to the surface (or optionally a subdivision of the surface) so you can easily adjust the surface without modifying the model's shape too much.

I remember a piece of software which also did a real-time relax of the points too, and so it felt like pulling a slippery glove over a model. We could call it the Placenta Tool. The software was intended to fit NURBs patches to polys and this was the final stage of adjust how the mesh lines flowed across the geometry whithout the danger of screwing up the shape.

How does that sound?

Jason

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Yeah, I remember that too. I think it was paraform.

Yeah! That was it! Paraform. That draggy-thingy was a lot of fun, although I'll admit the entire process of NURBsing polygons was tedious.

It would be great for the Snap Options to have this kind of functionality (with a volatile key) so that it could work with all operations. :)

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Oh I agree completely. Paraform had the most complete set of tools for stitching NURBs patches together. Unfortunately SubD's came along to spoil the whole NURBs modelling approach. Build those tools for polygons and that would be great.

Maya has the ability to make a surface "live" so that you can move single points constrained to another surface. Houdini can do similar snapping of a single point by using primtive snapping. In SOPs, just template your "live"surface then in an edit SOP bring up the snapping tools and turn on primitive snapping and in the filters just enable snapping to Templates. You can then shade your template and show wireframes for everything else.

Still would be nice to slide a set of polys on another like creep.

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