jrockstad Posted May 14, 2014 Share Posted May 14, 2014 Hi guys, I've come across some quite curious behavior while working with metaballs in my current project. Here is my set-up so far: I'm copying lines onto points from a Scatter SOP attached to a grid, then copying metaballs onto the lines. The issue is that the metaball geometry as seen in the viewport is a mess - sharp, jagged and erratic. I've observed that it gets worse the more copies of the line I generate - copying the metaballs onto a single line looks perfectly fine, but even adding one extra copy already begins to degrade the appearance of the geometry, and by the time I reach the number of copies I would need for this project (at least 20) it is unrecognizable. Interestingly, this seems to be related to the orientation of the line. If I set the line direction along the X or Z axes, everything looks fine, the odd geometry only occurs when I set the direction along the Y axis, which is what I want. One more wrinkle - if I copy metaballs onto a single line, copy and paste those nodes and merge them together, the geometry appears perfectly normal, even with the lines oriented along the Y axis, so it seems like this must have something to do with my workflow of copying the lines with the grid / Scatter SOP. Fortunately, this seems to only be a display issue, as everything looks fine when I render the scene. For now, I think I'm just going to replace the metaballs with spheres to get the general behavior I'm after, then pipe in the metaballs when I'm ready to render. If anyone has encountered this before, I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted May 14, 2014 Share Posted May 14, 2014 upload your test please, thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malexander Posted May 14, 2014 Share Posted May 14, 2014 It likely has to do with how the metaballs are tessellated within their bounding box. There are also limits that prevent too many polygons from being created, which lowers the res of the entire metaball mesh in this case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrockstad Posted May 14, 2014 Author Share Posted May 14, 2014 (edited) upload your test please, thanks! Sure thing, I've attached a HIP file demonstrating the issue to this post. metaball_test.hipnc Thanks for the help! malexander - Yes, I believe you're onto something there. In that case it makes some sense if I switch the line to, say, the X axis that the geometry would look normal, since it is then only spread out on the X and Z planes. Do you know of any way to correct for this? Edited May 14, 2014 by jrockstad Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted May 14, 2014 Share Posted May 14, 2014 You can also set a higher the Level Of Detail in the Display Option/Geometry. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrockstad Posted May 15, 2014 Author Share Posted May 15, 2014 You can also set a higher the Level Of Detail in the Display Option/Geometry. That did the trick - I cranked it up a few notches and am now getting nice smooth metaballs on all of my lines. Thanks for the help! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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