B.Walters Posted September 30, 2006 Share Posted September 30, 2006 I've been using Houdini for a couple years now, and to be honest, I've never used Meshes and I don't even know what they really are. It's never come up. But I'm afraid next week it might, as I'm teaching a intro to Houdini course next week, ( http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com...&Itemid=182 ). So what are Meshes and what are they good for? Houdini's Help didn't seem to have too much information on meshes (that or I overlooked it). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted September 30, 2006 Share Posted September 30, 2006 Someone might correct me, but I think of them as NURBS hulls. They can only have quads and must arranged in rectangular topology. Unlike NURBS, I don't think there's any tools for trim curve ability? So in that respect, they're closer to polygons. However, I suspect tool support for Meshes are less for them than Polygons or NURBs although many of the tools will work with them. The main advantage I can think of is less memory use where your geometry is simple enough. For example, a Mesh Torus with 100x100 rows/columns only has an approx. memory usage of 509 KB (with only 1 mesh primitive), whereas the equivalent polygon Torus uses approx. 1524 KB (same number of points but 100,000 primitives). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crunch Posted October 1, 2006 Share Posted October 1, 2006 I've been using Houdini for a couple years now, and to be honest, I've never used Meshes and I don't even know what they really are. It's never come up. But I'm afraid next week it might, as I'm teaching a intro to Houdini course next week, ( http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com...&Itemid=182 ). So what are Meshes and what are they good for? Houdini's Help didn't seem to have too much information on meshes (that or I overlooked it). Meshes are bilinear patches. They are equivalent (but simpler) than an order 2 NURBs/Bezier surface. They are simpler than NURBs since they have an implied basis (so are faster to evaluate and don't have to carry around their basis with them). They are more efficient than polygons since you have a single primitive, and well defined connectivity. There are roughly 1/4 the vertices in a mesh compared with a polygon mesh of the same resolution. This means they are more memory efficient. However, they aren't as general as polygons since you need row/column topology. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sibarrick Posted October 2, 2006 Share Posted October 2, 2006 You should find a lot of the NURBs and poly tools still work with them, like carve and join. They are a very good starting place for modelling so that you can delay choosing whether you want to finish the model as NURBs or polys... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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