ok so I have an issue where I have outsourced art resources that have been converted into Meshes. (I work with 3d Max)
The problem is that this data is well beyond the acceptable limits of real-time.
The main problem is that every cable will probably need to be replaced with a (much more manageable) spline, and the sheer amount of cables that must be replicated will be too much to accomplish by hand. Here’s a screen to illustrate
(there’s many more files like this)
So I think that it should be possible to create a script that will result in a spline created in the center, and in a perfect world, I’d want it to match that cable radius as well, because as you can see there are varying widths of cables strewn around everywhere.
So my initial idea was spawned from seeing this script on scriptspot
but instead of utilizing that center between two vertices as an alignment point for the pivot, using that as a generation point for spline vertices.
obvious I’d need more than two inputs, but it’s the basic idea. I thought about selecting 2 sets of edges length wise along the cable, perhaps using a select edge loop, but the mesh is triangulated and even retrieving those values would be pretty difficult without manual cleanup.
granted you’d have to specify which Geometry objects will become splines, but that’s a simpler problem.
so to recap
- I’m using 3dMax, so solution should probably be maxscript based
- I want specified triangulated meshes to result in a spline, and hopefully match the thickness of the cable
- final product will be suitable for real-time and simple to map and control LOD
any ideas would be helpful at this point
I did get another idea about perhaps generating the spline utilizing the normals? but I wasn’t entirely sure of the math behind it, and how I’d go about creating it.