edit poly / the new facetter

The new facetter

A new facetter has been added to the GIG3DGO and GIGVIZ products. Facetting is the process of converting solid models (with optional CSG) to a boundary representation with polygons. The existing facetter that provides the 'evaluation functionality' is still there. The new facetter has both pros and cons when compared to the old facetter.

Pros

Cons

Miniumum and maximum depth
You have to specify both the minimum depth and the maximum depth. This is to steer the recursive subdivision of the octree. If the mimimum depth is set to 2, it means that voxels in the octree at level 0 and 1 will always be subdivided, regardless of their contents.

The maximum depth gives the upper bound for the octree subdivision. If mindepth and maxdepth are equal, the octree will be a uniform voxelspace (a 3D array of cells). For instance, with both mindepth and maxdepth set to 10, you will get 2^10 * 2^10 * 2^10 = 2^30 = 1 giga voxels. As each voxel may lead to 0,1 or 2 polygons, you will potentially end up with 2000 million polygons. This will probably tell you that these depth values are to be kept low. Usefull ranges are 2-7.

The minumum depth should be lower or equal to maxdepth. Using a lower value for mindepth will give you a faster polygonization. Also, larger polygons will remain non-subdivided when possible.

Polygonize
When you press the 'Polygonize' button, you must specify an output file. This file is in an intermediate format and can be converted to either VRML or Inventor in the Channels submenu if you wish. When you have selected the output file, the model will be facetted. This may take some time, when finished your current model will have been replaced by its facetted version, stripped from all information other then geometry. Although when you export your model to VRML/Inventor, the surface attributes will be preserved.

Normals
The toggle button 'Normals' will include or exclude surface normal information in the facetted model and the optional VRML/Inventor file.

UV coords
The toggle button 'UV coords' will include or exclude UV coordinate information in the facetted model and the optional VRML/Inventor file.

Warning
When converting mesh-data like Freeforms or polygon data, make sure the models are closed surfaces, and have the solid tag set. Also set the option 'flip normals'.