What determines the distance for the inflate vertices and points?
The inflation value is based on the target edge length. Larger edge values = points surrounded by larger groups of polygons.
Hmmm ok, I guess I don’t understand the difference between offset and inflate?
use inflate when you are working with points / point clouds / or fragments of meshes from something like a 3d scanner.
Use offset to offset the resulting mesh inward or outward.
For example, the points on the left are inflated large enough to where they join together to create a solid shown on the right.
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Got it. Was not thinking of point clouds. All my data from scanning are meshes.
If you select Inflate when the input object is a mesh. The faces and edges will be discarded from the mesh and only the mesh verts will be used. This can be helpful when your input mesh is in pretty horrible shape to try to get some form of wrap mesh. Like when you have partial scans or some missing blotchy voids in your scan mesh.
I’ll be making a formal announcement for this tool really soon. Hopefully next tuesday when the next public wip rolls out. We were working through a pretty nasty crash bug this week, which I’m sure you’ll encounter, before talking about the tool in depth with examples and better documentation.
on the mesh you offset inward. Run the flip command on it and then join it with the outer mesh =)
Closed mesh but I think I get it. Inwards offset without self intersection is a nice addition…
I’ve been doing this negative offset mesh smoothing in Grasshopper but I think the new toll will make my solution obsolete soon.
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Yep, Rhino will let you invert (flip) the normals of closed meshes. So the outside mesh points outward and the inside points inward. Then when you join it to the original input mesh Rhino understands the object to now be hollow. A clipping plane through it or mesh boolean difference should reveal the hollow (like Einstein above).
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Thanks for the explanations.
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Hi Travis,
This is great ! I have had a quick play with Shrinkwrap and it seems to work quit well with Pointclouds.
What other new pointcloud tools will Version 8 have ?
I am not sure what the total list of things that are improved for point clouds looks like currently but I know ReducePointCloud is new for v8 and really powerful.
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