(I wrote this late last night, and managed to lose it all when I clicked a website link to research the subject matter....disgusted me enough to drop it and wait 'til morning to re-write....this is my second copy...groan!)SUGGESTION:
I was wondering how hard it would be to make a proggy to remove "collapsed faces" from a BIN model or at least an OBJ file.
DESCRIPTION: collapsed what?
When one does a vertix-merge in Binedit, sometimes many faces collapse into dots or lines if the merge distance is large enough. Dots are faces (polygons) with all corners connected to one vertix (a point in 3D space),...Lines are faces connected to 2 vertices.
You can't see the dots, but if you cycle through the faces on a model and come upon one you can't see (and the face counter isn't at -1) then you found a single-vertix collapsed face......faces with 2 unique vertices resemble a straight line, and are visible).
REMOVAL:
Excess vertices can be removed easily enough, but bad faces must be removed manually, one by one. OK in some cases, but a pain on larger model files.
IDEA:
A program that looks at the data for each face in a 3D model file, identifies the faces connected to at least a minimum of 3 UNIQUE vertixes, and remove any with less than 3.
WHY DO I ASK?:
I recently found some OBJ models of actual asteroids in outer space, modeled with radar signatures and computers......very realistic, but 2000 vert. and 4000+ faces is a bit much, eh? (that's a little one...another I have is more in the 16,000 range!)
I used the MERGE VERTICES tool to merge any points closer than 200 Binedit units, and brought it down to 200 vert. (shoot for lower), but the faces remain.
Normally, I'd cycle through the faces and remove the bad polys manually, one-by-one. That's fine in many cases, but not when there's thousands to deal with....it tries even my patience...
If I can reduce these models in detail, then they may make good track model boulders or such, (or maybe even the boulder car driven by the SLAG BROTHERS in the old WACKY RACES cartoon....) Who knows?
Anyway, it's a tool that I think would be useful...if it's possible to make, and not too hard to write.....
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SAMPLES:
If you'd like to see the models in their original form, I zipped two of the OBJ format models in one ZIP (I have more)...They load into Binedit just fine using the IMPORT WAVEFRONT menu item. They are;
Golevka (2047 vertices - 4091 faces)
Toutatis (6399 ver. - 12,795 faces!)
http://mtm2.com/~bigdogge/download/2_asteroid_OBJ_files.zip ============================
I also have them in POV format, along with textures, for anyone who has POVRAY (Persistence of Vision Raytracer). You can get it free if you want to experiment with it.
http://www.povray.org/ --------------------------
Thanks for listening....time for breakfast!
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Edited by ZOtm_BigDOGGe (26-04-2003)</font>
