Iciar Andreu Angulo​

The goal for this tool was to create an easier and more efficient way to create meshes for our surfacers to work on. Surfacing requires meshes that have a lot of detail to paint the UVs but at the same time there are some limitations to the level of detail we can provide them since Mari has some limitations. This requires some iteration to be able to get the proper mesh for surfacing and before this tool, it was the modeling department that needed to do this.

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The tool, takes in an Alembic mesh, the user can also specify any shapes or UDIMs they want to work on specifically. Then the mesh is subdivided using Opensubdiv to perform the Catmull-Clark subdivision. After that, we displace the mesh along the normal based on it's ptex map, which has the sculpted detail. After that we do some polygon reduction to reduce the number of vertices of the mesh while keeping the detail to be more easy to handle. Currently we have two methods for the poly-reduction: using OpenMesh and using Houdini's polyReduce. OpenMesh provides a nice solution for decimating the mesh and it is open source so I was able to modify it to make sure the decimation handles the UVs. Houdini's polyReduce is a very effective node they have, which also handles UVs, but it requires to load a Houdini license which might not be ideal. The result is then exported as another Alembic mesh for the artist to use. 

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Used:​

• C++

• Python

• Alembic

• OpenSubdiv

• OpenMesh

• Ptex