PDA

View Full Version : Fracture Plug-in for Maya using Tetrahedrons

krishnancr
04-19-2010, 10:53 PM
Hi,

I’m a master’s student in Computer Graphics. I’m trying to create a fracture plug-in for Maya using the Maya SDK. I’m stuck on an issue to which i’m getting no leads. My fracture plug-in relies on using tetrahedral mesh. Any model that i have must be converted to a tetrahedral mesh for my fracture algorithm to start working and processing deformation. Can someone help me out ?? I need a way in which i can take triangular/polygonal meshes and convert them to a tetrahedral mesh. I understand from some papers that there are a few open source libraries that convert , but they mesh data structure is not something Maya recognizes. Would be great if there is MEL Script or something that takes a Maya polygon and converts it into a tetrahedral mesh. Please help ..

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you
Krishnan
cbamber85
04-20-2010, 12:14 PM
There's undoubtedly better techniques, but I would start by using a plane-sweep algorithm to sequentially add tetras as each surface triangle is encountered. Once all the triangles have been converted use a similar technique to 'fill in' the mesh's middle.

If you would rather use an external library (cheat!) try CGAL or VTK - they're both very good. However, most of the CG libraries out there use very different mesh representation data than Maya because they usually have BSP data (inside/outside, etc.) built in amongst other things; so whatever library you go with you will have to do a lot of mesh preprocessing first.
robitabu
04-20-2010, 01:40 PM
As I understand you have to convert an entire Volume (not only the surface) to a collection of compact Tetrahedrons, right? Bear in mind that Maya represents 3d objects using only the external mesh surface. Ok, every polygonal mesh face actually consists of several triangles, that could be a good starting point in developing what you're looking for; tetrahedrons are based on triangle faces only (Display -> Polygons -> Face Triangles), right?
Just my 2cent :-)
CGTalk Moderation
04-20-2010, 01:40 PM
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.