Modeling Polygons & Polygon Meshes
The polygon modeling tools in Softimage let you create and modify polygon mesh objects in a variety of ways. You can:
• Create new polygon mesh objects in a variety of ways.
• Add and edit components by drawing, splitting, welding, or subdividing.
• Remove components by deleting, collapsing, or dissolving.
• Disconnect components to separate them from their neighbors.
• Duplicate, extrude, and inset components to create protuberances and indentations.
• Offset polygons to grow or shrink their contours.
• Knife or slice polygon meshes to subdivide them along a plane.
• Dice polygons to subdivide them along multiple axes.
• Symmetrize polygons to mirror them across a plane.
• Bevel components to round off corners.
• Invert polygons to change the direction of their normals.
• Bridge polygons to connect two areas of the same mesh.
• Combine polygon meshes by blending or merging.
• Perform Boolean operations to obtain the difference, intersection, or union of two polygon meshes.
• Filter components to clean up polygon meshes by removing or welding edges, points, and polygons that match specific criteria.
• Reduce the number of polygons in an object by collapsing edges.
• Quadrangulate polygon meshes by dissolving pairs of triangles, or triangulate them by subdividing quads and n-gons.
• Convert curves to polygon meshes.
• Convert NURBS surfaces to polygon meshes.
• Create new mesh objects by extracting specific polygons from existing meshes.
In addition to the polygon mesh-specific actions described in this chapter, you can manipulate polygons, edges, and vertices like any other component as described in Manipulating Components [Modeling and Deformation Basics]. You can also deform polygon meshes as described in Deformations [Modeling and Deformation Basics].
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5