INTRODUCTION
BasePart Deconstructor (BPD) deconstructs BaseParts (currently only Wedges and CornerWedges) into simpler constituent parts, such as WedgePart to Part and CornerWedge to WedgePart, and additionally includes truncation of CornerWedges.
Whatever parts you select and all their descendants will be deconstructed by the method you choose, with the original parts optionally deleted.
Current plugin GUI (Detailed description of the deconstruction types below):
Current deconstruction methods:
Wedge:
Face: Makes the hypotenuse face (longest face) into a BasePart
Full: Same as Face, but the thickness is automatically set to the max extension of the Wedge.
Shell: Same as face, but adds parts on the sides of the wedge that reach to the max extension.
Left & Right shell: Same as shell, but only creates the left/right sides
CornerWedge:
Faces: Makes the main outwards faces of the CornerWedge into Wedges.
Truncated: Removes the corner of the CornerWedge, effectively making it a triangle.
How BPD can be useful:
When you only need the outermost faces of a wedge or cornerwedge, the rest becomes unnecessary and in the case of interiors, can save valuable space while promoting a more realistic look. The plugin does this perfectly, and sets the new part faces in the exact position where they can replace the old part’s look entirely. Additionally, the plugin auto-parents the old part’s objects to the new part (or only one of the parts in the case of corner wedge), and auto-welds unanchored parts, giving it a very streamlined conversion, and making it perfect for moving objects/vehicles.
I had made a model a while ago using wedges & corner wedges that I liked the (exterior) look of and didn’t want to bother manually converting into parts:
Interior of my vehicle before conversion
After
(The exterior looks the exact same, when using the right & left shell methods where applicable)
Rectangular parts being easier/more versatile was my original use case for the plugin and what inspired it. I mainly wanted make the wedges into parts because a system I’m working on required rectangular parts and not wedges or CornerWedges, but it also happens to make the models look better.
With the plugin, you can choose to “keep” the original part(s), which can give you complete freedom over what to do with the faces of the part, effectively giving you “layers” to work with. Here are some examples where it could be used for style:
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Terrain
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Roofs
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Whatever you can think of !
While this specific task can be done with no scripting knowledge with regular parts, this plugin makes it way simpler and easier, automatically setting the part to the right dimensions and position within the part.
With this plugin, you can build using the much easier-to-use wedges and corner wedges, easily creating the angles you want, while also throwing away the often unnecessary and ugly-looking backsides of wedges! Additionally, the custom thickness parameter lets you set the thickness of the resulting part, meaning you can make tanks, ships, roofs, sails, whatever you want, to be whatever part thickness you want.
Here’s a boat hull I threw together really quick (~5 mins) with a bunch of wedges and corner wedges:
The picture on the right is entirely made with the plugin by converting the parts of the left. Using the left and right shell methods gave those useful parts at the end of the boat, which will make it much easier to build the full back of the boat:
Let’s continue with the boat to show where this can be useful in other cases while building, by building a sail!.
Due to the incredible ease-of-use of wedge parts, I was able to make this decent-looking sail in about 2 minutes!
Now we have a decent-looking boat in <10 minutes, with the power of wedges! (With a hollow space underneath for players!) Keep in mind I’m mostly a programmer and have very limited building experience, so it’s not hard to imagine a boat that looks even better using this workflow.
Creating the shape mentioned in this thread (which I call a truncated corner wedge) was prohibitively time-consuming to do with roblox BaseParts (outside of unions, which have a ton of problems), but with this plugin, it becomes as easy as just placing down a corner wedge and clicking a button!
Performance
Converting wedges using the most costly method (Shell without anchoring) takes about 0.0002 seconds per wedge, and has O(n) time complexity. Both corner wedge options are much less expensive from benchmarks. For the most costly method, lag is unnoticeable on your average device until around 5000 parts (~0.5 seconds worst case!), and is reasonable under 20000 parts (~4 seconds!), which should be more than enough for any implementation. (Seriously, I would be surprised if any plugin didn’t lag at 20000 parts).
Even at any amount of parts above that, the plugin will eventually convert all your parts, with the most likely thing to crash being studio by auto-selecting the gigantic amount of parts created from the operation, so I’d recommend staying below converting ~100000 parts at a time, as from experience working with selecting huge amounts of instances, studio starts to be unusable around that order of magnitude.
This took 0.14 seconds to execute (4096 truncated corner wedges) (0.000034 seconds per wedge)
Currently I have no plans to expand this plugin to other cases, such as full decomposition (just hollowing the part out) other decomposition styles, and regular Parts and the Ball and Cylinder shapes that come with them -- but let me know if you'd like these features: I might implement them if there's enough demand!