Sounds good, will publish soon then, and post on my X.
On a roll with these insane updates recently, unions have really needed some love with how old and dated they’ve been.
Absolutely amazing change.
Relating to advantages, modelling software like Blender has mirroring, with this beta or the GeometryService, would it be possible to seamlessly mirror unions?
If so, is there any pointer in a way that someone could make a plugin for that?
A real example to demonstrate this would be vehicles which I’m in a community which develops them with CSG, but it’s a lot easier to make it slightly asymmetrical with CSG than blender.
(edit: for anyone else, I know of the Stravant mirror plugin, and the fixed one, but one doesn’t work with unions and the other works by undoing the unions to parts, then rotating those parts which isn’t really mirroring the same way that I’m thinking)
Right now the GeometryService APIs don’t work in plugins, but we are going to lift this restrictions soon!
In general though, I don’t see a reason why it would not be possible to make such a mirrored solid modeling modifier. You will have to reflect the subtract/add tool about some plane before applying both the original and the reflected tool. One thing to note is that the GS API return parts that are not centered around the origin, so if your tool is a PartOperation and not just a Primitive, you will have to use the extents center property and not the position property to calculate the reflection.
If you want to build such a plugin and run into any problems or have any question, feel free to ask here or dm me directly!
Could we see a way in future to remove faces from CSG objects? Other than that and mesh part support, CSG is looking pretty great nowadays.
Also I don’t see this said anywhere, but do CSG objects benefit from the same optimizations meshes do? Where using the same mesh over and over is better than unique meshes.
This is kinda “normal” considering how the CSG engine works. When faces overlap, it’s not sure about what you actually want to do.
I work around this by using bigger negative parts. But I agree, this can be annoying at times
From my experience they do get batched. You can always try it yourself in a baseplate and see what happens to drawcall count
Looks like some very great changes! Thank you geometry team! I do wonder however if some things with solid modeling could be fixed, such as where negating certain causes faces to be left behind between the parts. I do use workarounds to fix this issue such as Part #3 in the photos, but it would be nice to not have this happen initially!
Hey, thanks for sharing! Is this picture with the beta feature enabled?
Generally, do you think it would be helpful if we automatically slightly scale negated parts before applying them in a union?
I think if it automatically filled in super tiny unions like a lot of those are 0.01 so if it merged 0.025 together it’d help fix those without making it larger
Hi! I have the Solid modeling improvements beta feature enabled. I do think that automatically scaling parts can be useful when used to help this issue, maybe just on certain axes so the seen sides of the part can stay smooth and level with other parts.
Is there a way to automatically update previously made unions using these new improvements, or will it have to be manually reunioned to get the new system’s benifits?
If so, would a system like this be an optional feature that can be ran for selected parts?
(For example, if I run a union on a part and un-union it, would that work in updating unions or would you have to use a different method?)
Hey! Existing unions are not altered by this update. To update an existing part operation you can separate and union it again.
Thanks for the information, will this work if a union operation is “stacked”? (For example, an old-algorithm union being updated with a new algorithm union ontop of it, rather than one large operation from scratch.)
Is it normal that Unioned cylinders look like this when you enable wireframe rendering?
If you modify an existing PartOperation by doing any additional operation (like unioning or subtracting a part) it will rebuild the entire model with the improvements enabled.
Looks expected to me. Are you expecting it to look different?
yep, that’s how pole topology looks like, its used to reduce the triangle count
Very good update, especially thanks for fixing the polygonal topology (I think the studio will reach a new level in simple modeling). I haven’t tested the update yet, but I still recommend using Blender or other 3D modeling programs to create models. I usually used union as a last resort, but will probably use it more often now…