an0malaus posted at 5:12PM Sat, 20 July 2019 - #4357427

I'm not referring to subdivision at all, here.
This is all interim attempts to solve something which I would hope Poser could eventually incorporate as standard: vertex following decorations that preserve the relationship of normals between prop decorations and underlying vertices, as Poser's dynamic hair does automatically. E.g opening a collar lapel rotates the cloth, so a button on the lapel should follow the closest vertex and acquire the same rotations as the cloth normal at that vertex. Extracting Euler angles from normal vectors is somewhat straightforward (except for identifying discontinuities in angles during interpolation, and determining the correct quadrant for each angle).

I get around the interpolation of translation encoded rotation (i.e. the rotation encoded in morph deltas is only without distortion at morph values of 0 and 1, not between) by having a magnet deformer for each button which derives rotations from valueOp dependency on the morph value.

Ahh... I see. Yes, I knew that you weren't talking about sub-d, I just mentioned that was what the paper was focused on, but the principle it stresses is sound, overall, in regards to topological "details."

But, you weren't talking about contiguous geometry. You meant "details" like buttons/etc! Gotcha. (Could be contiguous, one assumes, in certain circumstances. But, the objective is to isolate these "detail/decoration" groups of verts to preserve their "details." OK, now I see what you're focusing on.)

As you noted, to preserve some relative relationship for a separate group of geometry, or at least one that needs to be kept unmorphed/rigid, during a deformation of the base mesh the solution is to rig it... ie: A magnet is a sort of "rigging" object. But, we can't easily rig just anything we want with a real bone and stuff. The "vanilla" way to prevent such groups of verts from being deformed is to assign them a material of their own. Except... We can't "exclude groups/materials" from the Morph tool. We can only include them. (That's a dumb thing, IMO. :) ) We can, however, render groups "hidden", which helps a bit. Not much, though.

There have been conversations about something similar to this in Renderosity's forums. All of these kind of things end up with people trying to "do what they want to do with what they have." Some work, some don't. Most have involved isolating the geometry with separate material zones or ghost rigging.

To clarify - Is the operation primarily focused on certain desired results for clothing items or is the intent to make it equally applicable/useful for many different sorts of geometry operations? (ie: Both preserving geometry for button deforms/morphs during clothing movement/morphs and keeping figure fingernail material groups in their proper place? :) ) The reason I'm asking for a distinction is because I wonder if you can make use of the clothing engine to take advantage of its hooks for "decorations." I don't know how deep one can access it, though.

Have you thought about just taking this all outside of Poser and strictly Python, then bringing it back in? ie: If the box sucks, get out of it and only come back when you have to. :)