Geometry Editor

Scene » Geometry Editor

The geometry editor contains various functions to modify the scene geometry. It helps for example, to adjust/flip normals, or to retessellate NURBS surfaces.

Normals (tab)

Normal Calculations

Crease Angle

The crease angle value determines the hardness of the shading between geometry edges. A lower value gives a harder look to the edges. While values around the default of 35 degrees give a smoother appearance.

Calculate Normals
Starts to recalculate the normal orientation for the selected objects.
Length

Normalizes the normal vector lengths in the geometry to a value of one.

Normal Consistency

It may happen with imported geometry that the surface normals are inconsistent; some are pointing inside and others outside (the Vertex/Face Normal Rendering Mode helps to identify affected objects). This option sets all normals so that they are pointing on the same side of the surface geometry.

Flip Normals

Enables you to flip all types of normals.

  • Face/Surface: Switches the direction of the face, or surface, normals of the selected geometry.

  • Vertex: Switches the direction of the vertex normals of the selected geometry.

  • Face and Vertex: Switches the direction of both the face and vertex normals of the selected geometry.

Mirrored Flip Normals

These buttons allow the flipping of the normals for instanced geometry, such as a mirrored surface. The Flip Mirrored button flips the normals for the instanced object, while the Flip Non-Mirrored button flips the normals for the original object.

Adjacency Selection

The adjacency selection tool selects the triangles of the geometry that have neighboring vertex normals less than the Crease Angle value given. This function, along with the Separate Objects function can be useful to select portions of an object to separate it.

Crease Angle

Defines the angle that is used on identifying neighboring vertex normals.

Select

Starts the identification and selection process.

Separate Objects

Separates geometry into discrete objects when the angle between the vertex normals is larger than the value specified in the Separation Angle selector box.

Separation Angle

Defines the angle that is used for separation.

Separate
Starts the separating process.

Tangents/Binormal

This tool calculates the Tangents and Binormals of the given UV texture coordinates.

Source

The texture coordinates that should be used to calculate the tangents & binormals

Tangent

The texture coordinate slot that the tangent values are saved in.

Binormal

The texture coordinate slot that the binormal values are saved in.

Calculate
Executes the calculation with the selected values.

Geometry (tab)

Tessellation

The Tessellation Tab provides the functionality for retessellation of surface (NURBS) data in the Scene.

Tessellation Quality

Different presets help you to choose reasonable settings if you are a casual user.

  Coarse Low Medium High
Chord deviation 1.00 0.15 0.075 0.0375
Normal tolerance 30.00 20.00 10.00 7.50
Max chord length 400.00 300.00 200.00 100.00
Enable stitching yes yes yes yes
Stitching tolerance 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.10
Chord Deviation

Describes the maximum deviation between the NURBS surface and the tessellated surface. A low value results in more accurate polygon model but it also increases the number of triangles.

Normal Tolerance

The normal tolerance is the allowed normal deviation between the normals on the ends of a tessellated edge.

Max Chord Length

Defines the maximum edge length of the generated polygons. Long polygon edges are not shaded smooth within the render view; this setting is helpful to avoid such faceted effects.

Enable Stitching

This feature enabled on tessellation rebuilds existing topology - it makes edges of selected shells align to each other. It avoids ragged edges on tessellated representation within the Stitching Tolerance.

Tessellate
The tessellate button applies the changes to the geometry.
Convert to Convex

Convex polygons are polygons with interior angles more than 180 degrees. These polygons may cause problems during rendering and can be converted to concave polygon primitives with this command.

Decore

The decore function removes redundant geometries inside other geometries, like screws and mountings inside a door covering. A virtual camera flies around the selected object, takes screenshots, and removes any non visible geometry.

Quality Resolution

The quality resolution defines resolution of the images taken. A higher resolution gives more precise results.

Quality Steps

The quality steps define the number of images taken during the analysis. A higher value gives more accurate results.

Correct Wrong Normals

Selecting this option flips polygon normals that are pointing away from the camera if they are encountered during the analysis.

Removal

When geometry is determined to be inside another and nonvisible, then one of these options are available:

  • Disabled: Nothing is removed.

  • Object Level: Hidden objects are removed.

  • Polygon Level: Hidden polygons are removed.