Mesh Division

The MeshGrid class is an interface for plug-ins that divide the surface of a mesh into grids. A grid is a collection of quad faces over the surface in a grid pattern with the size of 1x1, 2x2, 4x4, 8x8, and so on.

The MeshGrid class is responsible to supply a list of grids on the surface with the following rules:

  1. The grids must be disjoint: one face can only belong to one grid and no more.
  2. These grids must cover the whole surface.

A MeshGrid is used by Mudbox when it is rendering meshes with high polygon counts using level of detail. A MeshGrid is always created as the child of the Mesh object, so it can obtain a pointer to the mesh by calling TreeNode::Parent().

To control the algorithm by which these grids are created, you can override this class in a plug-in and replace Mudbox's version, which is in the MeshGrid plug-in.

  1. Write a plug-in that defines your own class derived from MeshGrid.
  2. Delete the existing MeshGrid plug-in, and copy yours into the plug-in folder. On OSX, this plug-in is found in the Mudbox package under Contents > MacOS > plugins. On Windows, it is found in the <your_installation_directory>\plugins folder.