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Topic: Export Crease Support  (Read 4439 times)

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  • Triangle
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May 13, 2014, 08:45:44 pm
I would love to have support for crease edges being exported.  The FBX format supports this. 

It is a very valuable feature when working between apps like Mudbox/Maya

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  • Spline
May 14, 2014, 08:21:53 am
I agree - this would be an excellent feature.  I'm a ZBrush user, so I'd probably miss out on getting to use it, though... unfortunately, the only way to use the crease export from Maya to ZBrush is through GoZ, and I'm told Pixologic has been unresponsive to NVil requests for the SDK.  Oh well, hopefully one day.  In the meanwhile, I'm sure this would still be useful for others.  Am I understanding correctly, that NVIL would need to support FBX export in order to support this?

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  • Spline
May 14, 2014, 09:14:05 am
I would certainly not be against having this feature available but this really is an unrealistic request, at least unless IStonia switches over to OpenSubD and entirely rewrites his creasing code and made it perfectly conform to the OpenSubD standard.
Of course Autodesk can streamline the code of Maya and Mudbox and they have adapted OpenSubD and also Zbrush supports the .ma format to hold creases but appart from these few examples one can not exchange crease information between Cinema 4D and Blender or Lightwave...
In "conventional" creasing implementations every manufacturer uses its own dialect, proprietary code which may be written to fbx maybe but typically can not get understood by the target program.

@JTenebrous: If you have Zbrush you can effectively deal with all creasing information from any source program by using a simple trick: Just import the creased model in frozen and highly subdivided state, millions of polygons if you wish. That way you have brought precisely the desired shape into Zbrush. Then simply run reconstruct subdivisions in order to get back all SubD-Levels. Zbrush stores vertex positions and weights for the Hi-Res state - that way you'll keep the initial appearance. Nvil btw. performs nearly as good with it's reverse subdivision function, it currently
deviates lightly from the initial shape when re-subdividing.

« Last Edit: May 14, 2014, 09:15:51 am by polyxo »

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  • Triangle
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May 14, 2014, 04:12:11 pm
FBX is open source and is independant of Open Subdiv.

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  • Spline
May 14, 2014, 04:24:25 pm
FBX is open source and is independant of Open Subdiv.
No, it's actually proprietary – owned by Autodesk :)
But even if it was open source, this still would not solve the problem that every company deals with creasing differently. There was no standard whatsoever for quite a few years and the same answer (impossible, unfortunately) was given in countless of comparable requests I read before. Open Subdiv could change the situation but it would probably mean rewriting of greater parts of Nvil. Then – in theory – compatibility to other apps which also use that standard was given.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2014, 05:52:26 pm by polyxo »

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  • Spline
May 14, 2014, 05:54:18 pm
Odd -I can not link to the FBX wikipedia page directly.
Here's a screenshot.

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  • Vertex
May 14, 2014, 06:07:37 pm

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  • Spline
May 15, 2014, 09:53:55 am
@JTenebrous: If you have Zbrush you can effectively deal with all creasing information from any source program by using a simple trick: Just import the creased model in frozen and highly subdivided state, millions of polygons if you wish. That way you have brought precisely the desired shape into Zbrush. Then simply run reconstruct subdivisions in order to get back all SubD-Levels. Zbrush stores vertex positions and weights for the Hi-Res state - that way you'll keep the initial appearance. Nvil btw. performs nearly as good with it's reverse subdivision function, it currently
deviates lightly from the initial shape when re-subdividing.

Thanks for your reply - I've been using the reconstruct subD trick in ZBrush for quite awhile now and it is indeed a very useful thing to know (maybe a good pearl for the NVil wiki?).  I've never tried the reverse of that in NVil, however, and I can see a good many cases where'd I'd benefit from that, so cheers for the tip.