The tyMesher object can be used to convert point clouds into surfaces. Point clouds can be derived from both particles and the vertices of regular geometry.
Blobmesh: input particles/geometry will be converted to a blobmesh using OpenVDB.
Input Geometry: input particles/geometry will be combined into a single mesh.
Tets: input particles/geometry will be converted into a volume of tetrahedrons.
For example, if the time slider is at frame 5 and the offset value is set to -5, the input objects will return their mesh/particle data from frame 0.
You can use the “frame” mode to do in-place retiming of input meshes (normally retiming input objects like that would require the use of something like the Point Cache modifier).
For example, if “Frame” is set to 2.5, the resulting mesh will be a linear interpolation of the meshes queried at frame 2 and 3. This setting requires that whole-frame meshes surrounding the subframe have identical vertex counts. This setting is useful in situations where the is no subframe data available for input meshes that you wish to retime.
Enable in viewport: controls whether the tyMesher will generate its mesh in the viewport.
Show icon: controls whether the tyMesher icon is displayed in the viewport.
Icon size: controls the size of the tyMesher icon.
Show name: displays the name of the tyMesher next to its icon in the viewport.
Classic blobmesh: a standard marching-cubes, quad-based mesher.
Zhu-Bridson: a modification of the classic blobmesh algorithm, that blends and flattens more densely populated areas of particles.
Blend distance: the absolute distance to search from each particle, to find neighbors and determine which areas are more densely populated. The distance will be clamped such that it will be at least the radius of the largest particle.
Blend multiplier: the relative distance to search from each particle, to find neighbors and determine which areas are more densely populated. The relative distance is the blend multiplier multiplied by the radius of the largest particle.
When “absolute” radius is disabled, voxelization radius will be derived from particle properties.
Multiplier: an overall multiplier applied to radii values.
Voxel Size: the size of the mesher voxels. Smaller values increase the resulting mesh resolution.
Render Size: when enabled, overrides the size of the mesher voxels at rendertime.
Applies filtering to voxels prior to meshing. Enabling a filter can help smooth out boundaries between voxel radii.
Filter type: the filtering kernel to apply to voxels.
Filter width: the width of the filtering kernel in voxel units.
Only at rendertime: when enabled, the filtering will only be applied at rendertime.
‘Direct conversion to SDF’ mode only applies to input meshes (not particles), and is not (yet) compatible with the matID/UVW inheritance settings. The mesh resampling setting is ignored for meshes directly converted to SDFs.
SDF from vertices: when enabled, input meshes will be converted to an SDF by sampling their vertices and generating an SDF from the resulting cloud of points.
Input mesh resampling: controls whether input mesh resampling is enabled
Multiplier: the face area ratio multiplier. Higher values will generate more resample points.
Sometimes input meshes from particles or objects are too low resolution to generate smooth mesher surfaces. Mesh resampling will generate implicit uniformly-distributed vertices over the faces of input meshes, which will help to fill in holes in the resulting mesher surface. The number of implicit points generated on a face is determined by the ratio between the area of the face and the voxel size/radius, multiplied by the resample multiplier. In other words, the bigger a face is compared to the voxel size/radius, the more resample points it will receive.
Inherit material IDs: controls whether the faces of the resulting mesh inherit material ID properties from input points.
Inherit UVWs: controls whether the faces of the resulting mesh inherit UVW coordinates from the input points.
Inherit particle velocity: controls whether vertices of the resulting mesh will be smeared at subframes along the velocity vectors of the input points. Enable this setting to allow renderers to render blobmeshes with motion blur.
Only at rendertime: when enabled, subframe smearing and particle velocity inheritance will only be computed while rendering.
When “inherit particle velocity” is enabled, blobmeshes generated from moving particles can be rendered with motion blur, because subframe data is just smeared whole-frame data, which keeps topology consistent over the [-0.5, 0.5] subframe interval of each whole frame. Normally motion blur is not possible on a blobmesh due to changing topology at a subframe level, but this mode prevents topological changes from happening while applying the overall velocity of the source particles to the generated blobmesh. Note: for motion blur to work, the renderer’s motion blur frame duration must be less than 1.0, and the center of the motion blur interval must be set to a whole frame. So, for example, if you’re rendering frame 100 and want this method of motion blur to work, the total motion blur frame interval should be no greater than [99.501, 100.499] and the center of the motion blur interval should be exactly frame 100. In VRay, this would be a motion blur frame duration less than 0.999 and an interval center of 0.0. When using a Physical Camera, make sure the duration is less than 0.999 and the offset is set to negative half the duration (so for a duration of 0.5, set the offset to -0.25).
Accuracy: controls the maximum number of input points that will be used to interpolate matID/UVW/velocity values.
Influence: controls the radius multiplier applied to the UVW/velocity inheritance algorithms. The larger the value, the further away a particle can influence a particular vertex’s UVW/velocity values in the resulting mesh.
Use if available: particles will be retrieved from source objects if source objects’ particle interfaces are enabled.
Force interface: particles will be retrieved from source objects even if source objects’ particle interfaces aren’t explicitly enabled.
“Force interface” mode applies to tyFlow and tyCache objects that have their particle interfaces disabled.
Clustering allows you to split up the input particle cloud into sub-clouds which are meshed separately.
Clustering disabled: no clustering will occur.
Custom data clustering: clusters groupings will be determined by the custom float data values of input tyFlow particles. The data values will be converted into integers and grouped accordingly.
Channel: the custom float data channel from which cluster values will be retrieved.
Material ID clustering: clusters groupings will be determined by the material ID alues of input points.
Texmap clustering: cluster groupings will be determined by an input world/object-space texmap.
Cluster count: the number of cluster groups to create from the input texmap values.
Enable MatID filter: when enabled, only faces with material IDs found in the match list will be copied from the input geometry.
MatIDs: the list of material ID values to match.