Technical description of soften tool?

CypherFOX

Greetings,

I was wondering if anyone can give me a technical description of what the Soften tool does?  It's my go-to tool for fixing all kinds of fitting failures in DAZ Studio, but I honestly don't know how it works it's magic.

i know how to USE it, but not how it figures out what vertices or polys need to move where....

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

--  Morgan

Wee Dangerous John

Sorry Morgan, all I know is that it goes up in 4s each time you smooth a face.

Not sure, but using smoothing in the Daz Studio may-be bringing the colision detection into play. If you smooth a cube it turns into a ball - clothes wise, when you smooth something the faces will be closer to the figure, which may make the colision detection thingy push the garment out and make it fit better.

 

CypherFOX

Greetings,

@Wee Dangerous John I think you're thinking of subdivision, which splits each quad into four quads each.  Soften in Hexagon seems to move the vertices into more...appropriate positions without changing the number of vertices or polys in the object.  That's why it's super, SUPER useful for creating morphs fixing up clothes to be usable in DAZ Studio, because the end result has the same polygon set, just in a 'better' position.

I just have no idea how the Soften tool determines what the 'right' layout of quads is supposed to be when you drag the softening brush across them.

--  Morgan

 

barbult

I don't know. I figured it just did some kind of vertex position averaging or something.

ShawnDriscoll

Hexagon 2.5x only crashes on my computer. But if I remember right, the soften tool does the opposite of the pinch tool is all. It's like a polygon relaxer while in a UV map.

CypherFOX

Greetings,

shawndriscoll_34affb248a said:

Hexagon 2.5x only crashes on my computer. But if I remember right, the soften tool does the opposite of the pinch tool is all. It's like a polygon relaxer while in a UV map.

That was a really useful hint!  It turns out that, although I still have to confirm by reimplementing it myself, it appears to use the edge lengths of the UV map as the 'source of truth' for how long the edges of the actual model should be, proportionally speaking.  So if some of your edges between vertices are too short (because they've crumpled) then some of your other edges are going to be longer, and it balances them, using the UV edge length as a guide.  One of my big pieces of confusion was that the Soften tool _doesn't_ soften sections that haven't been deformed, which meant it had to have some kind of historical knowledge for how the mesh should be, but I couldn't figure out what it was.  That also explains why a poly manipulation tool is in the UV & Paint section of Hexagon...

So far I have an exported model (a t-shirt where the underbreast crumpled), an OpenGL program that imports the OBJ and renders the vertices (in just a point cloud right now; it has the face info, but doesn't use it yet).  The next thing I need to do is load the UV coordinates, and then start messing around with detecting edge length disparities...  At least it's a fun problem. :)

--  Morgan