Apply the smoothing modifier on a limited area

meipe

Is there a way to limit the smoothing modifier to a part of an object surface?

 

For example, if we use it to calculate collision of our figure with an object (let's say a body with a piece of furniture), it would be useful to mask the unaffected areas of the body, that get deformed if the number of iterations is high.

 

I believe the only way to do that would be to extract the affected geometry of the body, setting it as a graft, and then calculating collisions only with the graft... Tricky.

It would be great if we could use a weight map with the smoothing modifier instead!

Richard Haseltine

There isn't, no (other than, for a still, exporting as OBJ and then reimporting with a weight map or just removing deltas with the Geometry Editor). I do have a feature request in for the ability to weight-map smoothing, but I'm not certain that's actually possisble - and even if it is it still has to be added to the plan and have resources assigned, neither of which are guaranteed.

meipe

Thank you four your answer Richard... sorry for the late reply, work floods me.

 

I've been testing, but how do you remove deltas with the Geometry Editor exactly? I understand how to do that with a morph (select vertices you want to remove, Edit mode in the params tab, fav your morph, right-click in the viewport->morph Editing->Clear Selected deltas from favorites), but if I do that selecting one of the smoothing modifier params instead of a morph I get an error message asking for a morph...

Richard Haseltine

I was collapsing the process - turn the smoothing into a morph, then remove deltas. There isn't any way of directly editing a Smoothing Modifier, it has to be baked out in soem way first.

ben98120000

Click with right mouse button on the Parameters tab to get a menu and from menu activate "Show Hidden Properties". Select your figure and in Parameters - General - Mesh Smoothing you should now see Weight and Secondary Weight. Set both parameters to zero. That will deactivate smoothing part of the modifier and leave just the collision part of the modifier, so rest of your figure wont get smoothed out. 

meipe

Richard: you mean using edit->object>geometry->bake smoothed morphs? I never was able to use this function without getting wild results...

 

ben981: well, the beauty of the smoothing modifier is... the smoothing. If you disable it, collision is just a boolean operation, not very interesting. The idea would be to keep the smooting in the general area around the collision item. ;)

Rod Wise Driggo

Any updates to this? Was just starting to ask the same question until I found this. The "weight" parameters do help but they also "harden" the collision. So being able to otherwise limit the smoothing modifier to a certain area would be really cool. Any chance?