Free Electron Documented Operators
Common Operator Info
FE ExcarnateOp

ExcarnateOp

Reduces a physical body to a skeleton.

Inputs

The Input Surface can be any collection of points connected by primitives.

The Output Surface is the resulting collection of lines representing the body.

Parameters

If an input Point Group is given, only points in that group will be affected.

The Root gives a general location where the first generated line should start, perhaps the base of a tree or the hip center of a character.

Selecting Degenerate activates the method of progressive degeneration. Polygons are incrementally collapsed by selectively unifying a pair of points connected by an edge into a single point. With this turned off, the prior method involves averaging points on adjacent faces, like a simple smoothing algorithm.

The number of Reductions is the number of iterations. For the degeneration method, it is optimal to use 1 if the input surface only contains triangles and 2 if it may also contains quads. If there are polygons with many sides, the best number would be the maximum number of sides minus two. Additional iterations would have no additional effect. For the naive smoothing method, additional iterations will simply continue to converge.

The Expand option will collocate nearby points closer than the Fusion distance. Currently, the redundant points are not removed, such as a Fuse operator might do.

If Output Degenerate Surface is on, the collapsed surface will be written to the output. This may not be particularly useful except for debugging.

If Output Skeletal Lines is on, newly generated representative lines will be written to the output. There is nothing preventing both the degenerate surface and skeletal lines to be written to the output.

Status

(FE beta) DEVELOPING
testing in Houdini

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