new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

New plugins, tools etc.
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Mootzoid
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new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Mootzoid » 05 Oct 2012, 10:33

Hey there,

I am happy to announce the release of a brand new addon:
emTopolizer v.1.0

This time I did not have time to make a release video (unfortunately!),
but there are four tutorial videos in which I demonstrate what the new
tool can do and how it works.

Tutorial 01 - Walk Through:


Tutorial 02 - A closer look at the demo scenes
Tutorial 03 - Vertex Islands
Tutorial 04 - The Geometry Reader and Writer

Feature list of emTopolizer:
  • high speed geometry caching
    Reads and writes polygon meshes via a single ICE compound preset or via the "Geometry Reader/Writer" operators.
    Currently supported formats:
    .mzd (native format, compatible with emPoylgonizer v.4).
    .emp2 (native format, compatible with Softimage's built-in Polygonizer and version 2, 3 and 4 of emPoylgonizer).
    .obj (Wavefront's ASCII format, compatible with all 3D packages).
    .bin (RealFlow's binary geometry format, compatible with Maya and 3ds Max).
  • high performance polygonizer within ICE
    The brand new multithreaded meshing core with a new memory management (ridiculously small memory usage whatever you are meshing).
  • UVW Engineer
    A highly versatile texture coordinate creation tool designed to create UVs for geometry sequences with changing topology, typically meshed liquid simulations coming either directly from polygonizer or from a cached geometry file sequence (e.g. RealFlow meshes).
  • Vertex Islands / Polygon Islands
    Access to vertex/polygon island data in linear time. Combine this with the "Vertex Island" tool of the freeware addon emTools to animate and control vertex islands via an ordinary point cloud.
  • Thickenizer
    Apply some thickness to a polygon mesh, no matter how heavy.
  • Shatterizer
    Disconnect and extrude the polygons whilst preserving the UVs, normals and vertex colors.
  • The "Geometry Free Reader"
    A free geometry reader compound, good when throwing some scenes onto the farm that use cached geometry.
  • Many further little high speed goodies
    Fix non-manifold edges, quadrangule, apply a special liquid mesh smoothing, sort vertices and polygons, blur normals, blur UVs, blur colors, close holes in a mesh, etc.

Take care,
Eric

Ramon
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Ramon » 05 Oct 2012, 11:20

gr8!
Users build awesome addons, what do autodesk team whole year...

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Hirazi Blue » 05 Oct 2012, 11:40

After watching most of the walkthrough video and looking a bit at the documentation I was wondering how, apart from the memory improvements, the Polygonizer Preset and the Deep Polygonizer compound would hold up in relation to the in-built and the most current version of emPolygonizer?
Would it alone make emTopolizer a viable alternative (for someone on a tight budget) to the built-in and/or the new emPolygonizer, or are there differences/limitations I am simply not grasping here?
;)
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

pluMmet
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by pluMmet » 05 Oct 2012, 13:14

Hey Eric, I was hoping for a Flock and Newton bundle and now I hoping for a Flock, Newton and Topolizer price bundle ;)

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Mootzoid
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Mootzoid » 05 Oct 2012, 13:40

@Hirazi: the following short video tutorial that I made this morning should answer your question:


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Hirazi Blue
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Hirazi Blue » 05 Oct 2012, 13:41

Thanks! ;)
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

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Mootzoid
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Mootzoid » 05 Oct 2012, 13:41

@pluMmet: he, he, well, perhaps you can write me an email and we can figure something out. I'm not making any promises though! ;)

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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by gustavoeb » 05 Oct 2012, 14:53

Great stuff Eric, once again. It kind of hurts a bit because stuff like a high speed thick, fracture, cumulative geometry (and booleans for that mater) is what I (maybe all of us) expected from ICE modeling anyways. At the same time is good to have someone super smart in the community to come up with this tools. :-bd
Gustavo Eggert Boehs
Blog: http://www.gustavoeb.com.br/

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Maximus
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Maximus » 05 Oct 2012, 15:53

Just amazing...they should hire you:(
Thanks for those awesome tools Eric!

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Mossman
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Mossman » 05 Oct 2012, 16:30

Amazing stuff as usual! I've got some questions though:
I seems like most of the topo compounds (like capping holes, thickenizer, shatterizer etc) do stuff that can be done already in ICE (with much more effort of course). So are these normal compounds which ease the use of ICE modeling or are these compiled nodes which also work faster than the build in ICE topology nodes?

I your videos you mention that the new polygonizer is "much faster" than emPolygonizer4. Can you express that in numbers?

And what about the caching feature? Maybe it's obvious but why would one need yet another caching format? Whats the advantage over icecache (or alembic, if you have it)?

Cheers!

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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by gustavoeb » 05 Oct 2012, 16:36

the built in thicker seems a lot slower then the one implemented by Mr. Mootz
Gustavo Eggert Boehs
Blog: http://www.gustavoeb.com.br/

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Mootzoid
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Mootzoid » 05 Oct 2012, 16:57

I seems like most of the topo compounds (like capping holes, thickenizer, shatterizer etc) do stuff that can be done already in ICE (with much more effort of course). So are these normal compounds which ease the use of ICE modeling or are these compiled nodes which also work faster than the build in ICE topology nodes?
They are compiled C++ nodes and therefore much faster than the corresponding built-in tools. But emTopolizer is by no means a replacement for those tools! When you have smaller modeling things to do then the ICE topo tools are just fine (and they are a bit more versatile too). But try applying thickness to a mesh that has let's say 1 million polygons.
In your videos you mention that the new polygonizer is "much faster" than emPolygonizer4. Can you express that in numbers?
It is always a bit difficult to give meaningful numbers, because the meshing depends on so many factors (CPU, amount of inputs, Level of Detail, etc.). Here are nevertheless a few numbers:
- the average meshing of the new polygonizer is at least three times faster than emPolygonizer4 on average meshes. If however you have extreme amounts of inputs and a high LOD then the new polygonizer will perform even better than 3x.
- meshing a point cloud with 10,000,000 particles took WAY LONGER with emPolygonizer4 than with the new polygonizer. Surplus, if the LOD was fairly high, emPoylgonizer4 would abord because of the memory usage, whereas the new polygonizer would just mesh the whole thing without ever reaching some "dangerous looking" memory usage.
- Chris Keller created some meshes using emTopolizer's polygonizer that had over 40,000,000 polygons (polygons, not triangles!). The meshing took about one and a half minutes as far as I remember. He did have a 12 core machine ;)
And what about the caching feature? Maybe it's obvious but why would one need yet another caching format? Whats the advantage over icecache (or alembic, if you have it)?
In my opinion it is less the "file format" but rather the "workflow" that is important here. Being able to modify and cache your geometry the way it is done in emTopolizer can come in really handy. Again, it is not intended to replace anything, it is just an alternative way of doing things. Think about it: you can have a single point cloud in your scene with a single ICE Tree that takes care of all the caching. Surely an overkill for certain scenarios, but a nice-to-have if you have a scene with lots of point clouds in it that need to be meshed, smoothed and cached.

I am aware that emTopolizer might seem a bit redundant in many aspects, but then I remember the project during which it was developed and WHY it was developed. Some R&D quickly showed us that the factory tools could not handle the heavy geometry we were dealing with, so emTopolizer was developed to fill the gap.

Phew, sorry for the many words :)

Cheers,
Eric

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csaez
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by csaez » 05 Oct 2012, 17:45

Another awesome plugin from Mr. Mootz :ymapplause:

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Mossman
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Mossman » 05 Oct 2012, 17:57

Thanks for the insights. The lack of speed of most of the build-in topology nodes is what prevents them from beeing usable in a real production environment in my oppinion. So I guess Topolizer is far from being redundant! And 3x speed increase plus memory optimization for the polygonizer is amazing too!

Congratulations again, nice release.

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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by nuverian » 05 Oct 2012, 18:38

Eric hits again! I admire your work. If only....nevermind :-P
Ramon wrote:gr8!
Users build awesome addons, what do autodesk team whole year...
haha!... you so right about this one.
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Mootzoid
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Re: new addon released: emTopolizer 1.0

Post by Mootzoid » 05 Oct 2012, 19:19

If only....nevermind
Ah, come on, nuverian, what were you about to say?
Don't be shy, you are amongst friends here!

Cheers,
Eric

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