(replying to an higher branch, because the text area is getting to narrow)
On the t-junctions and minifig head things:
Last night I've tried a very quick and dirty implementation of using a meta for smoothing direction of curved planes with details.
Although it looks somewhat better, it's still not 'perfect', mostly due to the t-junctions indeed.
![[Image: smoothMetaTest.png]](http://www.melkert.net/img/mel/smoothMetaTest.png)
edit: the top ones are useing def smoothing on standard library parts, the lower ones use a modified .dat.
But even with no t-junctions I'm expecting a somewhat 'flattens/dented' facial area due to the distance of the detail vertices in regards to the 'cylinder' radius. When all t-junctions are resolved (or at least for the face geo) you could correct that by scaling all vertices using the same guidance cylinder. I would expect a (nearly) perfect minifig head in pretty much all situations after that.
But it will need a new meta, my quick implementation uses this, but it could be much much more powerful:
0 !SMOOTH CEN 0 0 0 0 -1 0
and
0 !SMOOTH NOCEN
I use these metas around the essence of the minifig face (everything except the "0 // replacing s\3626bs01.dat" part). But in practice it probably better to enclose the whole cylindrical mesh (to prevent further normal smoothing on those vertices).
The presence of the meta could also be used to decide to do auto t-junction corrections or not (see my other post in the t-junctions re-visited thread).
Another approach I was thinking about is random tessellation of the larger 'filler' triangles in combination with the 'radius push', this might decrease the effect of t-junctions without the costly removal of them. Haven't tested this jet though.
On the t-junctions and minifig head things:
Last night I've tried a very quick and dirty implementation of using a meta for smoothing direction of curved planes with details.
Although it looks somewhat better, it's still not 'perfect', mostly due to the t-junctions indeed.
edit: the top ones are useing def smoothing on standard library parts, the lower ones use a modified .dat.
But even with no t-junctions I'm expecting a somewhat 'flattens/dented' facial area due to the distance of the detail vertices in regards to the 'cylinder' radius. When all t-junctions are resolved (or at least for the face geo) you could correct that by scaling all vertices using the same guidance cylinder. I would expect a (nearly) perfect minifig head in pretty much all situations after that.
But it will need a new meta, my quick implementation uses this, but it could be much much more powerful:
0 !SMOOTH CEN 0 0 0 0 -1 0
and
0 !SMOOTH NOCEN
I use these metas around the essence of the minifig face (everything except the "0 // replacing s\3626bs01.dat" part). But in practice it probably better to enclose the whole cylindrical mesh (to prevent further normal smoothing on those vertices).
The presence of the meta could also be used to decide to do auto t-junction corrections or not (see my other post in the t-junctions re-visited thread).
Another approach I was thinking about is random tessellation of the larger 'filler' triangles in combination with the 'radius push', this might decrease the effect of t-junctions without the costly removal of them. Haven't tested this jet though.