evolute. blog
behind the scenes
April 30, 2015 at 09:36
filed under Awesomeness, EvoluteTools, T.MAP
Hi everyone,
it’s been a while since we released the first version of T.MAP back in December 2014, so we’re very excited to finally get a new and vastly improved version out to you. Thanks to lots of great feedback we got after the initial release, we were able to do lots of improvements under the hood and add new functionality which we believe will make T.MAP an extremely effective tool for texture mapping and remeshing.
Here’s a quick reminder of what T.MAP does:
And here’s our most important new features and improvements:
The most important new feature by far is of course the mesh extraction. With it, T.MAP essentially becomes a fully functional remesher which works completely automatic, but can be easily influenced using a small number of simple variables if necessary. The images above show results of our existing and new features: given the organic shape on the left (in triangle mesh format), T.MAP creates quadrangular and triangular patterns which can be used for texture mapping, as seen in the two images in the center. The picture on the right shows an extracted quad mesh (note that the result differs from the one shown with texture because it was created with different settings).
Our new command, etTMapFromMesh, allows you to use any triangle or quad mesh to design your texture mapping pattern. You can either use the mesh subdivision and optimization tools available in EvoluteTools Lite to create a pattern you like or just use a planar pattern like in the example shown above, and T.MAP will convert it into texture coordinates with the click of a button.
The two images above highlight the two ways of influencing the pattern directions. You can either specify directions in the form of curves or use the shapes inherent principal curvature directions to guide the pattern. You can of course also influence the size of the pattern facets.
Ease of use
EvoluteTools T.MAP consists of a only two commands with a few simple options to give you access to powerful mixed integer parametrization without a steep learning curve. In fact, a basic parametrization can be achieved by a single click and within a few seconds time (provided your input mesh size is reasonably sized – otherwise it might take a little longer).
Input
Currently the input must be a mesh, but this will soon be extended to surfaces and polysurfaces.
Licensing and support
EvoluteTools T.MAP is currently delivered free of charge as a public beta. It will be released commercially at a later stage, at which point beta evaluation licenses will cease.
Download
We encourage you to download EvoluteTools T.MAP beta here and use it freely and without restrictions throughout our public beta phase. We rely on your feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and questions in our forum to make T.MAP a great, stable and useful product – so don’t hold back with your thoughts.
We hope you enjoy using our tools and hope to hear about your mapping adventures soon!
Best,
the Evolute team
Joe White
Hi,
I was getting excited about this plugin for Rhino v5, until I got to the “Currently the input must be a mesh” part at the end. So, from that I am assuming your software cannot convert nurbs to “quadrangular” mesh?? Rhino does a, not so good, conversion of nurbs to “triangular” mesh.
>>> Question: Since this post of your new product was on Rhino-Blog—-How are you specifically to use this with a Rhino v5 Solid.
>>> I’m looking for a way to convert nurbs to Quadrangular Mesh—so— I can import the solid into ZBrush and work with it there.
>>> Your article said “but this will soon be extended to surfaces and polysurfaces”—is that to mean, it will soon be able to convert nurbs to Quad Mesh??
Joe
Alex
Hi,
for now please use Rhino’s commands “_Mesh” and “_TriangulateMesh” before using T.MAP if your input is a nurbs surface or solid. In the next release T.MAP will do this for you automatically, i.e. you will be able to select nurbs surfaces and solids as input.
Thanks, Alex