Anonymous at Fri, 28 Jan 2022 21:23:35 UTC No. 878702

>>878701
The way to tell if edge flow is perfect with my setup (no spirals / stops) is if all of the loops in a model compose upwards into the same master loop. That way I can work on more local parts of the model better.

Maybe this is a tool nobody needs, could still have some interesting applications though

Anonymous at Fri, 28 Jan 2022 21:25:17 UTC No. 878704

>>878702
This image should be rotated the right way up

Anonymous at Fri, 28 Jan 2022 21:26:21 UTC No. 878705

>>878704
Shit
Damn phone
Ok just rotate it yourself

Anonymous at Fri, 28 Jan 2022 21:39:34 UTC No. 878712

Why u flexing with math here? 3d artists don’t need whatever this is. Practice and experience, that’s all. This reminds me of an animation schizo who also posts here and thinks everything can be solved with formulas and algorithms instead of just practicing his skillset.

Anonymous at Fri, 28 Jan 2022 21:53:51 UTC No. 878717

>>878701
>>878702
>>878704
If you want a project, try coding it yourself to see how it works in practice

Anonymous at Fri, 28 Jan 2022 22:03:36 UTC No. 878721

>>878712
I am practicing >:(
Well, not in the last 4 days, but...

Shit

Still want to know, I don't need to be schizophrenic to be curious.

>>878717
I'm a bit swamped on programming projects rn, but I intentionally wrote this in a way that would be friendly to some circular buffers and a bored python wrangler.
I've never made a blender addon before, but if I can make code to determine where a mesh has perfect flow with this system, I will.

Anonymous at Fri, 28 Jan 2022 22:07:09 UTC No. 878723

>>878721
With code, a practical application of this would be a one-click button to spit back if you have perfect edge flow, though I think that can be done just by asking what ever edge loop select command is in a certain software to iterate over a mesh to the best of its ability.

This also might be interesting to the poor souls working on Miegakure, since the theory extends into higher dimensions

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 00:01:46 UTC No. 878736

>>878702
Here's a visual example
It's good for a quick freehand model, the only planning was done with the symbols ahead.

The numbers say edge flow is not perfect, but that's to be expected on a model that makes exceptions for muscles.

>>878712
I would never put algos over practice, but I can't model in school. I *can* write bullshit in a notebook.

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 02:16:51 UTC No. 878751

>>878701

You seem earnest in your posting so I will take the time to say a few things.

If you really seek to become a 3d modeler for characters, who are one of the few subjects for who topology matters a lot I would suggest learning how to sculpt instead of box/face modeling. Almost no one seriously does this approach since sculpting became a thing, sure there is a guy or two who can do it successfully but 99.9% of professional 3D artists start with a sculpture which while it brings its own unique set of challenges it is better in almost all regards.

I don't really understand what you posted but it seems like you are trying to conceptualize a fix to a problem that nobody really has, I feel that what you are trying to figure is one of the many steps 3D applications take when generating automatic topology, it seems like you are interested in the programming side and for that I cant really speak to, but on the art side edge loops and how they are defined is not a problem and its never considered too deeply when being used now a days.

There is no such thing as a perfect edge loop flow in the sense of practicality, some times you want it to stop and not having it spiral should be easy unless you are automatically generating it.

Most tools already have a way of checking if you have a perfect edge loop, you use the shortcut to try and select an entire edge loop, if you do have it you can see it highlighted and ready to be moved otherwise you see it going all over the place, unless I am misunderstanding what you are saying.

As far as edge flow, you don't need to break it to conform to every part of the anatomy, that's what normal maps are for, in most use cases you can have an arm made up of perfectly straight lines going down to the hand without breaking the flow and let the normal map draw all the smaller shapes.

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 02:21:18 UTC No. 878754

>>878736
do you imagine math when you shit too.

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 04:44:08 UTC No. 878772

>>878736
based schizo moment

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 05:02:05 UTC No. 878774

>>878736
Wouldn't it just be better to just look and adjust it? I really see no reason for all the mathematical nonsense here.

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 13:10:19 UTC No. 878831

>>878754
>>878772
>>878774
Based homosexual math impaired 3d "artists"

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 14:06:31 UTC No. 878837

>>878831
Are you implying real "artists" need to know math? Even more ridiculous claim. Go back to /g/.

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 17:15:32 UTC No. 878867

>>878831
nobody does complex math calculations to make a fucking human base mesh you retard

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 17:21:25 UTC No. 878868

>>878867
Da Vinci did you fucking pseud retard

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 18:26:35 UTC No. 878875

>>878868
Leonardo's calculations are anything but complex by contemporary standards

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 20:10:23 UTC No. 878895

>>878831
look at this weirdo

Anonymous at Sat, 29 Jan 2022 22:36:45 UTC No. 878921

>>878867
>>878736
>Yes

OP who's just happy his thread lasted more than a day at Sun, 30 Jan 2022 14:30:21 UTC No. 879021

>>878751
I guess I don't really see the point in doing stuff I don't understand. Math is intuitive for me, and I started self-studying topology, so I'm eager to put it in places it probably shouldn't be.
I've been fighting the reality that sculpting is the way to go for a while. I'm still an amateur, and promised a long time ago that I would force myself to learn sculpting techniques and maybe even break out of my blender box with my next character project.
The point is, beyond visual intuition, I didn't understand what an edge loop was before sprawling out those notes in the middle of class. And that notation came with fun higher dimensional implications on the side.

OP who's just happy his thread lasted more than a day at Sun, 30 Jan 2022 14:39:56 UTC No. 879029

>>879021
>>878723
I made some references to higher dimensional applications that I want to clarify.
The fun this about removing the visual element from something we typically think of as visual is that we can go beyond what we would otherwise not be able to imagine.
By increasing the number of direction from 2, 0 and 1, to 3, 0 through 2, this system allows for conceptualize a mesh of volumes in 4 dimensions, which could then theoretically have perfect edge- or, I guess "surface flow." And since the number of direction can be any number between 1 and infinity, this isn't limited to 4 dimensions.

It also offers a uniquely non-visual proof for why a 2d mesh of lines will always have perfect edge flow, because any non empty loop will be populated only by direction 0 and can therefor connect with any other non-empty loop.

In conclusion: based schizo moment indeed.

Anonymous at Sun, 30 Jan 2022 17:46:40 UTC No. 879061

>>879029
>>879021

I don't think topology is something you can understand in a vacuum, it is all based on the context of which you are doing it and what its supposed to be representing. Understanding an edge loop does not teach you how to make a joint deform well in the sense of character production, for that you need practice and experience.

There is something to be said for learning as you go, the understanding has to come after the experience, trying to put understanding before the action is not intuitive or efficient, it's like trying to learn how to swim before ever getting in the water, its something you do at the same time, likewise I don't mean throwing yourself into the deep end and I think you already know that since you posted a torso that you have been working on. Theory is great but in this specific scenario I would put forward that experience is a lot more important.

I think its perfectly fine to enjoy the technical aspects of geometry, you just might be expressing it in a place that is not known for that, which is why you are going to get so many confused replies.

For most people here topology is a means to an end, for a character you need it to be good enough (in the right place) to deform in animation, uniform/plenty enough for sculpting on top of, and that's about it for most use cases. For me an edge loop is a series of consecutively connected edges in a loop, knowing what it is mathematically does not help me or most artist which is likely 95% of the people on this board so most people wont be able to engage with you on it.

When you lean how to sculpt, topology becomes a less important step, because you are less restricted in your creativity, when you place topology first the best you can ever do is what the topology allows unless you are forced to constantly change it, as oppose when you put sculpting first you get the most out of the character without any limitations and then you create the topology around that sculpture.

Anonymous at Tue, 1 Feb 2022 17:58:57 UTC No. 879403

>>878875
Leonardo was not contemporary and did not 3d model

Anonymous at Tue, 1 Feb 2022 18:19:16 UTC No. 879405

Nice thread OP, it's been a while in this shit board. I'm not a mathfag but I tought of this recently and came to the conclusion that while I feel it's possible to resolve some edge flow mathematically (so programmatically at some points), it also depends on some "hard coded" inputs. Like a human face topology needs a specific amount of n-gons at some specific places in the faces.
Same for elbow and other specific parts that needs to move and fold a certain way.
But then how can you decice wich points should be connected to each other? I'm gonna reread ypur thread later and investigate a little bit more on this.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Feb 2022 01:17:45 UTC No. 879489

>>878712 so why do you need to get certs for all your theories to even get jobs then? theyre all fill in the blanks stupid "how many vert is a polygon" kind of question.

your idea of experience is so fucking abstract too, maybe its your fault anyone get stuck in whatever shit you say to learn but you then retract. moron.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Feb 2022 01:28:05 UTC No. 879491

>>879405
This doesn't work with ngons for shit lmao

I assumed quads only. Unsurprisingly, I haven't used the theory yet

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Feb 2022 01:31:41 UTC No. 879492

>>879491
All the system is capable of to my knowledge is resolving if a quad mesh has perfect edge flow by seeing if all of the loops in the mesh compose into an empty array. Though all the parameters and stuff make this brutally hard to solve computationally, it is technically possible to resolve any quad mesh using my Def for edge loops. You could also use the number of remaining arrays or array lengths after a mesh is composed to measure the number of "loop islands" and the number of imperfect rows respectively.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Feb 2022 01:34:15 UTC No. 879493

>>879061
The experience of making this thread and seeing the reactions has inspired me to get more into sculpting.
School is killing me right now but i made an alr torso the other day from a cube, though nothing will make me quit trying to find some application for my wacky math loops.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Feb 2022 03:07:59 UTC No. 879511

>>878701
Of course there's a formal definition otherwise algorithms couldn't select based on them. How much do you know about graph theory?
Also edge flow will never be perfect, sorry. Poles aka stars are pretty much unavoidable in a complex enough model.
I'd have to say your posts are very vague too. What are you exactly trying to do? A system to automatically figure out the edge flow for a given surface?

>>878712
You sound like a retard. It's because there's people interested in both the artistic and the technical side of it that software and tools can move forward. Fucking idiot.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Feb 2022 04:10:21 UTC No. 879519

>>879511
I guess I'm just messing around.
What the the idea of "composing" edge loop logically proves for me is the idea of constructing a mesh from edge loops (i.e. face topology maps) in a way that doesn't rely on a purely visual element. In theory, this would allow people to build good edge loops on objects that are not very visually intuitive, but, depending on the person these cases might not even exist.
Outside of 3d modeling, other specifics of a mathematically defined edge loop could predict the flow of fluid over a surface (with n directions representing downward directions if slopes, the composite of a set of loops tells you roughly where the fluid goes and where it is coming from).
Fucking around is just what I do with my math and 3d hobbies, since I'm not not skilled enough to make money off the stuff.

Anonymous at Wed, 2 Feb 2022 04:15:45 UTC No. 879520

>>879519
I mean, it's evidently possible as seeing that plugins like quadremesher and others already exist, but it's not a solved problem yet. I think your ideas are kinda cool, I don't fully understand them but if you learn some python scripting you should be able to put them into practice. You could definitely make money off something like that.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Feb 2022 09:20:47 UTC No. 879771

What do the finite natural numbers actually mean? Why would you draw them as a circle?

Given an arbitrary quad edge loop how do I obtain such a circular array?

You describe up = 0 and left = 1, but what is the origin of those directions? Why does B in the example contain 1s? I dont happen to see an edge loop that goes along the length of the arm.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Feb 2022 14:25:52 UTC No. 879829

>>878701
I don't know what you're trying to pull with your fancy numbers and your city slacker scrawl, but I'm sure it'll make more sense if you practiced your 3D a bit more and you had greater confidence in your understanding of loops. If you're at school scribbling this in a notebook when you should be studying, just study, you'll thank yourself for it later when you get a good job, and you'll have even more time to scribble names in your death note.

>>879403
>>878875
The first result for the Vitruvian donut.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Feb 2022 21:52:51 UTC No. 879947

>>879771
>>879829
>>878751
Sosososo people don't seem to understand this
I can't believe people are still posting on this thread so lets have a little lecture yeah?

First of all, this thread inspired me to start study sculpting. Progress is slow on top of school but I've started with this tutorial since I'm a fairly experienced blender user everywhere else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQfFlzHJJ88
Tell me if the tut is bad bc theres no dislikes anymore lmao.

1.1
An edge loop is a circular array, a term I stole from compsci that means a list of elements where the ends are tied together. Whenever you see me draw numbers in a circle, that's what that is.

1.2.1
A direction is a natural number (the set of whole numbers from 0 to infinity) less than N, which we'll say for the sake of argument is 2, making the possible directions 0 and 1.
1.2.2
The possible directions don't mean anything on their own and that's part of the fun of this, but you can think of them like the number of lines you can draw through an object to evenly cut it, which, on a quad, is 2: "up" and "right."

1.3.1
This means that an edge loop in N = 2 can define a ring of quads by the directions on the surface that can be cut through the loop at each polygon.

1.3.2
Two edge loops can be composed by taking an array X out of each of them and linking the broken ends to each other. X is removed because that connected region is now "inside" the edge loop and therefore not part of the edge loop.

1.3.bonus
If all edge loops in a set can compose into nothing, that means there are a series of arrays X1, X2, X3... all of which belong to at least two edge loops and so it is possible to connect the all the edge loops together. If these actual arrays are found (along with some other stuff I don't have time to explain rn), you've just determined that the set of edge loops has perfect flow without even looking at it.

Anonymous at Thu, 3 Feb 2022 22:34:08 UTC No. 879950

>>879947
The definition i give directions here sucks.

The number of directions is however much you want it to be until me or someone else comes up with a satisfying definition.

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 01:07:29 UTC No. 879976

>>879947
Show me how the edgeloop A in 1.3.2 corresponds to a real world example?

Shifting direction from 1 to 0 will give you a corner in the edge loop. This doesnt make any sense. Not even for a regular grid.

By the way learn Latex if you want to be effective in disseminating mathematical ideas.

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 01:31:57 UTC No. 879982

>>879976
I have to learn too many things :(
A is a random example and needs some extra steps to work properly.
A "symmetrical" edge loop L will have a subarray X, of which two can be pushed together and wrapped into a circular array to create L. Any asymmetrical loops won't fill in properly, I just threw out a random example to show how composition works.

The direction isn't really in respect to an individual polygon, but in respect to a region of the surface. The example image shows a half-loop completed by the mirror of the mesh.
The half shown has the directions
[0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0]

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 01:39:09 UTC No. 879984

>>879982
The tool became less and less of a mesh utility as it evolved. Its more just an abstract math toy now.

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 11:20:54 UTC No. 880052

>>879982
Why are the middle four quads suddenly direction 1? Is the direction established with respect to any of the axes?

Again it does not make any sense.

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 13:25:49 UTC No. 880062

>>880052
Look at the other lines of faces on the mesh, the direction "changes" when the line the next edge is a part of starts to go up the head from the side instead of from back to front.

A direction implies more what a part of a loop a segment is going to then where. For example, if the head and neck were translated without detaching or changing its connections to the collar, the edge loop wouldn't change. In fact, no matter what you do with this particular kind of shape, which could be simplified to something like a subdivided rectangular prism, you wouldn't be able to have a loop going outward from the center of the prism like a collar that doesn't start in one direction, change to another and then change back.

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 15:55:13 UTC No. 880087

>>880062
I'm with that other guy in that this doesn't make sense, particularly the way you seem to randomly assign orientations to quads.
What the hell do you mean by "up the head from the side" and "from back to front."

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 20:56:21 UTC No. 880147

>>880087
I think I now understand that the directions correspond to the loops which are orthogonal to the current loop. But it is unclear to me what we have achieved by labeling the quads in this way.

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 21:15:59 UTC No. 880150

Kek anon I can understand if you are planning for a coding problem but you are making this way harder than it looks kek. You are the first to go because you rather think it than just doing it.

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 21:58:40 UTC No. 880158

>>880147
Correct!
I was on my phone when I was answering the question so I couldn't make the diagram but you got it.

Originally, this was a way to help with designing a mesh's edge flow, but doing it visually is faster and more intuitive. Again, it's become more of a math toy.

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 22:00:14 UTC No. 880159

>>880150
For the last time /3/:
I fully understand how impractical it is.

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 22:22:34 UTC No. 880163

>>880159
you must have a lot of free time

Anonymous at Fri, 4 Feb 2022 23:30:28 UTC No. 880166

Let the nerd do his sums, we might even learn something and at least an attempt was made.

Anonymous at Sat, 5 Feb 2022 03:40:27 UTC No. 880207

>>880163
I sit in class doing nothing.
I got into uva for compsci, I'm a senior, I've finished my ib projects.
If I just didn't need to go to school every other day, I could be teaching myself skills like sculpting and animation.

Every other day consists of Spanish - I'm already fluent - homeroom, a class that helps with college apps - clearly they've served their purpose - and film, which I just need to write one more paper for.

I've cannibalized my math notebook into a place to draw settings for my dnd group and a place to pull dumbassery like this thread, where I pull random shit from level 300 or 400 math courses and taxidermy them into something amusing.

Anonymous at Sat, 5 Feb 2022 20:42:46 UTC No. 880369

perhaps you should write some 3d software. seems more up your alley than modeling. I'd personally like a stand alone 3d modeler like Silo, but with a modifer stack like 3ds Max. Simple and elegant, yet powerful. That's what I'd do if I had a math 'tism.

Anonymous at Sun, 6 Feb 2022 02:33:51 UTC No. 880435

>>880369
Looking at what actual 3D software devs do in open source programs like Blender and shit make me fully aware of how little I know.

Software development for 3D modelling is a crazy field of programming to say the least, it seems like designing a really intricate video game.

Anonymous at Sun, 6 Feb 2022 05:01:53 UTC No. 880457

>>880435

stfu and just get a monkey programming job and quit 3d bro.

Anonymous at Sun, 6 Feb 2022 17:27:05 UTC No. 880612

>>880457
This

Anonymous at Sun, 6 Feb 2022 17:38:10 UTC No. 880615

>>880457
NOO i am not monkey!!!
I am artist :'(

Anonymous at Sun, 6 Feb 2022 20:15:54 UTC No. 880641

>>878701
>>878702
>>878704
what the fuck am i looking at

Anonymous at Sun, 6 Feb 2022 23:42:19 UTC No. 880695

>>880641

if you really are interested in my funny numbers go here and follow the chain of responses:
>>879947

if you are, in fact, sane, just let this thread die