Controlling the width and sharpness of exported seams.

SeamNet Meshes are great for sculpting and subdivision modeling. GroBoto’s Seams act as Edge Loops in those systems. The distribution of rows of quads along the seams effects how they react -- both to subdivision, and to editing/sculpting operations.

The images below show the effect of these settings on the seam quads (highlighted in gold for clarity here, ‘tho they won’t look that way in GroBoto).

Notes on Seam Settings

Notes on the ‘Don’t Unify Groups’ Export Option

This option divides your OBJ into separate meshes for each GroBoto Group. Use this option when you don’t want your entire model melded into a single mesh. For example, you may want to keep a robots arms separate from its body even though they overlap.

Beta Cautions

Seam widths greater than 100% (which indicates approx. 100% of the size of neighboring ‘body quads), should be used with caution. The combination of wide seams and complex GroBoto models (with lots of primitives and ‘crowded’ seam networks), can cause mesh generation to fail.

No need to be overly cautious. It’s fine to broaden seams so they collide with one another (happens all of the time with complex models -- even when seams are narrow). It’s more of a relative thing... when seams become so dense and wide that they crowd out most of the body mesh, meshes get increasingly chaotic (lots of irregular/elongated polys), and eventually fail.

Examples

Various combinations of settings are shown below. Note how changes in Seam Crease move the innermost row of quads nearer or farther from the center of the seam. When the crease is narrow, a sharp edge will tend to persist when subdividing or sculpting... when broad, it becomes easier to round and smooth the seam.

Beta Notes

This is valuable because having a single OBJ (even ‘tho the meshes are separate), simplifies both export things and import (as opposed to manually generating and saving multiple OBJ files.

Note however, that using this option does not necessarily create OBJ Groups based on GroBoto Groups. For example, if you select the ‘Group By Patch’ radio button, your OBJ file will consist of separate polygon groups for each SeamNet patch. If you import into another 3D app that supports selections based on contiguous meshes, you’ll have the best of both worlds (ability to select smaller elements like those based on GroBoto patches or objects, as well as the ability to easily select each separate GroBoto Group-Based mesh).

However, not all apps support contiguous mesh selection (sometimes referred to as ‘select by element’). Combining the ‘GroBoto Groups’ radio button with the ‘Don’t’ Unify Groups’ checkbox will make it easy to select and manipulate those GroBoto Group-Based mesh elements in apps that only respond to OBJ grouping.

There are more tricks, tips and workarounds... we will add to this document soon, using real-world examples illustrating how to get the most from these options.