Spent most of today working on updates to the convex hull operator. As mentioned yesterday I submitted it for patch review; Campbell got on that right quick with helpful feedback. Finally got that work finished a half hour ago: lots of bug fixes and new options to control the output. Branch and code review updated if you’re curious.
In related news, reviewed a patch from Jason Wilkins that adds a handy feature for sculpt: pressing numpad period while in sculpt mode will center the view on the last sculpted area. Blender 2.4x had such a feature, but got lost somewhere along the way. You can expect that feature in trunk soon.
And lastly, the sculpt masking patch is now uploaded to code review.
Shouldn’t you just name it “Bridge” and replace the current bridge tool?
Although the examples I’ve posted have admittedly been focused on the bridging use-case, the hull operation is actually quite separate from a bridge operation, and both are useful.
For example, you can select a point cloud (i.e. vertices with no edges or faces), and use the hull operator to neatly enclose it in faces. Note that this is a *convex* hull, so it won’t accurately reproduce concave forms.
From the other side, a proper bridge tool doesn’t care about concavity. So if you have two edge loops you want to bridge, and one or both is concave, the bridge tool will still work as expected. Although the current bridge tool in Blender is limited to edge loops with the same number of vertices, this is not an inherent limitation; I’m sure someone will update the bridge tool at some point to remove this restriction.
Thanks for the various updates – Bmesh is already showing its versatility.
So does ‘Delete Unused’ ensure that diagonal line gets removed when the operator starts? If so, does that make the inside one, unpartitioned space?
The diagonal line (and the two adjacent triangles) are deleted in this case because of the ‘make holes’ option (without this, it acts similar to the bridge tool, leaving behind the existing faces which looks wrong with subsurf.) The ‘delete unused’ option removes any selected vertices that are interior to the hull.
Nicholas, can your Convex Hull will be used for Fluid Particles surfacing?
Probably not; a fluid surface is typically not convex.