Re: [Algorithms] CSG operations on textured meshes -- something better than CGAL?

[Chris G. <cg...@va...>]

I don’t believe you will be able to use your existing uv values with the mesh that results from this csg operation – it has a different topology, and there will be changes in the ratios of the areas of different parts of the model, with really bumpy areas of the mesh being smoothed out, etc. You’ll even have brand new areas emerge that don’t have corresponding areas on the original model, as holes are filled in, etc.

What might work better is to just do the csg operation and generate a uv atlas for the resultant mesh. You can then generate a new texture map for this uv parametization by sampling from the original one, in a similar manner to the way in which people produce bumpmaps mapping the normals of highly tessellated models onto low-detail models.



From: Jon Watte [mailto:jw...@gm...]
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2014 11:08 AM
To: Game Development Algorithms
Subject: [Algorithms] CSG operations on textured meshes -- something better than CGAL?

I have a triangle mesh composed of many submeshes with different textures/materials. This mesh may not be a 2-manifold -- it may have open edges. Typical game art.

I now want to create a 3mm thick shell of this mesh. As an approximation, taking each triangle, and extrude it back along the normal of each vertex, and union all of those generated chopped pyramids would be an approximation of what I want. If I do literally that, and self-union the result, then that should resolve the self-intersection problems I'll run into along narrow sharp creases etc.

I can't find any library to do this, though. CGAL has some fairly robust functions on NEF polyhedra, but those polyhedra don't seem to allow parameterization (which is academic speak for texture coordinates that may have discontinuities across edges.)

So, what are some robust CSG libraries available that work on such game-style meshes, preserving texture coordinates?

(And actually, I don't have one such mesh; I have > 120 million such meshes, so a by-hand or even script-the-Max-shell-modifier solution is unlikely to work. I do have hundreds of Linux servers at my disposal, though.)


Sincerely,

Jon Watte


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