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Metaballs

by Matt Ahrens · in Torque 3D Professional · 11/01/2009 (2:21 am) · 4 replies

is there any easy way to implement metaballs into torque, or will i have to do an over haul on the rendering systems.
I looking at making some creatures that are made purly from metaballs in script. Some will have parts that are modeled but the body will be metaballs, or metaboxes or whatever, i want to mess around with it, i am doing research on my own, i am hoping someone will have an idea of how to implement them.

think spore like, were the creatures are modeled procedurally.
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Torque 3D Owner Ted Southard
#1
11/01/2009 (9:26 am)
You won't have to overhaul the rendering system, but you'll have to derive a class and rig up the functionality for the metaball behavior on your own. All it really involves is the interaction between the metaballs' collision meshes and the distances between them to calculate how "fused" they become. Once you figure that out and have a triangle list created, the rendering part is easy.

Torque 3D Owner Matt Ahrens
#2
11/01/2009 (11:40 am)
yeah, i thought it might be something like that, it is the triangle lists that have me thrown off, i have yet to figure out how to make a sphere, or a cylinder from code. The math has thus far eluded me.

Associate Manoel Neto
Default Studio Name
#3
11/02/2009 (7:50 am)
Then you'll have a hard time pulling it out. Metaballs == procedural geometry generation. I suggest searching online for papers and, if you find them, example implementations with source code.

Associate James Ford
Sickhead Games
#4
11/03/2009 (9:55 am)
Generating any sort of geometry procedurally can get really tricky, especially when you start trying to generate vertex and index buffers... An example of this in the engine is MeshRoad, not that it has anything directly to do with metaballs.

Actually you can also look at T3D/examples/renderMeshExample. That shows you how to create a new SceneObject class that renders by submitting a MeshRenderInst, and how to allocate / lock / etc vertex and primitive buffers. Now all you need is to replace that code in RenderMeshExample::createGeometry with magic metaball code '-)