Hello,

I use a particle network to create metaballs. It works well when all the particles are around the emission location but when they get farther, some frames later, the metaballs seem very edgy and low res, as if the total nuber of polygons would always be the same in the scene, no matter the space taken by the particles.

Is there a setting somewhere to control the density of a metaball mesh? Can we have a local control on it or is it global?

Thank you very much,


Werwack

You mean in the viewport?

If you hit d, then there is a level of detail setting.

That's it, thanks a lot

I have the feeling that metaballs are very greedy…
Is there a way to optimize something to have a more accurate view of the mesh in the viewport with an acceptable processing time? As soon as I raise the lod value, the display framerate is tumbling down and the mesh quality is still very edgy.

Is it possible to also control their lod at rendertime?


Best,

Werwack

if you are dealing with particles you can use particlefluidsurface SOP maybe in metaball mode if you need. It is optimized for large number of particles and should be faster than copying metaballs to particles. Probably not realtime, but you can allways cache the mesh to disk and read it back

but if you have copied metaballs or dealing with metaballs in any way you can use convert meta SOP to convert metaballs to polygons, there you have 4 methods to chose from. Also notice Clustering checkbox in LOD method which can be useful if you have separated groups of metaballs

but for rendering you can render metaballs without convert meta, that way they will be rendered as metaball primitives in mantra which are rendered as smooth as they can be

Thank you very much, I'll dig into those directions.

By the way, do you know if there is a way to convert a 3D procedural texture to a mesh or a particle field in Houdini?
I am trying to model sponges and that king of elements and my approach is to fill the volume defined by the texture with particles then convert them to metaballs to get the mesh.


Best,

Werwack