Hi to everyone!
I just would like to know if is possible to subdivide the surface of a metaball into regular quadrilaterals; i tried all the “convert” comands but without success!
Thanks,
Stefano

Convert will work.

Many thanks Delight0092!
But this is what i get converting it to a polygon with quadrilaterals connections



and this is what i would like…



Can i achieve this result or not?

Thanks again…
Stef

Why do you want to do this? Metaballs render smooth so I don't see your need.

I need this shape for a project of a building and i need planar quadrangled faces…
That's why!

you can use sops to come up with quad surfaces from volumes.

its sort of like ‘marching cubes’, but with a couple extra steps to make a nicer surface. the procedure is.

1: make a level set from the metaballs with iso offset

2: make a cube for every ‘on’ voxel in the level set.

3: use raycasting to figure out the ‘shell’ of the cube surface.

4: fuse the shell into a continuous surface.

5: smooth the continuous surface.

6: ‘shrink wrap’ the smooth continuous surface to the level set.


certainly not a push-button solution, but its all quads!

-b

That's an awesome hip Brian..thanks for sharing it!

Oh my God! This is fantastic, really many thanks for this great solution Brian, i will try it for sure…

Very intricate.

Very clever Brian!
I just wanted to note that if you have access to 12.1 and can build the openVDB library and Houdini toolkits, the VDB volume mesher generates quads and is extremely fast. So once you convert your metaballs to an SDF you would convert it to a VDB Volume and mesh it, 2 nodes.

tjeeds
…if you have access to 12.1 and can build the openVDB library and Houdini toolkits, the VDB volume mesher generates quads and is extremely fast. So once you convert your metaballs to an SDF you would convert it to a VDB Volume and mesh it, 2 nodes.

this sounds pretty interesting jesse. i don't have the ability to install plugins, but i'd be stoked to see how this looks (generating quad meshes from volumes comes up a lot). can you screen-cap a mesh?

-b

Sho thang, here you go. The X that you see at the axis-aligned areas looks like tri's but it actually has a tiny quad in the center.

Very cool…

very interesting solution to get quads in the metaballs.