Mission:
Create intersection free offset surfaces of complicated models
Rationale:
The “solidify” modifier and “shrink-wrap” modifier create excellent offset surfaces in many cases, however sharp features, concave features or large offsets often result in mesh self intersections which create difficulty for CAM based processes like 3d printing.
Goals:
- A primary implementation in python
- Optimization of that implementation to achieve reasonable performance
- Implentation into blender source
Implementation:
http://www.mae.cuhk.edu.hk/~cwang/pubs/TASEOffsetting.pdf
Related:
Meshlab Remeshing->Uniform Mesh Resampling"
Discussion
I really like the paper above, however it has a broad array of components which may be individually too specialized to merit their inclusion into Blender source without creating redundancy with components blender already has or, requiring too many modifications to Blender’s existing components to fit in nicely. My plan is to follow this paper, however if good results can be achieved by other methods that is fine. The components of the above paper are.
-Distance Field calculation with some optimization filters
-A marching cubes algorithm to generate a volume
-A modified Dual Contour algorithm to generate the surface
Code will be hosted on public GitHub repository and GPL
If developer wan’t to polish code into a clean addon for the CGCookie market to generate revenue to maintain the code, they are free to do so.
Compensation:
Read the paper above, shoot me an estimate. This may not be achievable. Paid via paypal.