Combining overlapping primitives

[mars 0]

Maybe I am missing the obvious solution, but I am trying to connect many overlapping spheres into one object. It's basically a boolean operation than needs to take into account many objects. To my knowledge you can only boole 2 objects.  I tried metaballing the group of spheres that defines the shape I want but no matter how few spheres I use or how small I make them, the rusult is a always a huge  blog that doesn't follow the outline of the spheres.

 

I hope I explained my issue clearly enough. The image I attached represents the shape I am trying to unify into one mesh.

[Cerbera 2,032]

You can boole as many times as you like if you just keep stacking them and repeating the operation with different parts of it, but booles are a fairly hideous way to do this, and will produce disgraceful geometry that will preclude using any kind of subdivision on top of the model.

And if you stack too many booles your machine will just crash, so best to make editable often during that process.

 

To be honest, this whole approach works in Zbrush, which can use zspheres to make a basic form, but Cinema does not have equivalent functionality.

 

The easiest (but also not great) solution we have that isn't a boole is probably the metaball. Just dump all your spheres inside one of those and tweak settings until it looks how you want. This is hard to get control of, as you've seen so there is also a metaball tag that you can apply to metaball source objects that provides more options, but you shouldn't expect miracles from this either.

 

The last, arguably best, but somewhat painful and protracted method would be to manually retopo it yourself using the poly pen and polygon snap to create a new mesh on top of the spheres.

 

CBR

 

[mars 0]

Thank you for the reply. I sort of arrived at the same conclusions as you. Z brush will be the best solution. I can either import the shape in Zbrush, dynamesh it and then zremesh it.  Or probably better, recreate the shape I want with zspheres and end up with better topology to start!

 

I think the mataball function should be high on the list of improvements that MAXON needs to tackle!

Edited February 12, 2018 by mars
addition

[Cerbera 2,032]

6 minutes ago, mars said:

I think the mataball function should be high on the list of improvements that MAXON needs to tackle!

Ha ha - what they have now IS the improved version ! Before R17, there was no metaball tag, and it was properly rubbish ! :) The tag does substantially increase your options - I'm surprised if you can't get close to what you need in house using that...

 

I bet the XParticles mesher would do a great job on this if you have that ? Or like you said, just Zbrush it.

 

CBR

[mars 0]

17 hours ago, Cerbera said:

Ha ha - what they have now IS the improved version ! Before R17, there was no metaball tag, and it was properly rubbish ! :) The tag does substantially increase your options - I'm surprised if you can't get close to what you need in house using that...

 

I bet the XParticles mesher would do a great job on this if you have that ? Or like you said, just Zbrush it.

 

CBR

I tried to tweak metaballs, but maybe I need to use points or nulls instead of spheres. But regardless, as the previous reply mentioned, the resulting topology would be horrid. I don't have xparticles so I guess I will be zbrushing :)

Edited February 13, 2018 by mars
mispelling

[mars 0]

OK, I had a friend try the XParticles approach, but the resulting mesh, even though closer to what I wanted is still a chaotic topology mess. Zbrush on the other hand, handled the task beautifully. My next problem now is unwrapping the UV's with Bodypaint's archaic toolset :(

[holgar 15]

I do such things in 3D Coat by Voxelizing it.