BMesh Status
Joseph Eagar has started a new weblog on the progress of the new BMesh implementation. BMesh aims to be a well-maintainable mesh implementation that allows for more powerful and stable mesh editing tools in Blender.
Myself (Joseph Eagar), Geoffry Bantle, and Levi Schooley have been working on a replacement for the old, unmaintainable, outdated mesh modeling code in blender. Geoffry did most of the difficult design work, and wrote bmesh, a quasi-independant mesh library, with some help from Levi, and now myself.
My task is to integrate this new mesh library into blender, which involves quite a lot of reworking of existing tools. I’m the only developer working on this now, so it’s quite an undertaking. The work is being done in a branch, location at https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/branches/bmesh.
Link
Keep up the great work.
NGONS Yaay!
Cheering you on! Wish I could help! But I know it’s too much for little old me! :)
N-Gons! Hallelujah! Thanks, you guys!
Missing ngon support is the one thing that has always held me back from fully switching to blender.
With this it should be possible to implement a proper cut tool, like in Maya, which I find essential for reworking topology.
Cheer, cheer, cheer :)
Fricking awesome! I really hated blender because it lacked ngons and some of the modeling tools are really shitty because of that.
Hope this will make it in for 2.5 release…
!!! Go BLENDER GO >>>>
Ohhh Can’t wait for 2.5 …
It seems you can donate to support this work
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=156867
If the mesh system changes, What will happen to blenders fluid, soft body, body systems? Will they have to be redone? If so how long would things like that take?
Hitechboy: As far as I know most of that should still work, although there may be tweaks needed. Not a huge task according to the developers involved, only minor adjustments.
Thanks for the support everyone!
@Hitechboy: Billrey is correct, softbodies, fluid, etc will all still work. softbodies and cloth may need some work to correctly handle ngons, but it shouldn’t be too difficult (and I don’t even know if people use ngons in softbody/cloth simulations).
The previous mesh refactors, that trashed a lot of code at once all failed, so this time around we chose to make it so existing code can interface with the new code, that way it still works (if not always in the best way) until it’s eventually rewritten.
Joeedh: In my experience they’re best only used as flat collision objects.
Great work, for once I wish I had credit card.
Funny thing is…people whine about Ngon support. Then they get Ngon support. Then they whine about the Ngons in their models.
vray and bmesh.. :D