DeleD Community Edition

[ash]

please add a bridge tool

I will explain, with pictures !

Something I have found, that is missing, is a "Bridge" Tool. It creates geometry between 2 faces. I found one person request it, several years ago.
It is an invaluable tool once you get it going, and it should not be too terribly hard to implement, though I could be mistaken.

I am using wings3D to demonstrate, as it has an adequate bridge tool. Other apps I have offer a few advanced options, but recreating the functionality offered in wings is just fine.

Say I have a shape like this:

and I want to make it full circle.

then I select the bridge command and it does this:
before:


after:




as you can see, it "bridged" the gap between the two faces. The original faces do not exist anymore. Recreating this would require extruding one face, pulling it over to the other face, and welding them if they are planar, or manually selecting pairs of vertices and welding them piece by piece. This is tedious and inefficient.


I can do tunnels:



You cant select adjoining faces:



Its not just for tunnels and bridges though, it also is handy for modeling as well, take this wheel for instance, think how hard it would be to model this if you had to manually weld this:


I select one on the hub and one on the inner rim and bridge:


Heres a few more:


and a pretty nice wheel:


it took less than 3 minutes, maybe 30 or 40 clicks.

So, as you can see, the Bridge tool is very powerful, and can speed up design very much. Please add this at your earliest convenience.

I would think that it would work in such a manner, :

pair vertices based on making the least twisted shape, which should be easy. Create edges between pairs. Create faces between edges, remove old original faces. The determining pairs is probably the most complicated, and I would aim to line up pairs so as the edge created did not cross the plane of another pair.

Anyway, if the transform panel was my 2 cents, heres my 80 bucks, and probably one of the best new tools you could add to DeleD.

Thank you.

edit trimmed images edit edited for brevity, trimmed more images, thank you for this, it is so very useful
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[elementrix]

I also use this tool alot in maya, you can also bridge edges and create flat faces, or select 2 faces that are not in a straight path, and let maya calculate a smooth path between them etc.

This is also used quit alot in character/face modelling.
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[Mr.Fletcher]

This would be super cool to have
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[chronozphere]

That's something someone could write a plugin for. Unfortunately it's not possible to acces the vertex/edge/polygon selection from within the plugin, so polygon's have to be selected by giving them some tag. Even if someone manages to make this, it would be kinda tedious to use.

[Jeroen]

I definately want this tool to be part of DeleD's toolbox. It'll not be part of 2.0 but I will try to implement it in a later version.
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[Starnick]

[Jeroen]

The Bridge tool has been requested several times and indeed, it is a very powerful tool. It has been listed on my personal TODO list for ages and although time hardly permits it, I decided to implement it for DeleD 2.0.

In DeleD, the Bridge function is available as Connect. The Connect tool was already implemented for vertices and edges. Now you can also use it in Polygon mode. Simply select 2 polygons and press 'C' or the Connect button.

Here are some images of it.











Using Inset first:



And then connect them:



I still have some work to do, like checking how many polygons are selected and how many vertices each selected polygon has. I also want to extend the tool so it can work with multiple objects. Rest assured, Bridge will be available in DeleD 2.0.
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[Mr.Fletcher]

Oh wow! Very nice
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[fik]

Now that very nice. Be a lot more convineint than using long way round have to with my plugin

[chronozphere]

wow... awesome.

But what happens when the polygons are not facing eachother directly, or even face in completely opposite directions?

Can't wait to test this when it's done.

[Jeroen]

@fik: I used the same algorithm you used in your plugin, only slightly modified. Thanks for telling me about this algorithm.

@chronoz: go right ahead, I put a new beta up for you to get your hands on.
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[chronozphere]

Cool... It works great. Undo/redo also works with bridge/connect.

You should make sure that only two polygons are selected. If another number is selected, a message should be shown. If multiple poly's are selected, you will get weird behaviour. That's the only bad thing i noticed so far. Will do some more testing this week.

It would be nice to have some options for this tool, like a certain ammount of segments.

[ash]

wonderful !

This will be very handy, it just seems the next logical step so often as I work. Thank you very much for putting work on this !
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[fik]

Glad it came in use