3rd Powers, creators of some pretty great and amazing Lightwave plugins, have recently posted a look at their updates to the Meta Mesh plugin. Meta Mesh changes your modeling workflow by allowing you to interactively weld and hollow out objects directly in the viewport in real time.
Improved meshing engine can produce a much more desirable result.
Think of your objects as having surface tension and weight, much like metaballs do. You can easily join objects together as if they were made of wet clay, or use one object to impart a “push force” on the other clay object. With Meta Mesh, you can easily weld and hollow out SubPatch objects in Lightwave without wrecking the models.
The latest version improves on the topology left behind by the process. Looking at the promo video, it is nothing short of amazing. Algorithmically, there have been some great advances the last little while with boolean type object operations. This is certainly true for Modo’s MeshFusion, which can be used to interactively blend the subtraction, addition and intersection of subdivision surfaces while maintaining a watertight mesh.
Meta Mesh 1.10 boasts a new and improved meshing engine, which can produce a much better topology in the resulting mesh. The latest version also makes it easier to adjust the amount of smoothing in a welded object component. Meta Mesh also adds 2 types of transformations to the mix, with a new Stretch and Size attribute.
Check out Meta Mesh for Lightwave for more information.
Ryan Snider
Yikes!!! That is way too impressive. I’ve got Groboto, which can do much of this but only with designated boole objects. MeshFusion in Modo has always looked pretty impressive (made by the same developer as Groboto). But this is just too damn good.