SECTION 2 - Modeling and Detail Editor

40] How Smoothing tool works (By Bill Dimech)?

This uses Imagine v4.0 Smoothing tool.

I have just been playing with the new Smoothing Tool option in Imagine. This is very powerful and I got so excited I had to post this little tutorial that shows some of its power.

In the Detail Editor:

Add a default torus.
Add a sphere with a radius of 100 units.
In the front view: move the sphere about 150 units in the X direction so that the left side of the sphere intersects about half way through the right side of the torus.
Pick the two objects and Slice (ALT-x) them (You may need to raise the sphere a touch if You get the intersecting edges error).
In Pick Object mode: select the newly created intersecting bits between our two objects and delete them. We want the original outer torus and sphere parts only.
Pick the torus and sphere objects and use the Join command to create one object.
Merge it (this is important!!! If You do not merge, it will not behave as expected).

Now for the fun stuff:

Select the new Smoothing Tool option from the functions menu: change the iteration value to 20 and apply it to our new object.

Notice how nicely the join has been smoothed. WOW! Great potential here. You can apply the Smoothing over and over to increase the effect.

Ok, that's not all..... This next bit shows up best if the perspective view is in Shaded Mode:

Pick our object, change to Pick Faces mode and Pick ALL faces.
Fracture it.
Now select the Smoothing Tool option from the functions menu again, set the value to 10 and ensure that Lock Perimeter is on. Click on OK.

When You apply this to our object, look at the Shaded View as this really shows up the benefit of this feature (if lock perimeter is off the object will distort. Start to merge into a blob: yet another great feature).

Note, the Smoothing Tool works in Pick Faces mode as well as Pick Points and Pick Object.

You can select a range of points or faces to localise smoothing if necessary (i.e. to the intersection of the two objects only etc).

Try out this Pick Faces / Fracture / Smooth routine on the SKULL object that came in the Digimax directory, WOW!! Finally, an easy way to clean those ugly DXF files that come from those other packages.

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