Thursday 18 July 2013

Faster Polygon Islands


















Eric Mootz's emTools  has a suite  of compounds to manipulate polygon islands with a particle cloud. They require a pre-calculated index array mapping vertices to their island index. Doing this in ICE directly is relatively slow - quite a bit of work has been done to get these ICE compounds as fast as possible (see Guillaume Laforge's original blog post and this thread on si-community.com) but a C++ ice node can usually run orders of magnitude faster. In the case of the node provided here it has proved to be as much as 10-15x faster than the ICE implementations (depending on the scene). I'm sure there's scope for more optimal C++ coding to make it faster still.

You can use the node to feed data into Eric's vertex island tools (sample scene in the .rar file, remember to install emTools first) or as a standalone utility node if you're manipulating islands in your own way. It takes geometry and point positions as inputs and can output the index array of points and their island index, a per point island index and an array of island centres.  It's been compiled against 2013 SP1 64bit. Source code is included with the addon.

jj_Island_Indexer 1.0.0

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