Tgi3D SU Amorph & PhotoScan's new Warper Tool is released!

I would like to announce the release of the new versions (v1.25) of Tgi3D SU Amorph and Tgi3D SU PhotoScan. The new version introduces the latest Warp tool.

Warper helps modelers deform/reshape the selected surfaces including the ones inside the selected groups and components. Using the warper tool consists of three basic steps:

1. Create a warper, which is basically a bounding box of your selection placed in a new group
2. Edit and modify the bounding box inside the group. All your edits including scale, rotate, translate etc. done inside the component will be reflected to the output. If you use Tgi3D tools in modification a preview of the deformation result is displayed instantly during your edit. You can turn preview off for very large meshes if it slows down editing.
3. Finally issue the Warp command to apply the transformation of the Warper on the corresponding object.

As with all other Tgi3D tools, if the object that is being warped has a texture on it, the texture is modified automatically according to the deformation performed by the Warper without requiring “safeguard texture” and “restore texture” commands before and after the use of Warper Tool.

Warper has six different “Child component transformation type” options that determine the type of transformation to be applied on the selected components and groups.

• Full: The given transformation is applied to the whole hierarchy as if the whole selection were flat. In the process it may have to uniquify instances with more than one instance. The instances are left intact, enabling smooth edits on large designs despite SketchUp performance issue. You can easily warp large designs where you can not even hope to explode and flatten the whole thing. For the other options the hierarchy is preserved.
• Nothing: The component (group) instances in the selection are ignored, they are left untouched.
• Translation: The instances are translated only with an average amount (as determined from the transformation on the warper)
• Rigid: Rotation and translation only (the amounts are approximated to be optimally matching the transformation)
• Similarity: Rotation, Translation, and uniform scaling.
• Affine: Rotation, Translation, arbitrary scaling, and shear. (this is equivalent to the SketchUp instance transformation matrix)

The following videos demonstrate how the Warper tool is used to reshape the objects.







The new Warper Tool is included both in Tgi3D SU Amorph and Tgi3D SU PhotoScan.

We have also introduced a new “Flip if necessary” command within the “Image based Surface Modeler” Tool of Tgi3D SU PhotoScan. This command changes the topology of the mesh to capture sharp discontinuities in the surface. The edges are flipped as in the “Flip Edge” tool of the Sandbox Plugin based on the image matching quality.

The following video shows the new flip command in Image Based Surface Modeler



Enjoy!