metaobject Element Reference

Blobby shapes are composed of one or more metaobjects, which each exert a positive or negative 'charge' over a scalar field, whose isocontours (level sets) define blobby surfaces with different threshold values corresponding to the contour level. More...

Inheritance diagram for metaobject:

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Detailed Description

Blobby shapes are composed of one or more metaobjects, which each exert a positive or negative 'charge' over a scalar field, whose isocontours (level sets) define blobby surfaces with different threshold values corresponding to the contour level.

MetaObjects positively or negatively affect their neighboring MetaObjects depending on their 'strength' and 'negative' attributes. 'strength' defines the initial charge of the object, and 'negative' is a boolean which defaults to false, denoting whether or not this MetaObject has a positive or a negative impact on surrounding MetaObjects. MetaObject is an abstract class, and specific implementations define how its initial charge dissipates throughout the field.

Note:

Currently, the only support type of metaobject is a metaball.

metaobject corresponds to the underlying Milton class 'MetaObject.'

Example of metaballs aggregating to create a blobby shape. Effect of varying the threshold parameter with 3 metaballs; also shown is an example octree spatial acceleration data structure being used for the resulting mesh. Thresholds of 0.1 (left), 0.18 (center), and 0.19999 (right) were used to create these blobs.

Available metaobject variants:

ball

Example usage:

"blob" : {

// declare a blobby metaobject composed of three metaballs

"metaObjects" : [

{ "type" : "ball", "position" : [ .6, 0, 0 ], },

{ "type" : "ball", "position" : [ 0, .6, 0 ], },

{ "type" : "ball", "position" : [ 0, 0, .6 ], },

],

// optionally specify hints for resulting mesh's acceleration data structure

"spatialAccel" : "kdTree",

"kdMaxDepth" : 16,

// threshold may range from [0, 0.2)

"threshold" : .18,

},