[Released] Gescon, CSG plugin for Daz Studio [commercial]

Alberto

Havos said:

So in summary, I do believe this is a useful plug-in, and I will almost certainly not return it, but it has some disadvantages that I would be very happy if they were addressed.

The main issue is that I do not want the original mesh to be touched where the vertices and polygons lie completely outside of the area of union or difference. It this was an option, that would be fine, and I would also be okay if this was limited to just cuts with primitives like rects or spheres, since obviously in these cases the mathematics of calculating which vertices are outside the area would be a lot easier. 

You can see this issue when you union two squares. The squares will become dice. This can be mitigated by using a higher precision, but this will take longer and often create a final mesh with a huge number of polys (over a million in one case I tried). The squares would still be slightly rounded, even in this case. The high poly count problem can be reduced by using the "Surface Adaptivity" option, but I would still prefer to keep my original mesh where possible.

If the original mesh is mostly retained, I believe it will allow the plugin to do a better job when retaining the original UV. For example in the headless sample above, the final mesh and UV was not the same, even though I choose "Retain the original UV". The poor girl lost half her nipples, even though this part of the mesh is a long way off where the cut was performed.

 

 

 Hi, Havos. Thank you for the review! 

I have some comments.

The OpenVDB CSG operations work using the so called Level sets. The level sets have the advantage that, in comparision with other methods, can virtually operate with any solid (closed-meh object), no matter how complex the geometry is. But, there are some disadvantages: sharp edges are difficult to reproduce (although the realistic objects don't have so sharp edges), and the topology cannot be preserved (that is the shape is the same, but the edges, vertices and facets are different). See here https://groups.google.com/g/openvdb-forum/c/TgxZpZmCGKE/m/_t3wTGICAwAJ

Regarding using planes, well, by definition, CSG operate only on solids. Of the DAZ Studio primitives, the plane is the only one that doesn't qualify as a solid.

About the beheaded girl, another cutter, maybe a cube (to simulate a guillotine's cut, for example) could be better. To get a better result with the UV map apply a high enough precision value, but use an adaptivity value as low as possible, a 0.001 is a good one.

 

James_H

Alberto said:

Mark_e593e0a5 said:

Alberto said:

However, I'm creating a plugin that could thicken open-mesh objects.

If that can be used to add some thickness to paper-thin clothing items, I would consider that one a must-have  

Yes, it's precisely its purpose .

Now that sounds really useful.

Havos

Alberto said:

Havos said:

So in summary, I do believe this is a useful plug-in, and I will almost certainly not return it, but it has some disadvantages that I would be very happy if they were addressed.

The main issue is that I do not want the original mesh to be touched where the vertices and polygons lie completely outside of the area of union or difference. It this was an option, that would be fine, and I would also be okay if this was limited to just cuts with primitives like rects or spheres, since obviously in these cases the mathematics of calculating which vertices are outside the area would be a lot easier. 

You can see this issue when you union two squares. The squares will become dice. This can be mitigated by using a higher precision, but this will take longer and often create a final mesh with a huge number of polys (over a million in one case I tried). The squares would still be slightly rounded, even in this case. The high poly count problem can be reduced by using the "Surface Adaptivity" option, but I would still prefer to keep my original mesh where possible.

If the original mesh is mostly retained, I believe it will allow the plugin to do a better job when retaining the original UV. For example in the headless sample above, the final mesh and UV was not the same, even though I choose "Retain the original UV". The poor girl lost half her nipples, even though this part of the mesh is a long way off where the cut was performed.

 

 

 Hi, Havos. Thank you for the review! 

I have some comments.

The OpenVDB CSG operations work using the so called Level sets. The level sets have the advantage that, in comparision with other methods, can virtually operate with any solid (closed-meh object), no matter how complex the geometry is. But, there are some disadvantages: sharp edges are difficult to reproduce (although the realistic objects don't have so sharp edges), and the topology cannot be preserved (that is the shape is the same, but the edges, vertices and facets are different). See here https://groups.google.com/g/openvdb-forum/c/TgxZpZmCGKE/m/_t3wTGICAwAJ

Regarding using planes, well, by definition, CSG operate only on solids. Of the DAZ Studio primitives, the plane is the only one that doesn't qualify as a solid.

About the beheaded girl, another cutter, maybe a cube (to simulate a guillotine's cut, for example) could be better. To get a better result with the UV map apply a high enough precision value, but use an adaptivity value as low as possible, a 0.001 is a good one.

Thanks for the reply. Since you are using a 3rd party library to do most of the heavy calculations, I fully understand that you can only offer what it can supply. Since it seems to offer no option of retaining the mesh outside of the area of operation, then clearly there is not much you can do to fix this. Seems odd though that the library is not implemented that way, as perserving the original UV would be far quicker and more accurate if the original mesh was perserved where possible.

I tried out the settings you suggested on the headless girl example, and increasing the precision does help to retain the original UV. I did discover that a precision of 3 with an adaptivity of 0.001 worked well when discarding the UV. However when retaining the UV those settings were very slow to run (15 mins on my machine) and created a fairly high polygon final mesh. I found that a combination of precision 3 along with adaptivity 0.1 worked better in this case, which executed faster and created a mesh with only twice the number of polygons of the orginal genesis mesh. Whilst the final UV was not perfect, with some issues at the seam lines, it was better than the original time I ran it when I posted above.

A couple of suggestions you might want to consider for the user interface. Whilst I was able to use the plug-in without reading the manual at first, the one parameter I had no idea what it did was "Surface Adaptivity", which is rather a technical term that most people would have no understanding of. Maybe something like "Polygon reduction factor" would be more clear.

Also you might want to consider a different calibration of the surface adaptivity slider. If very low values are ideal, these can only be achieved by typing into the box, since clicking the + button makes the value 0.01. As an alternative you could have an additional control with a list of suggested preset combinations for the two fields of precision and adaptivity.

 

gerd.schricker_8e8780689b

Hi Alberto, I bought the plugin yesterday and it works great. Is it possible to change only the UV mapping without doing a boolean operation of 2 nodes ?. Otherwise I can help myself by placing the 2 node inside the first and doing a union. But maybe this can be done easier.

Greetings

Gerd

Chaosophia

Thank you for the reply. This will help out with some horror/slasher sets I have planned for my store, but haven't even tackled yet due to needing an option like this presents. This will definitely cut some major time on geografting the wearables while not having to reposition the already done propped poses which shelfed 2 products for the time being. You have presented me with an easier option moving forward, and opened Pandora's Box for me. LOL, thank you for making this.

Ryuu@AMcCF

Hi Alvin,

I'm just posting a quick and dirty render using your product, and comparing it to what I had been doing using an imported boolean from Bryce--I chose to recreate a JumpPoint prop that I had recently started to play with again.

Finding the Gescon Node in the Create tab and entering the product serial number was easy--finding the Gescon Control panel hidden in the Panes menu not so much. Initial obstacle to using the product was that it wasn't evident without the .PDF instructions--and finding the .PDF was fun in and of itself, but I was soon able to locate it using the file listings in DIM.

After that little bump, things worked really great, although getting used to the altered quality of the resulting objects was a thing.

So, the JumpPoint I made consists of a hollowed out hemisphere blended with a torus along the rim of the resulting bowl.

In Bryce, that involves 2 spheres, 2 objects to cut them in half, a cylinder to extend the lip of the inner sphere to ensure there is an open bowl when subtracting it from the outer sphere, and then joining all that to the torus. From there, I always needed to apply the materials to the prop. Once that was done, I then needed to bring in the other models, set up the scene, render it, THEN import over to GIMP to do post work on the space inside the JumpPoint to give that illusion of a space gate... And while in Bryce--ALL those objects have to remain in place at all times--Bryce, for all the superior qualities it possesses, suffers greatly from a horrible UI scene display with its broken polygon viewport. Poser and DAZ Studio both have excellent UI viewport settings.

Of course, you can export the resulting Bryce boolean as an .OBJ file that can be imported to DAZ. That leads to the texture mapping issue, as you have to now export the materials from Bryce. You ALSO have to to use something like UVMapper to create a UV Map for the exported .OBJ! Setting up the scene in DAZ was much easier once the static .OBJ was imported, but it still requires me to do postwork to paste in the image that goes inside the JumpPoint.

First time I tried playing with Gescon, DAZ crashed! Fortunately, I learned a great deal from what led to that mistake.

First thing I learned I was doing wrong was creating a new Gescon Node Point for each boolean interaction in DAZ, like I was expecting it to behave in a fashion similar to Bryce. The very first time, I was a tad disappointed in the low quality of the boolean object resolution, so although I thought I had barely tweeked the resolution slide setting in the Gescon Control, each step of building the JumpPoint was quickly increasing the polygon count tremendously. Another thing I realized was that Gescon DOESN'T NEED THE ORIGINAL OBJECTS TO REMAIN in the scene, or even keep the Gescon Node point once you're done creating the final desired boolean object--Gescon is creating a brand new separate object with each operation!

So, when I tried again, I was reusing the same cube primitive to chop both spheres in half, being careful to not have the new object resolution set too high (that really is a very sensitive and twitchy setting--entering an explicit value barely >1 [and <<<2] is the better option than trying to use the slider), and moreover, I'm only using ONE Gescon Node point!

Now, I still needed to use the exported materials texture map that I had originally done in Bryce--that's unavoidable--but at least I DON'T have to use an external program to create a UVMap for the new Gescon Object, Gescon already created the UVMap for it!  This is the result, compared to the imported object from Bryce:

You probably can't tell which is which--The top JumpPoint was made with Gescon, the bottom was the imported Bryce .OBJ.

BTW, NO POSTWORK in GIMP was needed in this render! I cheated this time and made use of one of the intermediate Gescon objects and put them inside each JumpPoint object and used a texture map just for those space scenes!

Also, the built-in UV mapper in Gescon actually gave me better results than what I got from creating the UV in UVMapper for the imported Bryce OBJ, so that's another plus for Gescon!

This is a very easy-to-use product, very intuitive (but only once I was actually in the Gescon Control panel), and it is extremely flexible and versatile. Could it be improved? Of course it can, like any new product can and should be, but this is off to a GREAT START! Overall, I'd say this is a fantastic product, providing a much needed vital function that was far too long overdue for DAZ Studio!!

THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH, ALVIN!! 

Alberto

gerd.schricker_8e8780689b said:

Hi Alberto, I bought the plugin yesterday and it works great. Is it possible to change only the UV mapping without doing a boolean operation of 2 nodes ?. Otherwise I can help myself by placing the 2 node inside the first and doing a union. But maybe this can be done easier.

Greetings

Gerd

Hi, Gerd:

You can use the same node for the two inputs in the union operation.

Alberto

Havos said:

Thanks for the reply. Since you are using a 3rd party library to do most of the heavy calculations, I fully understand that you can only offer what it can supply. Since it seems to offer no option of retaining the mesh outside of the area of operation, then clearly there is not much you can do to fix this. Seems odd though that the library is not implemented that way, as perserving the original UV would be far quicker and more accurate if the original mesh was perserved where possible.

It makes sense if you notice that the library is focused on level sets. To get a level set, it has to transform the original mesh in a shell of cells in a 3D matrix, thus the vertices and its conexions is lost. See Conversion Tools here: https://www.openvdb.org/about/

The UV reconstruction is my doing, the OpenVDB library doesn't have the tool.

Havos said:

A couple of suggestions you might want to consider for the user interface. Whilst I was able to use the plug-in without reading the manual at first, the one parameter I had no idea what it did was "Surface Adaptivity", which is rather a technical term that most people would have no understanding of. Maybe something like "Polygon reduction factor" would be more clear.

Also you might want to consider a different calibration of the surface adaptivity slider. If very low values are ideal, these can only be achieved by typing into the box, since clicking the + button makes the value 0.01. As an alternative you could have an additional control with a list of suggested preset combinations for the two fields of precision and adaptivity.

 

Thank you for your suggestions. I take note.

 

Alberto

Ryuu@AMcCF said:

Hi Alvin,

First thing I learned I was doing wrong was creating a new Gescon Node Point for each boolean interaction in DAZ,

Hi!

The Gescon Node Point is needed only for fractures.

Ryuu@AMcCF said:

THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH, ALVIN!! 

You're welcome! I'm glad the plugin is helpful .

Alberto

By the way, the manual is inside the folder of DAZ Studio installation:

"\DAZ 3D\DAZStudio4\docs\Plugins\Gescon". 

The recent plugins (not only the ones I created) have their manuals inside "\DAZ 3D\DAZStudio4\docs\Plugins\"

Alberto

Chaosophia said:

Thank you for the reply. This will help out with some horror/slasher sets I have planned for my store, but haven't even tackled yet due to needing an option like this presents. This will definitely cut some major time on geografting the wearables while not having to reposition the already done propped poses which shelfed 2 products for the time being. You have presented me with an easier option moving forward, and opened Pandora's Box for me. LOL, thank you for making this.

You're welcome! 

nicktechnical

Alberto said:

nicktechnical said:

Bought the tool. A little disappointed Daz didn't include the cutters. I've logged a ticket as suggested.

I'm attempting to blow a hole out of one of Stonemason's Ubran Sprawl 2 and 3 buildings. I've tried with both but I flat out can't get it work. I've tried substituting the cutter for various primitives and also some debris props. No luck. It flat out won't cut. I've confirmed there's plenty of polys in the building mesh. Nothing happens when I hit fracture. Any suggestions?

Screenshot attached.

 

They're open-mesh, not solid objects. This is the Building 17 of your image. 

 

Oh ok! Sorry, dumb moment. Thanks for replying. So if I used your merge tool to merge a solid block into this, I could then use the fracture tool?

Alberto

nicktechnical said:

Alberto said:

nicktechnical said:

Bought the tool. A little disappointed Daz didn't include the cutters. I've logged a ticket as suggested.

I'm attempting to blow a hole out of one of Stonemason's Ubran Sprawl 2 and 3 buildings. I've tried with both but I flat out can't get it work. I've tried substituting the cutter for various primitives and also some debris props. No luck. It flat out won't cut. I've confirmed there's plenty of polys in the building mesh. Nothing happens when I hit fracture. Any suggestions?

Screenshot attached.

 

They're open-mesh, not solid objects. This is the Building 17 of your image. 

 

Oh ok! Sorry, dumb moment. Thanks for replying. So if I used your merge tool to merge a solid block into this, I could then use the fracture tool?

 Yes, that's the objetive.

Marshian

I bought it but haven't tried it yet. I am very excited as a PA to use this for content creation.

I'm looking forward to the cutting primitives being added or found. I looked in the MAC version too and didn't see them there.

 

Alberto

Marshian said:

I bought it but haven't tried it yet. I am very excited as a PA to use this for content creation.

I'm looking forward to the cutting primitives being added or found. I looked in the MAC version too and didn't see them there.

 

Thank you!

The cutters didn't there yet. Apparently, they forgot to add them to the library. I reported the issue to DAZ last week. Today, they contacted me. I hope they solve the problem soon.

Alberto

nicktechnical said:

Alberto said:

nicktechnical said:

Bought the tool. A little disappointed Daz didn't include the cutters. I've logged a ticket as suggested.

I'm attempting to blow a hole out of one of Stonemason's Ubran Sprawl 2 and 3 buildings. I've tried with both but I flat out can't get it work. I've tried substituting the cutter for various primitives and also some debris props. No luck. It flat out won't cut. I've confirmed there's plenty of polys in the building mesh. Nothing happens when I hit fracture. Any suggestions?

Screenshot attached.

 

They're open-mesh, not solid objects. This is the Building 17 of your image. 

 

Oh ok! Sorry, dumb moment. Thanks for replying. So if I used your merge tool to merge a solid block into this, I could then use the fracture tool?

There is a trick to force Gescon to fracture these buildings using a geometric shell (or a duplicate of the node) and four planes.

1. Create a geometric shell of the building (or duplicate the building).
2. Scale down the duplicate or shell (global scale to 90-92 %).
3. Translate the duplicate or shell so the bottom part is at the same level as the original building.
4. Create four primitive planes and scale them to get two pairs of planes that cover the gap between the original building and the duplicate. Let alone the central hole.
5. Set invisible all the objects in the scene, except the planes, the building, and its duplicate.
6. Export as .obj and re-import it. The imported object will have a closed-mesh geometry. You can use it with Gescon.
7. Very large objects will need a high precision value to give acceptable results, but it could be beyond the scale of precision. The solution is to scale down these objects. After the operation, you can scale up the results, if you wish.
8. I suggest setting the scale of the (imported) building 17 of Urban Sprawl 2 to 10 %. Then set the precision to 10 and the surface adaptivity to 0.001 to apply the fracture operation. If you choose to preserve the surfaces and uv map, it can take a while. In my test, it takes more than a hour.

This is the building and its geoshell (in red):

 

Here are the four planes:

The final result:

RGcincy

Oh that's clever! I had tried to just close off the bottom which isn't sufficient. 

Alberto

The cutters should be in your library now.

Leticia

I can confirm the cutters are now in DIM and install fine.

Alberto

Leticia said:

I can confirm the cutters are now in DIM and install fine.

Good to know. Thank you! 

Sorel

Alberto how long does it usually take to recieve a serial code for this product? 

Alberto

Sorel said:

Alberto how long does it usually take to recieve a serial code for this product? 

It should be immediately after the purchase. If not, fill a ticket, please.

leemoon_c43b45a114

I purchased Gescon earlier this evening and am having difficulty installing it via DIM.

If someone would be so kind as to point out what I'm doing wrong.

One of the 2 installer files appears to have installed fine, the other one, "Gescon: Constructive Solid Geometry for DAZ Studio 4.5+ (Mac 64-bit)" won't install.  The installing progress bar in DIM never moves (stays at 0%).  My latest attempt has been running for about 10 minutes.

I'm on a MacBook Pro (Intel) running macOS Catalina (10.15.7).  DIM is version 1.4.0.67 (64-bit) and DAZ Studio is 4.12.0.86 (which is not running while I use DIM.)

The DIM log file shows no errors, it just ends with the line where it's installing Gescon file.

Thanks so much for any suggestions on how to install Gescon. :)

Lee

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Alberto said:

Sorel said:

Alberto how long does it usually take to recieve a serial code for this product? 

It should be immediately after the purchase. If not, fill a ticket, please.

The serial number should be in My Serial Numbers at Daz3D.com, right?  I'm not finding it there, though.

Alberto

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e said:

Alberto said:

Sorel said:

Alberto how long does it usually take to recieve a serial code for this product? 

It should be immediately after the purchase. If not, fill a ticket, please.

The serial number should be in My Serial Numbers at Daz3D.com, right?  I'm not finding it there, though.

Fill a ticket, please. They should have already given you the Serial Number.

Alberto

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e said:

Alberto said:

Sorel said:

Alberto how long does it usually take to recieve a serial code for this product? 

It should be immediately after the purchase. If not, fill a ticket, please.

The serial number should be in My Serial Numbers at Daz3D.com, right?  I'm not finding it there, though.

Could you upload here the logs of the Dim (Use Show log and Show helper log), please?

 

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

Alberto said:

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e said:

Alberto said:

Sorel said:

Alberto how long does it usually take to recieve a serial code for this product? 

It should be immediately after the purchase. If not, fill a ticket, please.

The serial number should be in My Serial Numbers at Daz3D.com, right?  I'm not finding it there, though.

Could you upload here the logs of the Dim (Use Show log and Show helper log), please?

 

Okay.  I guess I should attach them to the ticket, too.

 

andersenpm1682_a0b35d2d07

So I purchased this, but I'm having a difficult time finding how to use it. I also cannot find the user manual that is supposed to be included. Can someone help me, please? Thanks.

magnabob

I bought it paid full price and now four hours later I still can't get it registered to make it work. How am I supposed to activate this thing? And yes I know were the plug-ins tab is.

RGcincy

magnabob said:

I bought it paid full price and now four hours later I still can't get it registered to make it work. How am I supposed to activate this thing? And yes I know were the plug-ins tab is.

Did you copy and paste the serial number from your Daz account and click on the check mark? If so, did you close Daz Studio after doing that and reopen? If so and it still doesn't work, you may want to try to uninstall and reinstall.