If you're a displacement fiend you'll be aware that excessive displacement can cause a mesh to split along some of its edges.
If you're a 'Smooth Polys' fiend you'll be aware that many meshes inflate as if somebody's stuck a high pressure air hose into them
If you're both a displacement fiend and a smoothing fiend you'll know that the answer must lie in combining these two things.
If you're like me then you've been trying to work out the 'how' for years without success !
But at last, thanks to EldritchCellar and others, I have the secret !
It's Control Edges !
(for the low-down dirty details see the "Preventing Edges On Architectural Etc Models Being Too Sharp In Poser" thread in Renderosity's Poser forum)
This warpy cube is my first proof. It's a standard 8 vertex /12 edge / 6 face cube, but with a control edge around each face - the result is a 56 vertices / 54 faces cube mesh.
There's a single morph to control the widths of all the control edges together.
There are also morphs to move each edge (yes, morphs to move each corner might have been more useful, but the effort would've been much greater so I didn't bother)
The Warpy Cube comes with my previously released simple Poser procedural marble shader pre-applied.
But as well as the raw platonic solid Warpy Cube prop I've also provided a couple of Warpy Cubes with morphs already applied (cheeseboard and masonry block), and several Warpy Cubes with a clouds node driving displacement (lumpy, bumpy, modern art and sculpture). An 8' cube with +/-4' displacement is quite impressive!
No readme - just play with it...
Short 10 second video here - http://www.sharecg.com/v/84851/gallery/2/Video/Warpy-Cube-Test-Video
(don't forget to turn on displacement and smooth polys in the render settings)
It can be really fun if you do an animation - definite amoebic glooping ! (I tried uploading the video but I can't...)
It's not UV mapped because it's only a plaything for Poser procedural texturing.
(It should work fine in DAZ Studio but you'll need to find your own procedural textures with displacements) « Less
Arc of the Covenant
