Hello Peter,
Thanks for sharing your modelling process.
I guess that the exploratory phases of new models is still done with real Geomag since you have a large enough supply for any construction.
Though, the construction time may become an issue with large models like the telephone booth I presume.
Lately, I have managed to construct a deltahedron that is also a continous flexahedron. Do you think that the solver from Autodesk Inventor would work it out correctly ?
For the trivia, there is a math theorem stating that the volume do not vary when the polyhedron flexes.
I did not know there was a paying version for Blender Cycles and I know very well the trouble with noisy images in path tracer.
Some AI denoising tools developed by Intel or Nvidia do a good job with that.
My modelling process relies on several tools depending on the starting point.
I use
Blender to sketch coarse models from scratch, the topology would be correct and the general shape too but the edge length and face planarity are not.
Then, I use
Stella to regularize the coarse model into a fine model where edges are unit length and faces are planar.
The issue is that this step sometimes fails for models that are too large, too complex (without symmetries) and is done manually.
At the end of last year, I have developed some scripts to have the inverse kinematics done in command line so I can batch multiple models at once and also combine it with generation scripts, I came up with my own algorithm which is not so good, and performs differently from Stella's in some cases. I have also recently encountered a similar algorithm made by
Antiprism http://www.antiprism.com/programs/poly_form.html.
I have yet to benchmark these different algorithms against each other.
In the end, I always load the model back into Stella and save it as a .stel file and export the obj.
For models on the Geomag forum, most (but not all) are compounds of other basic shapes. In this case, I use Stella since there is a feature to add models face to face.
This method is very fast (I know the keyboard shortcuts by heart now).
As you have noticed, I was having a good run at modeling people's work for a weekend or two. I still intend to finish the other models some day, maybe soon.
I also want to do the same for models on the wiki and from people's picture galleries, basically any model I see a picture of.
The end goal is to add them to a proper database that connects to my viewer and share it with people.
Wagyx