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Selecting tangent polygons
Hello,
I’m importing a nurbs CAD file converted into an FBX polygon model into C4D to render it. This model consists of many polygon objects which are made up of many individual polygons. For some polygon objects I want to apply a texture to only a certain area (to simulate a mask painting job).
Usually, I would use the Fill selection tool to select the relevant surface “patches”, which is fine. However, for more complicated shapes that contain lots of fillets (created in the original CAD software), this selection process is very tedious.
Normally the area I want selected is “cut off” by a sharp corner (eg. a groove that encircles the area). In a CAD software, I could simply define a selection as tangent surfaces, and all surfaces within the groove are selected. Is there a way to achieve the same with polygons? Is there a way to select a polygon inside the area and automatically have all surrounding “tangent” polygons selected with it? This tool would not use normal direction or phong to decide how to fill select, but determine the angle between each polygon and select based on that. For example, all polygons with an angle of less than 2 degrees between each other would be automatically selected.
I’ve tried the Vonc selection plugin, but it doesn’t have this capability.
Is there something like this in C4D, or a workaround?
Using C4D R16.
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4 Replies
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Select>Phong Break Selection is what you’re looking for. You may need to check the “override phong tag” box and play with the angle setting.
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Thanks Adam, I’ve tried that, but there is no improvement over the fill selection tool.
Here is a screenshot of the nurbs model showing the tangent faces to have a separate texture (in blue):
And this is what it looks like after importing the FBX model (converted in Rhino) in C4D:
As you can see, only a single “patch” can be selected, regardless which tool is used. For this example, I would have to manually select about 30 patches to select the blue area.
Here I’ve attached the FBX file, if you want to experiment:
9104_selecttangentfaces.fbx.zip -
Problem is that those groups of polygons aren’t welded together. Select the mesh and run Mesh>Commands>Optimize and you’ll be able to use the phong selection tool with perfect results.
Run optimize in object mode, or if you’re in poly mode you’ll have to select-all first.
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It worked! Thank you so much!
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