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Modeling Polygons & Polygon Meshes

The polygon modeling tools in XSI let you create and modify polygon mesh objects in a variety of ways. You can:

• Create new polygon mesh objects in a variety of ways.

• Add and edit components by drawing, splitting, welding, or subdividing.

• Remove components by deleting, collapsing, or dissolving.

• Disconnect components to separate them from their neighbors.

• Duplicate, extrude, and inset components to create protuberances and indentations.

• Offset polygons to grow or shrink their contours.

• Knife or slice polygon meshes to subdivide them along a plane.

• Dice polygons to subdivide them along multiple axes.

• Symmetrize polygons to mirror them across a plane.

• Bevel components to round off corners.

• Invert polygons to change the direction of their normals.

• Bridge polygons to connect two areas of the same mesh.

• Combine polygon meshes by blending or merging.

• Perform Boolean operations to obtain the difference, intersection, or union of two polygon meshes.

• Filter components to clean up polygon meshes by removing or welding edges, points, and polygons that match specific criteria.

• Reduce the number of polygons in an object by collapsing edges.

• Quadrangulate polygon meshes by dissolving pairs of triangles, or triangulate them by subdividing quads and n-gons.

• Convert curves to polygon meshes.

• Convert NURBS surfaces to polygon meshes.

• Create new mesh objects by extracting specific polygons from existing meshes.

In addition to the polygon mesh-specific actions described in this chapter, you can manipulate polygons, edges, and vertices like any other component as described in Manipulating Components in the Modeling and Deformation Basics guide. You can also deform polygon meshes as described in Deformations in the Modeling and Deformation Basics guide.

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