Morphing

New Features

Morph ribbon
The mesh morphing tools have been moved from the Mesh ribbon page to a new Morph ribbon page.
Proximity morphing


The new Proximity Morph tool allows to morph mesh directly using a simple distance or perturbation value around selected nodes, faces, or edges. Move the mesh using the graphical manipulator, or by optionally mapping to Target entities. Usage of this tool is analogous to the Free Morph tool, but without the need to define anchors or morph areas, making it a simpler and faster approach for applicable use cases. This approach is also great for morphing surfaces of 3d meshes where only a few element layers around the moving nodes need to be morphed.


Figure 1.
Volume morphing
New interactive morph volume tools allow creating, editing, and morphing morph volumes in various ways. Morph volumes are highly deformable prisms created around a mesh, and can be used to manipulate the enclosed mesh by manipulating the shape of the morph volume. Morph volumes are very malleable; the position of its vertices and length of its edges can be modified independently of the others, and adjacent morph volumes can be linked through tangency conditions. This malleability allows you to enclose a given mesh with morph volumes, adjust the morph volumes to fit your model, and then change the shape of your model by modifying the morph volumes.


  • Enclose: Use the Enclose tool to create morph volumes with rectangular or circular shapes. Enclosed mesh and connectors are automatically registered to the enclosing volumes by default.

  • Move: Use the Move tool to morph or adjust morph volumes by moving vertices or handles, edges, and faces using graphical manipulators.

  • Split/Combine: Use the Split/Combine tool to split morph volumes using single or multiple locations along an edge, combine adjacent morph volumes along shared faces, join pairs of separate morph volumes, or equivalence any number of morph volume faces using a search distance.



  • Register: Use the Register tool to review and edit the contents of morph volumes. Only registered contents will morph when morphing morph volumes. Entities that can be registered to morph volumes are nodes and connectors.

Enhancements

Distance-based methods moved from Free to Proximity morphing
The following distance-based options have been removed from the Free Morph tool options menu, since they are now available in better form as part of the new Proximity morphing tool:
  • Automatic anchors toggle,Calculate By menu, Value field
  • Morph Method: Morph within envelope
Optional automatic unfolding
A new menu located in morph options > domain solvers > large domain morphing, allows controlling the automatic mesh unfolding that may takes place after certain large morphs. The new default behavior is set to ask the user before unfolding, and can be also set to always or never unfold. The unfolding process is time consuming and may not be required after every morph, especially when still iterating on the mesh shape or if the mesh will be rebuilt after morphing.