FrozenMesh

From K-3D

Description

Freezes its input for manual editing

Plugin Status:	Stable
Categories:	All Plugins, Stable Plugins, Mesh Plugins

Metadata

Name	Value

Properties

Label	Description	Type	Script Name
Input Mesh	Input mesh	k3d::mesh*	input_mesh
Output Mesh	Output mesh	k3d::mesh*	output_mesh

Overview

As you work to model a geometric mesh, K-3D uses the Visualization Pipeline to keep track of all of the steps that went into creating it, which is what allows you to go back into the "history" of the mesh, make changes, and immediately see the results of those changes.

When a K-3D document is saved, the document contains all of the steps used to create the mesh, instead of the mesh itself. That means that you can continue to modify a mesh's history even after reloading a saved document; it also tends to keep K-3D documents small since a mesh containing thousands of points and polygons can be saved using just the steps that went into creating it, which - usually - requires less space.

Sometimes you don't want to keep all that history - and that's where FrozenMesh comes in. When you apply FrozenMesh to mesh, it "freezes" (makes a copy of) its input. Changes to the mesh history no longer update the display because the FrozenMesh copy never changes. When you save a document, FrozenMesh saves the actual geometric data in its mesh - points, polygons, patches, etc.

FrozenMesh is used in a couple of situations:

• Geometry readers - when you import an external file into a document, K-3D doesn't know the steps that went into creating it, so a single FrozenMesh is used to contain the contents of the imported file.

• As a time-saver - as you continue modifying a mesh and its complexity increases, the number of steps in its history grows - that means that document load times may become slow because the entire pipeline has to be executed every time a document is loaded. Because the pipeline caches data at each step, memory use is also increased. All of this time and memory is wasted if you never go back into the mesh's history. All of the modifiers in the pipeline appear in the Node List Panel and the Node History Panel, which may make editing difficult. For all of these reasons, you can insert a FrozenMesh into a mesh's history, and delete all of the modifiers upstream, simplifying your document and reducing resource consumption.