Fast way to get "flat" parts in a surface?

Hey, i am looking for a performant way to get "flat parts of a surface.

The way i am doing it now is

1. divide surface

2. eval surface

3. calculate angle btw. normal and z vector

4. delete all points wich not fit my goal

it works, but the more precise i want to have it, the definition gets very slow on large surfaces (and very fine subdivisions).

What is the fastest way to do that? Even a plugin is fine as long as it s lightning fast ;)

Ideas?

Cheers

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on January 11, 2017 at 12:12pm

It's an interesting problem because the boundary between the planar and the curved parts can be quite complicated. Strictly speaking the boundary is analytic, but it may be both very difficult and undesirable to use the exact boundary. What sort of control do you want over the fuzziness of the planarity checks?

I've never done this, but I'd start by sampling the curvature of a surface in many places. That should be pretty fast even for lots of points. But then you still need to create a boundary from those samples.

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on January 11, 2017 at 12:18pm