PL - Mesh

This is the place for the mesh’s fundamental settings. They directly influence the way the polygons are created around the particle cloud.

Build

When enabled the mesh will be created and saved.

Type

The options:

• “Metaballs” are spheres which can influence one another to create an organic-looking, smooth surface. These meshes often require a certain amount of filtering or correspondingly high particle counts to achieve a satisfying quality.
• “Mpolygons” does not create a closed surface, but attaches a 2D polygon to every particles instead.
• “Clone obj” attaches an object to every particle.

Clone obj

This is the place to choose the node you want to use for the “Clone obj” type. It is only possible to select a single object.

Polygon size

Smaller values take longer to calculate, lead to larger mesh files, but also more detail. A good starting value is around 0.02. The corresponding → “Radius” value can be calculated this way: Radius = Polygon size * 1.7

@ Num Faces

This read-only value displays the mesh's number of polygons at the current frame.

LOD resolution

With this option it is possible to adjust a view-dependent mesh resolution based on your camera settings and point of view.

@ LOD Camera

You can choose any available camera node from a list. The field of view and point of view settings are then used for the calculation of the mesh’s resolution.

@ Min distance

This is the minimum distance from the camera and represents the area with the highest resolution. The value is given in metres.

@ Min Polygon size

This is the minimum polygon size of the high resolution area. If your camera is very close to the mesh the value should be correspondingly smaller.

@ Max distance

This is the maximum distance from the camera and represents the area with the lowest resolution. The value is given in metres.

@ Max Polygon size

If the distant areas of the mesh are very far away from the camera, this value can be rather big.