rounding edges on geometry?

[najrock]

so in C4D I use fillet almost every time I make a cube so that it looks a little more natural…

the fillet sop in TD I was hoping would have the same effect but I am not understanding exactly what it does…

anyone have any tips on rounding the edges of a cube and if its not too much trouble… what is a practical use for the fillet sop… I read the wiki and played with it but wasn’t able to come to any revelations

I have attached a frame rendered from C4D with a light fillet on the box to demonstrate my end goal

[ben]

There’s not really a SOP that does that easily, I think what you are looking for is a Poly Bevel SOP which wasn’t around when TouchDesigner SOPs were born (by that I mean it wasn’t around in Houdini 4.1 which is where TouchDesigner’s SOPs came from).

I would recommend you export that nice looking cube from C4D and import it into TouchDesigner. It will have a lot more poly faces however, so watch how heavy your geometry gets to keep performance up in real time. Animating SOPs can be very heavy on the CPU.

[rob]

The Fillet SOP creates a piece of geometry between two surfaces, trying to preserve continuity at the join spots.

You could get a rounded box, by starting with a square, sharing points by ‘consolidating points’ in the Fact SOP, the using a Subdivide to subdivide and smooth it.
(image and toe file attached)

You can play with the crease weight to affect the corner sharpness.
But like Ben mentioned, it will necessarily increase the poly count.
Cheers
Rob.

roundedbox.toe (3.71 KB)

[rob]

Here’s a second attached example, that starts with a cube, converts the polygons to grids, to apply some careful refining near the edges, converts back to polygons, shares edges and subdivides.
Similar to the above, but just adds the detail close to the edges, for a subtly different look.

Rob.

roundedbox_refine.toe (4.07 KB)

[najrock]

Thanks guys!

my work around has been importing the geometry from C4D but I knew there was some way to do it in touch.

Lately I have been running out of gpu memory faster than cpu so unless I get way more into animating sops this should do the trick

[rob]

Just realized, another way of doing this is using a wireframe SOP on a cube.

That SOP will add tubes and spheres along its edges and corners.

You’d then need to place 6 faces of the right size over each face of the cube.
Not sure the quickest way of doing this.

Or, carving the tubes to quarter tubes, and joining them with fillets.

[matijaerceg]

A quick and dirty way to add a fake bevel-looking edge is, if you’re using a PBR, enable height map, and play with Displace Scale, which will offset faces in the direction of the normal, and give a beveled look from some (but not all) angles:

May need to use Attribute Create SOP to get the normals all going outward.

It’s sort of the best quick in-TouchDesigner thing I’ve been able to do while waiting for a Bevel Edge SOP