addPointOnBG (LW 7.5, PC)

addPointOnBG

This plugin allows you to add new points just like the LW builtin '+' except the points are placed directly on the polygons you have in your BG layers. You can place them in any viewport, including the perspective viewport, and the point will appear directly under your mouse pointer, but snapped in depth to BG polygons. Just like with the '+' builtin, you can move the points around with the left mouse button and clone more off with the right. It works best if the BG layer contains planar polys (so to be safe, triangulate everything first). If you have problems or suggestions, contact me at plugins@ribsngibs.com. Spam me and I kick your ass.

An example of how to use it:

Start with a mesh. This is a really bad arm I made, by pushing and pulling points around from a cylinder.

The plugin prefers triangles, and it is only going to be snapping points to the actual faces, not the subdiv patch, so to get the best results, you want to turn to faces...

...subdivide it...

...and triangulate it...

Throw it in the BG, and select the "addPointOnBG" command.

Add points. It's hard to tell, but these points are appearing directly underneath my mouse in the perspective window. If you look in the ortho views you can see that the points are stuck onto the original arm surface.

Lots more points.

Well, I didn't exactly make a clean new mesh, but you can see that if you wanted to, you could pretty quickly lay down some nice clean splines around the various shapes (bicep, elbow, forearm muscles, etc.) without having to constantly rotate your view to see the 3D location of the point without having to drag things around in your ortho cams.

Last updated: Apr 26 2004