Can't figure out Normalize

[ggatlanta]

Hi,

I'm new to GeoMaps. I'm a 3D artist, using 3DS Max to create drawings for patent applications. I purchased GEOMaps specifically to create curvature maps to highlight convex and concave surfaces.

As you can see in the attached image, I can't seem to get the flat areas to be white. In fact, two adjacent flat areas exhibit 2 degrees of convexity. I understand that the normalize setting is what I should use to deal with this, as the flat areas are vastly less dense than the curved area. But I can't seem to get these long, straight areas to be white.

Can anyone help?

[boomer]

Graham,

The curvature calculation is based on the neighboring vertices. My guess is that for this example the long stretches have only 1 vertex at each end, and therefore inherit the curvature of the curved neighbors. Simple solution is to increase the number of vertices on your object.

Make sense?

[ggatlanta]

Thanks Matthew,

I must be misinterpreting what you are saying, because as you can see from the attached image, the strut I added vertices to actually got worse. What am I missing here?

[boomer]

Graham,

Try adding verts along the edges only, not just chopping up long sections.

-Matt

[ggatlanta]

Matthew,

Sorry for being dense, but I don't understand. What's the difference between chopping long sections and adding verts? Personally, I've never added verts to a spline before to achieve anything other than create a joint for a spline to terminate in. But as you can see from my little test, adding verts didn't do anything. Am I missing something here?

Thank you so much for your time.

[boomer]

Graham,

Try Tessellate as illustrated below. The trick is ensuring that the faces with sharp edges don't have large areas, as the curvature value is spread across the area of the face. So again, chopping the mesh along the edge will do the trick:

[ggatlanta]

Matthew,

I see where you're coming from, but when you tessellated your cube, weren't you in essence doing just what I did in GeoMap-Example-3.jpg? And yet my results were practically the opposite of yours!