Hi All
Some weeks ago I got a pretty interesting mantis bug repport about LiveClay couldn’t correctly handle long stretched triangles. I’ve develop for current LC tools a very advanced splits triangle criterias that ensure we always get nice triangulation, nice topology and nice valence on the mesh, in a very organic like way.
Also 3DCoat almost always deals with high density meshes so I never saw the artit use cases dealing with such ill formed triangles…it turns out it was more common that I initially tougth!
Any low poly model imported from every general purpose 3dpackage can have such triangles and in furniture modeling those are everywhere, so yes, hard surface low density meshes was a missing spot for LC tools.
The largest edge split triangle will allow to split ill or long stretched triangles in a correct way for the sculpt tools.
And the solution was the simplest split criteria: split only the longest edge of a face. It will always subdivide ill triangles in a way they become tractables latter, something was not happen with previous criteria, but ofcourse a tradeoff must be made, between nice topology and stroke preserving shape. So former advanced split criteria will still be the best when mesh density is relatively high compared to the brush size or mesh is organic.
Summarizing, there´s now two options for split faces: Soft (previous advanced algorithm for organic or dense meshes that keeps nice topology/geometry ) and Hard (new algorithm for keep hard edges and preserve as much geometry as possible at the cost of topology quality)
Cheers!
Soft split is the previous advanced split algorithm while Hard is the new split for hard surfaces or stretced triangles.