From BlenderWiki
Laplacian Smooth and Shape Enhanced Modifier
Mode: Any mode
Panel: Modifiers
Description
The Laplacian Smooth and Shape Enhanced modifier allows you to reduce noise on a mesh's surface with minimal changes to its shape, and exaggerates a shape using a Laplacian smoothing modifier in the reverse direction using a single parameter, factor, that supports negative and positive values: negative for enhancement and positive for smoothing.
The Shape enhanced method exaggerates a shape using a Laplacian smoothing operator in the reverse direction.
The Laplacian Smooth is useful for objects that have been reconstructed from the real world containing undesirable noise. A mesh smoothing tool removes noise while still preserving desirable geometry as well as the shape of the original model.
The Laplacian Smooth and Shape Enhanced modifier is based on a curvature flow Laplace Beltrami operator in a diffusion equation.
The Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces together with Shape Enhancement can easily generate families of shapes by changing a single parameter.
Options
- Repeat
- Repetitions allow you to run the Laplacian smoothing and Shape Enhancement multiple times. Each repetition causes the flow curvature of the mesh to be recalculated again, and as a result it removes more noise at every new iteration in Laplacian smoothing cases (positive factor) using a small Factor < 1.0. In a Shape Enhancement case (negative Factor) multiple iterations can magnify the noise.
- Repeat: 0 Disables the modifier and no repetition is made.
- Repeat: 1 to 200 Number of repetitions to be done by the modifier. Be careful with large numbers of vertices, because it will take a lot of time to execute all iterations.
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- Lambda factor
- The Lambda factor ranges from -1000.0 to 1000.0; this factor controls the amount of displacement of every vertex along the curvature flow.
- Lambda factor: -1000.0 to 0.0 Using a Lambda factor you can enhance the shape, preserving desirable geometry.
- Lambda factor: 0.0 Disables the modifier and no smoothing or enhancing is done.
- Lambda factor: 0.0 to 5.0 Using a small Lambda factor, you can remove noise from the shape without affecting desirable geometry.
- Lambda factor: 5.0 to 1000.0 Using a large Lambda factor you get smoothed versions of the shape at the cost of losing fine geometry details.
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- Lambda border
- The Lambda border ranges from -1000.0 to 1000.0 . Borders are treated differently. There is no way to calculate the curvature flow on them. For this reason the Lambda factor just smooths or enhances them.
- Lambda border: -1000.0 to 0.0 Enhance the borders.
- Lambda border: 0.0 Disables the modifier and no smoothing on the borders is done.
- Lambda border: 0.0 to 10.0 Smooths the borders.
- Lambda border: 10.0 to 1000.0 Collapses the borders in a small circle.
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- X, Y, Z
- Toggle buttons to enable/disable hard constraints in the X, Y and/or Z axis directions.
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- Preserve Volume
- The smoothing process can produce shrinkage. That is significant for large Lambda factor or large Repeat values; to reduce that effect you can use this option.
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- Vertex Group
- A vertex group name, to constrain the effect to a group of vertices only. Allows for selective, real-time smoothing or enhancing, by painting vertex weights.
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- Normalized Version
- The modifier has two versions, the normalized version that does not depend on face size, and the other that is dependent on the face size. Be careful with the face-size-dependent version, which can produce peaks.
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Hints
Meshes with a great number of vertices, more than ten thousand (10,000), may take several minutes for processing; you can use small portions of the mesh for testing before executing the modifier on the entire model.
Examples
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See Also
Category: Modifiers
