Mesh Editing

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Mesh Editing

Often an outlying tracker may need to be removed from the mesh, for example, the top of a phone pole that creates a “tent” in an otherwise mostly flat landscape. You

can select that vertex, and right-click Remove and Repair . Removed vertices are not deleted, to give you the opportunity to reconnect them. Use the Delete Unused Vertices operation to finally remove them.

Tip: There are toolbars with many perspective view operations. Right-click and look in the toolbars submenu; for example see the Mesh toolbar for editing operations.

Long triangles cause display problems in all animation packages, as interpolation across them does not work accurately. SynthEyes allows you to subdivide facets by placing a vertex at center, and converting the facet to three new ones, or subdivide the edges by putting a vertex at the center of each edge and converting each facet to four new ones. This latter operation is generally preferable. (Detail: the result is non- watertight because some new vertices appear along edges of existing triangles. A watertight version is available through Sizzle and Synthia, though necessarily it can produce some skinny triangles.)

Also, you can add vertices directly using the Add Vertices tool, or move them around with the move tool. Both of these rely on the grid to establish the basic positioning, typically using the Grid menu’s Align to Trackers/Vertices option. You can then add vertices on the grid, move them along it, or move them perpendicular to it by shift-dragging. You can move multiple vertices by lasso-selecting them, or shift-clicking them from Move mode. There are a variety of tools on the perspective view's right-click menu, see the perspective view reference.

Important! : if you move vertices, or add new ones, they will not update if you update the mesh after a new Solver operation; see the next section.

After we get into object tracking, you will see that you can use the mesh construction process to generate starting points for object modeling efforts as well.

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