Creating 3-D Curves with Flexes

SynthEyes 2204 has many improvements to increase the usability of flexes, which are curves in 3‐D space, for modeling and other tasks. This tutorial shows how you can use them.

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Hi, this is Russ Andersson with a little walk-through of what you might do in SynthEyes 2204 with Flexes, which got some love this version. Flexes were created as a cool kind of curve tracking, to be able to create 3-D curves in space from shots. Unfortunately, many curves aren't fixed in space, or the camera doesn't move usefully. Despite that, Flexes are useful for modeling curves in 3-D space. Here's how. The objective is to create a flex on the arch of this door. I'm going to start wirth a pre-solved scene, because I had to hack out trackers on these tree branches, and add a couple of useful ones. I'm going to select a bunch of these trackers, then put the Grid up there. Now I can right-click and select Flexes to be created. Flex is listed on all of the creation-object menus. You can create flexes from the Top, Front, etc Views too. In the perspective view, drag out the first two points, then continue clicking for additional points. In the other views, just click, click, click. Right-click when you're done. You can select the control points and move them around. You can shift-click to add a control point. Or select a point and hit the delete key. We can also use the normal Place Mode to put the control points onto a mesh or lidar dataset. If we add a Hierarchy View, you can see the Flexes there, with visibility, color, lock, and export controls. So let's talk about exporting. If we export now, the export would consist only of these control points. That may be what we need if they'll be used to build a spline downstream. If we want to export a more continuous curve, the Flex operations panel can set that up, by converting these control points, also called seeds, to more densely-packed waypoints, either evenly spaced or spaced at a fixed distance apart along the curve, for example for a constant-speed path. If you're building a mesh inside SynthEyes, the Convert to Trackers button is helpful, because the trackers can easily be turned into vertices as part of that process. Check out the tooltips for the other options. Now we're ready to export. You have several choices, starting with the normal USD ASCII exporter and Filmbox FBX exporter. You can convert to a lidar mesh via the "Flex operations" script, which will give you a set of vertices that will export from any exporter. You can also export a flex as a .obj mesh --- but one that contains a line. Downstream software may or may not support lines in obj files, because that's a bit unusual. There is an importer for lines also. Or, if you're doing an analysis task, you can use the "Plain Text/Flex Vertex Coordinates" exporter to get a text file of numeric coordinates to crunch. Hopefully this video has given you some ideas for your next project. As always, please take a look at Flexes in the manual too. Thanks for watching.