fusionThing 1.0    

User Interface

Immediate mode

• Select the fT tool
• Ensure that 'Immediate mode' is checked
• Select one or more polygons as connector on a 'child' mesh
• Press 'Connector on Child' - 'Child Tag' and selection is added to object
• Change child tag settings if/as needed
• Select one or more polygons as connector on a 'parent' mesh
• Change parent settings in tool if/as needed - live wireframe preview shows what you will get
• Press 'Connector on Parent', and mesh is built!

Object mode

• Select the fT tool
• Ensure that 'Immediate mode' is unchecked
• Continue as with 'Immediate mode'
• After pressing 'Connector on Parent', parent mesh has a 'Parent Tag' and selection added
• Place parent mesh into a 'fusionThing object', and combined mesh will appear
• Unlike 'Immediate mode' - ALL settings can still be changed, and mesh will update.
• Parent Tag also contains additional settings that are not available in 'Immediate mode'.

fusionThing tool main panel

Help/Report - Prints report of any problems in the console window Conform, Interp. normals, and Curvature comp. - If/how child meshes are wrapped onto the parent mesh Single poly. conn. - Whether child mesh is applied for each polygon on parent, or each group of polygons Alignment settings - How meshes are aligned with each other Immediate section - Controls on if/how parent and child meshes are to be welded seamlessly, and also allows child meshes to weld to each other Build mode - Whether a single mesh, or multiple seperate meshes are created Connector on Child/Parent - Creates and applies tags (and in immediate mode, builds mesh) Live preview - Whether immediate mode shows you a live preview of what you are about to build

Child Tag attributes

Rel. prob - how often this child is used compared to others in same group Tweakable - Enables the next two banks of controls, that give you control over PSR adjustments and amount of random variation. (Very useful for animation work) Use normal distrib - Use a Normal (Gaussian) random distribution rather than a Uniform one Tweak before conform - controls how height tweaks are applied when conform is checked Stop at surface - stops child meshes from penetrating parent meshes Aim/Warp - Set of powerful controls allowing child meshes to rotate and twist in various ways towards/away from a target object. Provides many animation posibilities that would otherwise need complex PLA keyframing Alignment settings - as for tool Main panel, and Parent Tag

Parent Tag attributes

Child Density - How many copies of the child mesh to apply to each connector of the parent (good for multiplying up detail - e.g. grass) Choose child by texture - Very powerful - lets you use a material channel to control, for each connector, which child from a set should be used Random child - Choose child randomly vs. in sequence (both consider rel. prob. settings) Seed/Offset - Random seed or start offset, depending upon above setting Use texture Tweak - Very powerful - together with the next three blocks of parameters it lets you 'tweak' the child using one or several material channels to control. This is very powerful for use in motion graphics work, especially when combined with 'Choose child be texture' Remaining settings - Same as meaning in Tool panel - but apply live to current mesh object in hierarchy

fusionThing Object attributes

Global object build settings for Object mode Can be over-ridden as needed in Parent Tags

Sample object hierarchy in fT 'Object mode'

The six parent tags on 'Body' correspond to the six child groups - pods, nose, canopy, windows, starboard wing, port wing The 'jetPod' mesh has a child tag AND more parent tags - so as well as being a child mesh of 'Body', it also has its own child meshes (the inlet and inner detail meshes which are repeatedly applied to the jetPod mesh, which in turn is repeatedly connected to the parent 'Body' mesh Because this is Object mode, all parameters of each and every Parent tag and Child tag in the hierarchy can still be adjusted. Furthermore, changing the polygon selection tags will change where, and how many times, the child meshes are connected. Note that the very top of the hierarchy is a HyperNURBS object. fT has seamlessly welded the parts together into a smooth mesh which is well-suited to HyperNURBS sub-division. This was a design objective of fT from the very beginning