- As you're going through and creating your surfaces
through your reference data whether it's a (inaudible)
or a curve, whatever that may be,
you want to go through and verify to make sure that
the data that you create is within tolerance to your
background data or your input data.
And for that, we use a tool called Distance Analysis.
Specify the surface, specify the mesh or this could be
curves or whatever, and it lays out a tolerance,
maximum deviation tolerance, and I have that turned on
right over here, showing me the max values
where the issues reside.
And there are several display options here,
you can turn on and off if you want to see a color range,
where the deviations are located at.
Let me turn on the texture mapping so
we can see that color range.
You can see it gives you a nice indication of
how things are spread out across the surface,
where the tightest areas are located at,
the loosest areas are at.
Turn off my texture mapping, turn off that gradient display.
Discretization is how many samples it's measuring.
So if I have a very large mesh,
I may want more samples
just to make sure that it's checking
a lot more points along that surface.
It may take a little bit more time for it to happen,
to do the analysis, to perform it properly, but
it also allows you to verify that you don't have
any wild points or you don't have anything
really crazy going on along that surface.
Other things I can do are turn on my combs
and you don't really see anything so I'm going to
double the value, the length of the comb.
And as you can see, it reaches a certain point
where you can really see those combs.
And this is indicating to me basically
the color map, but in 3D space.
You can see where those deviations are occurring,
and the combs represent a different deviation,
the longer the comb the greater the deviation.
And you can run across those points and
get an idea of how big or how small that
deviation is back to the original surface.
I'm going to select combs, turn that off,
I'm going to leave everything as is, and
I want to create the distance analysis.
This is nice now at this point,
so if I were to go to something like Control Points,
and do a manipulation of this surface,
I just come in here, right mouse click and
go down to 3, right mouse click and go down to 3.
You can see I'm now creating a larger deviation
to the base reference and because of that I may need
to come in here and do some manipulation of this
surface to align it to get to where I want it to go.
So that's where the Distance Analysis is really handy,
it allows me to visualize where my deviations are at,
and again those deviations might be necessary
you may have a poor quality scan or maybe
your curves have a lot of issues, and larger amount of
deviation may give you a smoother surface,
but you may have to go back in there, tweak things,
to make sure you get the highlights flowing
into the part or away from the part,
the way that the stylist wants.