From the course: Meshmixer: Function and Command Reference

Attract - Meshmixer Tutorial

From the course: Meshmixer: Function and Command Reference

Start my 1-month free trial

Attract

“

- [Instructor] This video is on the Attract function, which is very, very useful for quite a number of things. We're starting off with a sphere here. It has some patterns on the back. The Attract tool, you can see what it does when you go to View to Show Objects Browser. The Attract tool is influenced by this little magnet here. The actual tool is under Sculpt and Attract. If you click on it and your scene isn't set up, this is what you'll get, Not enough objects. So what we need to do is we take the sphere here, and we can go to here to Edit to Duplicate. So what this did is it created another sphere. You'll see we have two objects here in our Object Browser, and they take up the exact same space. So I'm going to hit T for Transform, and move one of the spheres over, so now we have a copy of it. So now the Attract tool will work, but what we need to do first is click on one of these little magnets. That means that that is the tool you will be attracting towards. We're going to take our initial sphere here. I'm going to click on the magnet. So you see it kind of becomes transparent here, so this shape will never be affected by the tool, only the resulting other shape. So we're going to click on this tool, and now go to Sculpt, Brushes, Attract, no error this time. So what this does, we'll rotate around a little bit, and I will show you. I'll make the brush a little bit bigger and just click on the mesh. You'll see as I move around, or I can turn Flow on to make it happen automatically, that mesh is being sucked towards this other mesh. I'll zoom in a little bit so you can see even more. As I click over here, the sphere is being attracted to the other sphere, just to the surface. I can't actually select the other sphere right now because it is still an attraction target. So if I want to go back and edit this sphere, I can turn this little magnet off and now click on that object and now I'm influencing that one. If I click T and just move this object away, you can see that this other one has been drawn towards it. This is actually a little bit more dynamic, if we turn and rotate this around. We'll rotate it so that these little spikes are pointing towards that, go back to the other sphere, click on the magnet, and go back to the Attract tool, under Brushes, Attract. Now, when I click on this, I can actually turn Refinement on so that I don't get these jagged edges. With Refinement on, it makes it a lot more of a consistent result because the tool can add in triangles as needed. So I'll actually make this brush very, very large and have it sucked down towards here, go underneath. And notice my mouse is passing through the transparent object, totally valid to do that. So it's coming towards it, towards it. I can turn Refinement up to make it a lot more. And I can also do other things. You notice that it's attracting right towards the closest part of the target. I can go in here to the Drag tool, drag some of this out in this direction, and now the Attract tool will be attracted to a different place, a little bit more on this side. So I'll turn this target off, click on it, and press T to transform it and move it away. And we'll see we've made some spikes in that mesh, based on spikes that were there. So this only works on two objects and would be very good, for example, biomedical uses, if you had a scan of somebody's arm, you could have a cast that was a premade object that you can suck down onto the person's arm and it would match their geometry perfectly. That's the Attract tool.

Contents