The MeshSliceTool allows you to slice a polygon mesh in a way, that the polgons nearest to a bone or another specified object get extracted to a new polygon object. So you no longer have to manually create slices of a character to allow animation in realtime for instance.
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Imagine you want to create slices of a character mesh, just select it and click Create -> Poly. Mesh -> KP_Tools -> MeshSliceTool. This opens up a ppg which offers automatic slice creation tools at the bottom and some advanced features to fine-tune the results. To automatically create slices click “create slices by picked root” in the “quick slice creation” category and then pick the root of the skeleton. Wait a few seconds and you get a new layer with the slices linked to the corresponding bones.
If you are satisfied with the result you may delete the ppg. If not you recognized a weakness of the automatic approach. Since the algorithm uses the skeleton layout to dicide how to slice, you may get some weird slices e.g. in the hips area.
To get rid of this issue use the buttons in the “advanced slice creation” category instead. They allow you to create colored clusters in a first step. These clusters represent the slices you get at the end of the process. The color of the clusters is the same as the one of the bone when “use bone color for slice” is checked and random if the box is unchecked. It just helps you to see which cluster/slice belongs to which bone. The other checkbox ensures that the scene is nice and clean after you finished your work with the tool. After creating the colored clusters by either pick the skeleton root or selecting the bones (I prefer the first option), you can “pick bone/object for assignment” to pick the hips bone and then click on “assign polys” to get another picking session to select some polys of the thighs which should to be part of the cluster that represents the slice around the hips. Please watch the first video tutorial to see how this works.
You can even use the tool to create extruded solid slices out of any polygon object by not only using bones but any other objects like nulls, etc.
Just take a look at the second tab of the ppg, set some values and hit one of the create buttons on the first tab. The second video tutorial takes a look at those additional features.
the “extrude options” tab with additional features
To download the tool as an XSI-Addon click the next link:
version notes:
v1.1: streamlined gui and added a button to assign a selection of polys to a another cluster/slice (easier and faster than use of picking session)
v1.01: added progress bar support
To download the video tutorials (Windows Media 9) click the following links:
MeshSlice_Tutorial1.wmvTutorial 1: main features (12.8 mb)
MeshSlice_Tutorial2.wmvTutorial 2: addtional features (4.9 mb)
(version 1.0 is used in videos)