Surface Inflate (blender addon)

Surface Inflate is a simple tool for inflating the surface of mesh.

It works well for grid based surface (eg: sub-divided cube).

It has two modes :

Inflation Mode :

Select two faces then run the tool

It works by selecting two faces. The tool those two faces for forming the axis for inflation.

It affect all flat faces (defined by angle setting) that are between the selected two faces

It also works for iregular angle.

It also works for two faces that are on different surface (work for some cases).

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Bezier Curve Mode

Select any faces as you like (it will expand along its normal direction)

It will inflate all your selected faces.

You can set the area affected by inflation, similar to blender's proportional editing.

You can have multiple selection and inflate all together.

You can inflate across any normals.

You can tweak the Bezier Curve parameters.

There are 4 control points, the 1 parameter is the outer area, the 4 parameter is the center area.

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Difference Between Two Modes

Inflation Mode (A shape in below pic) produce perfect circular surface (like a half circle) because it shift the vertices, so the result surface has evenly spaced faces.

Bezier Curve Mode (B shape in below pic) moves the vertices up along the normals. The height of moving is depending on Bezier Curve interpolation. The curve is bell shape and the center is the heightest point. Since it is a curve, we can tweak the curve shape by 4 parameters in menu.

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Usage

To use the tool, go to blender's Edit mode, switch to face mode,

Select faces, then right-click in the 3D viewport.

Surface Inflate is located at the bottom of the Blender's pop-up context menu.

There is a bottom menu at the Left-Bottom of the screen.

You can change the mode and parameters.

Mode : Please read the above descriptions for difference of two modes. To use Inflation mode, you need to select two separated faces.

To use Bezier Curve mode, you can select any number of faces.

Inflation ratio : the size of inflation

Limit angle : when using Inflation mode, this angle is used for defining the surface faces to be included. This is the angle difference of face normals.

Threshold : this value is used for defining the boundary of the inflation area. When two vertices are very close in python, there are tiny errors and they are not considered equal. This value 0.0001 is used for defining equal.

Area : Only used by Bezier Curve mode, the area for inflation

Curve : The 4 control points for Bezier curve. 1 th point is the outer area, 4 th point is the center

This is a free addon !

Feel free to play with it : )

Enjoy !

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