Mesh Editing Gestures

In CozyBlanket, you modify the edit mesh by directly drawing over the target mesh. After you finish drawing a stroke, CozyBlanket will try to execute a mesh editing operation that matches your gesture.

  • All gestures in CozyBlanket are performed with a single stroke. The gesture will be evaluated and executed after you finish the stroke and lift the Apple Pencil.

  • The whole stroke has to be over the target mesh. Drawing over empty space will cancel the gestures.

  • The edit mesh will display a thick wireframe when there is an appropriate number of mesh elements in the view that allow gestures to be recognized correctly.

Mesh gesture precision

You can follow these guidelines in order to improve the gesture recognition precision:

  • Always try to draw the gestures using straight lines with and sharp corners.

  • Avoid drawing gestures too small or too big in relation to the size of the screen.

  • Try to work at the recommended zoom level. CozyBlanket displays a thick wireframe of the retopology mesh when you are viewing the model at a distance that allows gestures to be recognized properly.

  • Try avoiding heavily distorted topology. CozyBlanket recognized gestures better with evenly distributed and regular (quads as square-shaped as possible) topology.

  • Try moving the camera a bit before repeating the gestures.

  • If a gesture is not being properly recognized, try drawing the gesture including more information. For example, try drawing over existing edges of the mesh when creating a new quad if the quad is created incorrectly.

Edit Mesh Properties

  • The edit mesh only supports 3-sided and 4-sided faces. N-gons are not supported.
  • The edit mesh does not support non-manifold geometry (loose edges, loose vertices, edges with 3 faces…). There are no gestures to create loose non-manifold mesh elements.
  • The edit mesh face normal should always be oriented towards the same side. Gestures creating a face adjacent to another face with a flipped normal will fail.
  • Edit mesh faces have back-face culling.
  • Edit mesh is not optimized for high poly geometry visualization and editing. Creating high poly meshes using the edit mesh will affect performance.

Edit Mesh Occlusion

The occlusion threshold of the edit mesh is calculated automatically based on the contents of the view. In order to avoid occlusion artifacts or unwanted occlusion:

  • Avoid importing models with double sided surfaces or non manifold geometry as target meshes.
  • Avoid creating edit mesh faces that are too far from the surface of the target mesh.

Face Loop tags

You can draw over an existing edge to create a loop tag for the entire face loop. Tagged faces will update automatically as the edit mesh topology is updated, following the tagged loop flow. You can remove a tag by dragging over an edge included in the loop tag.

Loop tags don’t have any effect on the exported edit mesh or the behavior of other mesh editing features.

Secondary Actions

By default the Apple Pencil will draw a white line that will be executed as a mesh editing gesture. There are a series of actions that can be activated temporally to assist the retopology process, overriding the default Apple Pencil behavior.

Relax

Smooths the topology under the Apple Pencil trying to achieve a regular quad layout. Corners and inner corners will be automatically pinned to help with the creation of regular grids.

Move

Moves the topology under the Apple Pencil with a smooth falloff by sliding vertices through the surface of the target mesh.

Erase

Deletes faces under the tip of the Apple Pencil as the stroke passes over them. When applying more pressure with the Apple Pencil, this action deletes vertices inside of a radius, deleting all isolated faces with them.

Patch clone

Marks a series of faces with the Apple Pencil in a single stroke. When the stroke ends, the marked faces are stored in screen spaces to be cloned in any other area of the model. A series of buttons will appear:

  • Clear: Deletes the content from the screen space patch copy.
  • Flip: Flips the patch copy on the screen space X axis.
  • Paste: Recreates the patch copy over the target mesh if possible.
  • Paste Once: Recreates the patch copy over the target mesh if possible and the deletes the patch copy.

The patch clone action will attempt to merge vertices from the patch with the existing edit mesh when pasting the patch. This can generate non-manifold geometry, causing the paste operation to fail. When this happens, the patch copy will flash in red and the operation will be automatically cancelled.

You can freely move the view and do other editing actions while the topology patch is in screen space.

Interaction Modes

The “Interaction Modes” option in the app menu can change how secondary actions are enabled. You can change these setting to match your available hardware or needs.

  • MultiTouch/Hold: This option can be used when you don’t have an Apple Pencil available. Secondary actions are enabled by holding down the action button. By holding down the Pencil action button, you can use a finger to draw mesh editing gestures, emulating the Apple Pencil. You can also emulate the Apple Pencil by holding down three fingers anywhere on the screen and then drawing mesh editing gestures with a fourth one.
  • Apple Pencil/Hold: This option can be used when an Apple Pencil is available. CozyBlanket will only draw mesh editing gestures with the Apple Pencil and multi touch emulation of the Apple Pencil will be disabled. Secondary actions can be executed by holding down the action buttons.
  • Apple Pencil/Select: With this option, secondary actions do not need to be hold down in order to be executed. The Apple Pencil will always perform the last selected secondary action, which has its button highlighted.