I'm trying to create the look of about 15 grooves being cut in metal like in the attached image. So far I've tried two different methods and both seem much too heavy for the amount of grooves I need. I've tried using volumes with a vdbcombine set to subtract. It seems promising but the converted polygon mesh gets very jagged near the curved edge and I need that to be pretty clean. Communicating precision is key. Not sure what can be done to improve the mesh quality.

I've also tried displacing points with an attribute transfer. It works, but my starting mesh is going to have to be massive. Either method seems like it's going to take tremendous amounts of cache data just to get to the point where I can render. Maybe, for this effect that's just the reality, but I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts on making this more efficient? R&D file is attached. Thanks for any thoughts on this.


Brian

Hey brian,
What about using blend shapes. You could Build a cutted version and a clean version of the piece.
Then blend the two shapes with a custom attribute.

you could also try a boolean operation.
Cheers
CYTE

render booleans:
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/31575/ [www.sidefx.com]

combined with a ramp displacement like here:
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/51508/ [www.sidefx.com]

:-?

Ah! Render booleans! That seems like the speed + lightweight combination that I need. Thank you both for the replies.

Brian

boolean anim…
play the anim to see the effect