merge by distance - where was the removed vertex?
i'd love to know where that single vertex that was removed with the Merge by Distance operation was..
i'd love it if there was some way to see from where it was removed on my mesh.
dunno how to implement this but it would be great knowing where the vertex was so i could surely know what it did to my mesh (especially when working on fixing shading issues).
9 Comments
Someone made script for "select overlapping verts" here: blender.stackexchange.com/a/68334
Would be nice to have in base blender.
yes, it would be nice to have it in base Blender. Not having to depend on updates from the script-maker is a plus.
i was thinking about how this could be implemented, after waking up from a nightmare in the middle of the night. don't eat and sleep, kids! one way it could be implemented is to, on merge, Blender would select the vertices, which the "duplicates" got merged into.
because we need to select vertices to merge by distance anyway, we wouldn't lose any important vertex selection we might have had, when Blender, after the merge operation, selects the vertices that had the duplicates near them.
this would give us an idea of where the removed vertices where, without losing anything (ie, any important selection we might have had).
if there was an option like select by distance. It would select verts which are really close to eachother. So you could see them maybe
both "select by distance/ before merge" and "select after merged" options are nice. the before merge options would be good so we can manually merge them ourselves, and the after merge would be good to let Blender do it's thing, just show us the result of what it did so we can manually check if something broke.
I think the best implementation of this is that the 'merge by distance' node has a boolean field output that is just a selection of every merged vertex. This selection could be run into a separate geometry node, so you can see just that merged vertex, or run into the value input of the viewer node
You can probably use geometry nodes to compare the geometry before and after the merge to identify the points that would be removed by the merge. Then you can instance a little sphere on that location to make it visible.
cool. but having to add geometry nodes isn't really a convenient workflow.
With my thought process I'd probably prefer to add geometry nodes first and identify the too-close verts before hand then go in and merge them bit by bit. Don't think of geometry nodes as something you have to build yourself. Give someone on the forums $5 and ask nicely for a node group.