Intermediate or edge/face particle creation?

[josemendez]

That'd be really cool, like a best-of-both approach where it can use both surface and voxel representations? Does it prefer surface vertices and use voxels to fill in the gaps?

Works more or less like this:
- Any voxels overlapped by a mesh triangle are marked as a "surface" voxel.
- The exterior or the voxels is flood-filled and marked as "exterior" voxels, think of this like a cast of the model.
- All remaining "empty" voxels are interior to the mesh, so we mark them as "interior".

(The rationale behind flood filling the exterior of the model instead of the interior is that this handles disconnected parts of the model automatically)

Volume particles are generated for the interior voxels only, "surface" voxels are ignored. Then, the surface of the mesh is sampled as usual (one particle per vertex, unless they overlap).

You can select 3 sampling methods: surface only, volume only (in this case, surface voxels do generate particles), or both.

My thought for surface blueprints was just to create a second generation of vertices in the middle of any face or edge larger than the particle size. We could just keep subdividing the surface until the distance between vertices is less than the particle length, then we have a continuous density of particles but it's still only using the surface geometry and there's no need for internal particles or voxelisation.

Imho, there's not much interest in using more particles than vertices for surface sampling. The reason is that the extra particles wouldn't aid much regarding deformation quality (skinning quality depends only on how many vertices your mesh has, and how many bone influences per vertex), collision detection, or performance (more particles = worse performance).

Maybe I'm not aware of a particular use case that would benefit from this?