Hello! I wanted to reach out and see if anyone would possibly have any insights on how to approach this - I’d really like to make a script that functions like Marvelous Designer’s particle distance feature, ie taking a plane mesh and procedurally generating new retopology made up of equilateral triangles, in order to create a new mesh to use as a sim mesh. This script would be really helpful for my workflow, to be able to have this feature without the MD license - I just don’t know where to get started. This seems like something that’s beyond the capabilities of maya cmds, which is what I’m familiar with when automating anything in Maya.
Does anyone possibly have any thoughts about how the tool works in MD that might point me in the right direction? Thanks!
If you just want to get something done, I suggest just using the built-in maya Mesh -> Remesh option.
The trick is to add a polySmooth to your mesh to give it extra resolution to work with, and then remesh it. Then just play with the Max Edge Length Collapse Threshold and Smooth Strength options until you get something you like. Then If the triangles still aren’t even enough, you can also try adding a delta mush afterwards with Displacement turned to 0 and Inward Constraint turned to 1
There’s also Instant Meshes. It does an OK job, but sometimes leaves holes.
And I’m guessing you could probably throw it at MeshLab. I don’t know that software very well, but that seems like something it would do.
Now, if you’re doing this to learn … well, it’s not easy, but it is fun (at least I think so 
)
Maya’s Remesh is an “Edge Collapse” algorithm. High level overview: It picks an edge that’s below a given length, and collapses that edge. Repeat until there aren’t any edges over that length. Then, I’m guessing it does a shrinkwrap back onto the original object, otherwise it’d lose volume.
Then there’s things like “Poisson Disk Sampling” (Pronounced like “Pwa Sawn”)
And once you’ve got the points, you’ve gotta triangulate them, probably using something like a “Delaunay Triangulation”
And if you’re REALLY looking for for something crazy, check out how instant meshes works 
Thanks for the response! I’d like to take the learn pathway lol, I suspect this idea will not be easy at all but I bet learning the approach to something like this would open a lot of doors to be a better TA. Am I on the right path that remeshing/procedural retopo uses algorithms to manipulate points? There’s some research papers out there on algorithms for isotropic surfacing to get equilateral triangle meshes. Is there an approach for running algorithms in Maya? Would you only be capable of using algorithms native to Maya?
Additionally, is it true that MD seems to use not polygon plane meshes for pattern pieces, but vector shapes that are then converted to meshes to be used in sim? It’s really good at preserving borders when resampling patterns.
To do that in Maya, you will probably need to write a c++ plugin.
You also might be able to use python with some specific python modules (like libigl and numpy), but it’ll almost certainly be slower.
And I’m not sure what you’re actually asking about Marvelous… I think that’s the basic workflow, but I’ve never used it.
)