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Transfer:

The "Transfer" button is a tool that will allow you to transfer the point position of one object that is topologically the same as another object whose point order is different. If you have ever run into a case where bringing a mesh in and out of a program accidentally changed the point order, no longer allowing you to use the mesh, this tool will get you back to what you need!

NOTE: This tool does not change the point order of a mesh. Instead, it moves the point positions to match the other mesh.

Example:

The following example show two different shaped heads that use the exact same topology. However, the point order of these two meshes is not the same. This can happen in several different ways, from inporting from another 3d package, to extracting or combining meshes, ect. Its not important how it happened, what is important is that you have the ability to fix this. (This solution comes up way more than you might think in an actual production environment)

A blend shape has been added to the left object to show how the point order is not the same. If the point order was the same, when activating the blend shape, you would see the left head turn into the right head.

In order to fix this problem, we will duplicate the left head mesh. We want to do this because as stated above, this tool does not change the point order of a mesh. It simply transfers the point position to another mesh that is topologically the same.

Now that the mesh is duplicated, we need to tell the tool where to start to try and figure out which points are the same. The tool needs to loop through all of the vertices and edges to find the corresponding components on the other mesh.

NOTE: Because the tool loops through the mesh, this will only transfer points that are contained meshes. This means that if you combine a sphere and a cube, and try to transfer that, only the components that the tool can loop through will transfer. So if you selected a vertex and an edge on the sphere, the sphere will transfer, but not the cube.

In order to do the transfering, you are required to select a vertex and its sharing edge on the mesh that you want to transfer the points from, and then the same exact vertex and sharing edge on the mesh that you want to transfer the positions to. The order is very important! You must also always choose an edge that is attached to the vertex!

As you can see the exact same vertex and edge is selected on the mesh that we want to transfer the points too.

After clicking the Transfer button, the tool will modify the points of the second selected mesh. As you can see it now matches the position exactly based off of the Local Position. If you want it to match the world position, you must select that Radio Button. Be aware, if your mesh is moved off center, and you use World Space, if you try to apply a blend shape, the mesh will shift in space. For the most part, you will probably always use Local Position.

Now that the positions are transfered, we can apply a blendshape to the duplicated model to show that everything worked correctly.

Now you have a mesh with the correct point order and the correct positioning!

NOTES:

Stray vertices will cause the tool to error out.

If the topology is not the same between the two objects, the tool will error out and select the vertex where the topology is not the same. This can make it easy to find where the problem is if you think the meshes are the same.

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