In D5634#131109, @Pablo Dobarro (pablodp606) wrote:

• Rename poisson_ratio to compressibility

Note that the Poisson's Ratio represents how much a solid deforms transversally when a longitudinal force is applied to it, so the transversal section goes thinner for traction longitudinal forces, and thicker with compression longitudinal forces. It's a common term in rigid solid mechanics and it will be missed with this relabeling. "Compressibility" is not related to this, it's not even a concept applied to solids' physics but fluids', and in any case I'm not sure if it provides a clear insight towards the behaviour of the tool when tweaking this property. So I would keep the Poisson's Ratio concept present somewhere, in the description at least; but maybe keeping it as property name accompanied with a description like "amount of transversal deformation caused by every (axial) deformation applied" is more suited and hopefully understandable enough.

One last thing: this property is hardly ever over 0.5 for real materials, and has an average value of 0.3. Maybe it's a good idea to reflect this in the ui, while introducing a value up to 1 manually is allowed.

In D5634#131171, @Fran Marz (franMarz) wrote:

So I would keep the Poisson's Ratio concept present somewhere, in the description at least; but maybe keeping it as property name accompanied with a description like "amount of transversal deformation caused by every (axial) deformation applied" is more suited and hopefully understandable enough.

That's much too technical, we can't assume a user knows what "transversal deformation" means.

If "Compressibility" is confusing for someone who knows physics, we can rename it to something like "Volume Preservation".

The description can be something like. "Poisson ratio for elastic deformation. Higher values preserve volume more, but also lead to more bulging".

One last thing: this property is hardly ever over 0.5 for real materials, and has an average value of 0.3. Maybe it's a good idea to reflect this in the ui, while introducing a value up to 1 manually is allowed.

We can test if 0.3 works better, but really this is something we should decide empirically. We're not doing an actual physics simulation here and digital sculpting is not necessarily most useful with real material parameters. The paper shows higher values than 0.5 are useful, so I wouldn't set even a soft limit on that.

I know, but I had to point it out. As long as the expression "Poisson's Ratio" is not lost, I think it's ok. I find both Volume Preservation as property name as well as the new description so much better. Thank you.