Digital Art Zone

Hi All,

I’m using Hexagon to build a model for my job, and was wondering if anyone has had problems where parts of the model, or the entire model suddenly became invisble.
All of the parts of the model are still present in the scene tree, with the ‘eye’ icon showing that everything should be visible.  Selecting a part shows that the missing part still has the correct location and size.

I tried resetting the preferences, then tried un-installing and re-installing Hexagon, without any luck.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
—Carl

carl1954 - 15 June 2012 08:33 AM

Hi All,

I’m using Hexagon to build a model for my job, and was wondering if anyone has had problems where parts of the model, or the entire model suddenly became invisble.
All of the parts of the model are still present in the scene tree, with the ‘eye’ icon showing that everything should be visible.  Selecting a part shows that the missing part still has the correct location and size.

I tried resetting the preferences, then tried un-installing and re-installing Hexagon, without any luck.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
—Carl

I don’t know why it does that, but it’s ‘gone’.

Close Hexagon and re-open it; then open the last saved project file and carry on.

you also may try re-setting the view.

sometimes, when working very close, i’ve lost the model—well, not really lost, but it becomes so wee small you can’t see it.

resetting the view will fix that.

That’s a different scenario.

For that situation there’s a nifty button to find it again. Click on the object [anything that is in the grid area] ... and then click the ‘find it viewer’ ... that maybe what you’re referring to.

So far I’ve only encountered the .obj totally vanishing situation in the latest release of Hexagon. Shows on the Scene Tab; ‘viewer’ goes to empty space! There’s “nothing”. Nothing to do but go back to a previous save.

Thanks for the replies, Patience and Hiker, I think I found the problem.

The incremental saving didn’t help much in this case.  I had 10 versions of the model.  When the problem occurred in the 10th version. it also started occurring from version 5 on up.

I exported the model as an .obj and looked at it in Carrara and saw the same thing - many pieces missing.  I then pulled it into UnWrap3d where all parts were visible, and found issues with some boolean operations.  I couldn’t fix those issues in UnWrap3d, so I exported the model as another .obj and imported that into Carrara for repair.  Once done, I exported that as a third .obj and was able to view and work with it inside Hexagon.

Another thing fixed in UnWrap3d that may have contributed to the problem was very long group names resulting from nested groups in Hexagon.  I shortened these up in UnWrap3d before I was able to see the complete model in Carrara.  If there’s a character limit on group names, Hexagon could have gotten confused on multiple groups having the same truncated names.

If I had to guess though, my money would be on the booleans as the culprit.

—Carl

yeah…  booleans will bite you in the butt everytime…. they should be outlawed.

In fact, I’ve never used a boolean in Hexagon and don’t intend to… i’ve seen the havock it can bring.  I’ve also not really seen anything that could not be done without booleans.

@patience… ya.. thet’s what i was calling the ‘reset view’ button… it also work good when you object is upside down and you can’t get it uprightr.

hiker_1 - 15 June 2012 07:21 PM

yeah…  booleans will bite you in the butt everytime…. they should be outlawed.

With booleans, it depends on how you use them. But I would agree that the way Hexagon performs booleans should be outlawed.

.

Hi Carl,

carl1954 - 15 June 2012 04:04 PM

If I had to guess though, my money would be on the booleans as the culprit.

Daz brought in some bugs with the boolean functions in the latest update(along with introducing numerous other problems not present in earlier versions).
If you can try and get hold of Hexagon 2.1 or 2.2 (2.2 was given away free on a cover disk). The booleans work as originally implemented (although, there is still the problem with Hexagon rebuilding the resulting mesh and triangulating non-planer and merging planer facets).

- Steve

I generally try to avoid booleans also and Hex does seem to discourage their use. In the last projects I was working on the only way I could find to get the precise dimensions I wanted tho was to use booleans. It required a lot of dissolving edges and re-adding faces, not to mention a lot of welding points. It’s tedious but not so much as all that export/import to different apps would be.