Digital Art Zone

I have been trying to model clothes for DS in Hexagon and have run into a problem:  when I try to add thickness to my model, it doesn’t actually add to the geometry - it just seems to create a ‘ghost’ figure of the thickness and it will only let me select polys from the original mesh.  I can’t figure out how to apply it properly so I can select the ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ polys individually.  Any advice would be muchly appreciated!

BeanKranski - 01 September 2012 02:34 AM

when I try to add thickness to my model, it doesn’t actually add to the geometry - it just seems to create a ‘ghost’ figure of the thickness and it will only let me select polys from the original mesh

It does add geometry. It duplicates the surfaces of your selected object, offsets the duplicated surface to the inside or outside (user selectable) of the object surface, and bridges the 2 surfaces to create a new “form”.

The “ghost” effect is caused by your transparency being turned on. Turn it off to see the figure as a solid.

With 2 surfaces, one in the foreground and one behind it, you can only select polygons on the one in the foreground. Turn the scene so that you’re looking at the other side of the object to select the other faces.

If your “thickened” object forms a pocket that makes it difficult to access surfaces inside it, you can select the outer faces and hide them, leaving the inner faces exposed to work on. If you have to do that repeatedly, you can select the outside faces and assign them to a shading domain. Then you can select that domain (which highlights the faces) and hide it. Then you can assign the “unassigned faces” to a second domain. Thereafter you can hide/show whichever domain faces you want to work on.

PS: Just an aside, but DAZ’s genius spell checker flagged the word “selectable”. Try it and see the ludicrous “corrections” it suggests  

Thanks for the reply afreaginname.

I realise now where i was going wrong (wasn’t re-selecting the object after doing the thickness thing).  I guess the thickness problem is my brain and not Hexagon.  All sorted now…

P.S.  I tried spell-checking ‘selectable’ and it’s not picking up any error…i’m kinda curious as to what it was suggesting for you   Doesn’t like the way i spell ‘realise’ though, must be an American robot doing the spell-checking…

Glad to hear you got the problem solved!

My “selectable” had non-options like “select able” and “select-able”, as well as “delectable”. I added “selectable” to the dictionary, and I assumed it would write it to a local cookie. Since you aren’t getting the error, now I’m wondering if it got added to the DAZ site dictionary - a disturbing notion… 

I got the same error you did with “realise”, and I added that to the dictionary as well. Check the word on your end again and see if the error persists or has been fixed.

The ghostly look is there until you validate.

PS Probably not a good idea to add thickness to clothing?

Roygee - 01 September 2012 12:02 PM

PS Probably not a good idea to add thickness to clothing?

Better to just make a small inner extrude to fake the thickness.

when I try to add thickness I get some weird geometry.  Some vertex end up way of the mesh.

That is something that pops up very occasionally - haven’t seen anyone give an explanation for it.  I have tried to get it to happen deliberately by reversing a normal and adding thickness and this does imitate that anomaly to a small extent, but not enough to explain it.

Only cure I’ve found is to delete the offending mesh and start over.

Roygee - 30 November 2012 01:14 PM

That is something that pops up very occasionally - haven’t seen anyone give an explanation for it.  I have tried to get it to happen deliberately by reversing a normal and adding thickness and this does imitate that anomaly to a small extent, but not enough to explain it.

Only cure I’ve found is to delete the offending mesh and start over.

Not just a Hex thing either…I’ve had it happen in Blender, Wings3d and others.

It also seems to happen more often when there is some other problem with the mesh than with a ‘clean’ mesh.  I’ve also seen it happen on one import of a mesh and not another of the same mesh (importing from say obj and not opening a mesh in the model’s native format..in that case, it happens all the time).

Sometimes, if it’s just one vertex that goes shooting off, you can bring it back into place and have it stay…but only sometimes. If it’s more than just a couple (I’d say definitely 4 or 5 MAX) then it’s not very likely any amount of tweaking/pulling back into place will help.  So nuking the mesh and starting over is really the only viable option (or at least reverting back to a much earlier save…)

This isn’t a case of offsetting the mesh (thickness) a certain distance such that polygons would start to overlap each other ?

That would confuse the program and possibly cause this scenario.

Given you mesh has pointed end I suspect this is what is happening. The same thing happens in expensive software also.

Nurbs software of course doesn’t have this problem because it is working with surfaces instead of polygons.

Ghostman - 02 September 2012 06:00 AM

Roygee - 01 September 2012 12:02 PM

PS Probably not a good idea to add thickness to clothing?

Better to just make a small inner extrude to fake the thickness.

In one of the tutorials I’ve bought for creating clothing they added thickness and then deleted the faces that were unnecessary leaving just the edge faces and a couple of loops around the openings.  I think it was one of the fugasi tutorials…