Tools for making shapes, like... err, cuboids.

Robinson

So the paradigm in Daz seems to be "here's a cube of side length X, now scale it".  Is there a tool or script that will allow me to make cuboids any size I like, in cm or inches, on any side?  This seems a bit limited.  As a follow up, Sketchup has a nice "move" feature whereby you can choose a vertex on the source, a corner say, and then click a destination vertex and it'll snap the model to it.  Is there anything similar on Daz, or a tool to help with it?  This one tripped me up when trying to make a modular building some time ago.

Use case:  I'm trying to make "thick glass" panes fit into holes where windows should be and it's a... pain.

Silent Winter

A default cube is 1mx1mx1m (I think you can change this to other units too) - if you need 34cmx12cmx20cm, scale as 34%, 12%,20% - that's almost as easy as putting those values as cm into a modeller to make a cuboid.

Robinson

That never occured to me!  Of course, that's one way of doing it.

Silent Winter

As for object snapping - the align tool comes close as it'll put objects next to/on top of/etc each other. Not quite as easy as selecting 2 verts though.

tj_1ca9500b

One potential downside to stretching a cube is that if you want evenly shaped texture face polygons, well your long side will be stretched while your short sides will be squished.

A few random thoughts:

Hexagon is now free, so if you want your vertexes evenly distributed, you could 'weld' a few cubes together, after deleting the 'interior' polygon faces if you want to keep your poly counts down.  This is a bit more work of course.  You can also use Hexagon to subdivide a polygon on a particular side of a cube, so if the numbers are evenly divisible, yeah just use the select faces feature, then split up the polygon face as needed to create the number of polygons you need for that particular face.

The reason you'd want to go to all this trouble is if you want to have a bunch of 'square sized' sections on a face, which you'd then break down into separate texture groups.  Say if you wanted to have the '8 bit style' smiley face and eyes on your cube use different textures than the rest of the polygons.

Also, along the 'smiley face' line of thought, you could use the extrude feature in Hexagon to 'recess' the eyes and smile, by selecting the appropriate subsquares and then pushing them inward, or outward if that's what you want instead.

Anyways, this is all extra work.  You can also just select each face separately in Daz Studio using the geometry editor tool and create a separate material zone for each side of your stretched cube.  That way you can use specific texture maps that are scaled appropriately for the size of the face in question.  Say if you wanted to put a different photo on each side of a cube, that you can swap out as needed, or want to create a 'simple' panel to put on a wall with a picture on a front and metal edges on the sides.

fastbike1

You can change the initial dimensions to anything you want. you can also change individual dimensions by typing a number instead of using scaling.