Cylinders Losing End Surfaces in Hexagon
bandito37_2000
Posts: 0
Greetings! I am brand new to Hexagon, so this could easily be just me doing something wrong, but I'd like to find out what's going on anyway.
When I create a cylinder using the 3D primitive, after creating the cylinder, I can change the number of points and segments for the cylinder. If I do change these values, the cylinder loses its top and bottom surfaces. If I don't change these values, then the top and bottom surfaces remain. So, am I doing something wrong by increasing the number of points in a segment? I have been following a video tutorial on creating a mug and can't get things to work the same way as in the video.
Thanks for any insight that you can provide!
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As I tend to put the ends on after creating the cylinder I don't recall having that problem. However, what is likely happening is that as one adds tessellation lines sometimes Hexagon will unweld a face. And if/when something goes completely kapooey with it, it will either remove the face or make a triangle face and a hole.
I notice though that you mention just adding points/dots ... add full lines. The points that are 'extra' [not forming a corner attachment] will cause an unwelded face to exist. And if those points were around the edge faces, yes they would be removed.
Little trick is to make your cylinder, then close the end holes [there's a button for that up top too], select those faces, then select the tessellation tool that has the 4 corners crossing in the centre. That will cause lines from all the dots to go through the centre. If there's a hole in the very centre, select all the dots there and use the weld them together button.
AND then, go to the Tools > Utilities and tell Hexagon to weld all the points together that are close to each other. Save project and continue working on it.
Long ago, Hexagon had the possibility of being a nice mesh making program ... but it has been largely abandoned.
As Catherine mentioned, tessalation can cause unwelded lines and faces. You must check for those frequently.
The best advice I can give is to save sequentially and often so you can back up a little bit when it is needed.
Hexagon seems to exist so there is a way for Daz Studio users to make morphs on already existing objects. It usually does that quite nicely.
But the poor functionality for modeling from scratch and the cumbersome issues with texturing have driven me to other programs for those purposes.
If you choose the cylinder from the Primitives Menue in Hexagon you click, drag and drop to create the cylinder (if necessary adjust the number of segments (Sections) and polygon (Points per secction) in the properties menue - only possible at time of creation). Hexagon will display the cylinder and mark both ends white (at least in my version). This indicates that those two faces are open (in case you want to create a tub, beaker or similar). By clicking on the white lines (they turn red) you can close one or both end of the mesh.
If you have a cylinder (or another mesh) with openings you want to close: select object, go to Vertex Modelling menue and select Close. Again all open faces in the object should be marked by white lines. Clicking on those will close those faces (so you can close an endface in your cylinder even after creation).
Hope this will be helpfull. Personally I think Hexagon is much more useful and capable than it seems on the first glance, expecially in its very easy connection with DS.
But I admit Tutorials and documentation is lacking - either announced but never published or has vanished over the time.
Tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF3LSR7D48Me0rix6kdS5BL5ZycpNxA71
Thanks everyone for all the tips and pointers. I continued playing with cylinders and figured out what @atoxic mentioned that there was a button to close the ends available when initially creating the cylinder. Through a lot of experimentation, I found several things that happen. If you change the number of points or sections and then press enter, the button to close the cylinder disappears and you get the position controls instead. So, you can only change the number of points or sections by using the up and down arrows next to the values. One lesson learned.
Another lesson has to do with how you create the cylinder. If you create the cylinder by tabbing into the values fields for the start point, then the diameter, and finally the height, the application doesn't put the white lines around the open ends of the cylinder and you cannot close it. if you use the mouse to set any of the values for the cylinder by dragging first and then tabbing to enter the values manually, everything works and you get the white lines around the ends of the cylinder so that you can close it. Another lesson learned.
Also, if you create a cylinder by using the mouse and it isn't based on zero on the y-axis, everything you try to create afterwards starts at that same offset and even if you change the position to zero for the y-axis by typing the value into the position box, nothing changes. The only way I've found to reset the y-axis origin to zero is to close and restart the application. Another lesson learned.
I also learned that there is a bug with manually typing in values for the objects. If you place the cursor in the value field to the right of the last character, you can then backspace over the existing value and then enter in the value that you want. However, if you place the cursor to the immediate left of the decimal point and try to backspace over the whole number value, the whole number value doesn't get removed and the cursor jumps to the right of the last character in the value. This same behavior occurs in every value field. This seems to me to be an obvious bug and I'm surprised it has never been addressed, but from what I've read here it doesn't appear that Hexagon gets much, if any, love nowadays.
So, I'm learning a lot and having fun while doing so, but the application appears to have a lot of quirks that you need to work through to achieve your desired results.
@Catherine3678ab, thanks for the link to the tutorials. It was the first tutorial in the series that I was trying to follow when I ran into the various issues that I described above. I am unable to get quite the same results as shown in the tutorial, but now know what to do to work around some of the issues. I'm not sure how many cylinders that I created and experimented with to learn the above, but was a very large number.
Thanks again, everyone. I'm sure I'll be back with a few more questions as I continue working with Hexagon.
Okay. I took a brief look at some of those tutorials, most if not all of them are rather old; several were made by the original company that made Hexagon {i.e. the ones in French for eg.} and Hexagon was definitely updated by Daz3D since those tutorials were made.
I tried on my computer to see if I can make a video of actions with Hexagon but the gaming thing [comes with the OS] won't record any of the popups. So that's pretty useless.
https://obsproject.com/
is free and very popular; not sure what gaming overlay you have, but probably not OBS. make vids? OBS is pretty nice tool for toolbox.
under your sources of capture, make sure to have cursor capture on too
should capture everything. game or display capture.
At the top far left of main window, you will see a small icon "XYZ", click on that to reset the ruler position to zero.
Thanks, I'll take a look at that.
Gee whilikers Batwoman!
I have never heard of the UV Relax tool or the "stretch on a surface" tool. Little bits of on-the-spot modelling and sculpting.
Picture (or model) me going (eg. pulling hard) downwards on a rope outside your window (gravity is reversed, in this vignette) while everyone else is trying to go up.
;-) You're welcome.