HU always texture to "copies"
patience55
Posts: 7,006
Normally I don't have any problems but the other day in the workflow, Hexagon truly messed up a folder's worth of texture images for a figure. Thankfully it was a copy so no real harm done, but yes it can.
D/S export of a figure .obj file, "copy" maps ... imported that into Hexagon ... exported it out again ... and the images were corrupted. I thought it would be overwriting the images from D/S but what it did was corrupt them.
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Maybe it was the Bridge that corrupted them and not, necessarily, Hex itself?
To me, it seems like texture-painting is an afterthought added to Hex to beef it up a little bit for curb appeal. It's never been "good." And, it certainly isn't flexible. I'm not familiar with DS nor the Bridge, so sorry for speaking out-of-school, here, but what image formats and resolutions where you using? Hex hates large images of any sort and it may have difficulties with compressed or uncompressed image formats. OR, perhaps, the Bridge does. Try sending it back in an uncompressed format, first (BMP/TIFF if possible) and then try compressed formats (JPG etc, if possible) and see if you get better results with one or the other. The overwrite could be a problem, too, but at that point, I don't know if it's the Bridge writing those files or Hexagon, itself.
No in this case it was Hexie that corrupted the files.
D/S export out of an .obj with "copy images" works fine.
Hexagon loaded them all fine. Image viewer could read them fine.
It was the export out of the .obj file from Hexagon to the same folder [hence the set of images it was making should have simply overwritten what was already there] that had the end result of a folder full of corrupted images. Image viewer could not read them. Forget now but they would have been either .png or .jpgs. Learned a long time ago not to put .tiff in so many programs including Hexagon. And you're quite about the large sizes ... don't recall now what the sizes were. It was one of the Genesis figures though.
At anyrate, it is always best to work with "copies" of texture images rather than "original" files ;-)
If I used the Bridge, at all, I could be of more help. Unfortunately/fortunately, I don't use it. :(
That being said, Hexagon doesn't have much in the way of image export features. It's resolution-locked, for the most part. And, even that requires non-intuitive work-flow. I will say, however, that not using the workflow methods that are intended to be used in Hexagon often results in borked up stuff. The thing is - Hexagon will let you do it, anyway. :) It is defintely NOT a self-policing program, forcing the user to use its workflow properly. Luckily, in generic object construction, there's little one can "bork up." Unless, of course, one chooses to not "Verify" an operation before moving to another, something one would think Hexagon would prevent you from doing... which it doesn't. :)
Yeah that would be a kool feature, a "don't do that pop-up"! Sometime back had a go at the Max free trial ... it had a popup for such scenarios. I can even crash Max! [good thing this wasn't my day job lol ...]
That's one of the causes of a lot of complaints for new Hex users - "I don't understand why it just borked up on me! What's happening! This program sucks!" :) And, besides technical bugs, it's usually because Hex was waiting on a "Verify" message before the next operation, something that it doesn't stress loudly enough or even... at all.
When using Hexagon and in doubt, always click "Verify" before continuing. Just finished sculpting? Verify. Just finished creating a primitive? Verify. Want to go get a cup of coffee? Verifty. In doubt about paying your electricity bill today or tomorrow? Verify....
hahahaha... yeah, it does like to know that you know where that button is.
Seriously though the "one" time one really does need to use "Verify" is when jumping back into Hexagon after having sent something over to D/S. That "closes" the send action and let's the program continue working.
With the previous edition on another computer the "Validate" is also essential to "seal" the uvmap selection. No unfolding, etc until that is done.
Ah, thanks for the Bridge tip.
And, I repeatedly used "Verify" instead of "Validate" in my above post, but the intent is clear, I guess.
And, Validate is absolutely necessary to apply the UV map before proceeding with further editing. Hex actually has a pretty darn good UVmapping component, but it's missing some key features and it doesn't have a good mapping alogorithm, since its space ratios are always off. But, it's tools are excellent, for all that.
Yes the intent was clear, I was reading the words interchangeably.
One of the gems Hexagon can do with uvmapping is allow one to select the seam lines "any way" you want to, from front or back or even through mesh. Not all other modeling programs work that way.
Hex has some very nice UVMapping features like that. But, it doesn't maintain proper... dangit, what's it called? Proportional area something-or-other? That's a pain. With any model that is not symmetrical, Hexagon has projection issues, as well, resulting in "skewed" and radically unproportional maps.
What I normally try to do with models that are intended to be symmetrical (and we all know that Hex's "Symmetry" function is borked up, terribly) is to cut the model in half and create a symmetrical copy/clone and then stitch it back together, by hand. Then, and only then, do I take it into UV mapping with any degree of projection confidence. It works... most of the time.
(I would LOVE to have vertice "soft selection" capability in Hexagon's UVMapper for correcting projection issues, easily. But, that ain't gonna happen. So sad... :( )
Yes Carrara 3D paint has a protected image popup and a make copy option straight after
Yeah I've done the stitching too ... little trick I'd discovered though ... SOMETIMES ... if one has all those symmetrical half islands; then on the uvmap side, select "one" dark blue line and "-" it; "unfold", then it'll match up the way it should.