Things you might not know about Hexagon
JonnyRay
Posts: 1,744
I think there are hidden gems of controls in Hexagon that a typical user might never stumble across. My premise is that most of us get to know a set of features that work for us and stop looking / learning to expreience some of the other things you can do. I thought it might be nice to have a thread where people share the little gems you may have come across for others to learn from.
I'll get started with one I learned from a Geeks at Play tutorial...
When you have an edge or a group of edges selected, if you hold down the CTRL key, you automatically go into "Fast Extrude" mode. I typically use the Universal Manipulator; so with a set of edges selected, if I hold CTRL and start dragging or scaling the edges, it actually extrudes new geometry until I let up on the CTRL key.
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Comments
Here's one for you (I do not use it very often but I should).
Say you are making a vase, you make it with no smoothing then to see what it looks like smoothed you add a level or two of smoothing then canel the smoothing operation and carry on till you want to see it smoothed again.
Instead use the clone tool. Ctrl + D to make a duplicate, add level of smoothing. Cancel smoothing on original, carry on modeling. As you make changes to the original model keep an eye on the copy.
Keyboard_shortcuts_qwerty.pdf below hexagon manuals on daz site
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/hexagon/2/userguide/start
maybe you find some useful shortcut you never used before
Also, you can use the custom tab to store/show your most used (favorite) tools, this can also be put on your work area - see top left of my screen grab I posted earlier.
I like all three of these. :)
@John: I've used cloning but I hadn't considered using it to see both the low poly and smoothed object at the same time. And I forget about the "custom" tab all the time!
@Mach25 : Keyboard short cuts are so handy. I use the view ones all the time and some of the others like ring, loop, and between for selections. But I often forget that there are more.
one trick I wan't to learn is howto make a part of a model that is need to be made to rotate around certain point its supposed to be attached to, I guess some child hierarchi rather than simple grouping is needed,because simple group it makes it turn around center of group,turning turrets that have long cannons pointing out in one direction making the center of object turn around where turret ends and cannons begin
Jen Greenlee's Rigging a Simple Prop video tutorial shows how to change the pivot point when you're rigging in Daz Studio.
thanks, Jonny
I found out something that might be useful when you don't want to add extra polys in hexagon to smooth things:when I made a diamond starting from a sphere and imported to DS I had to uncheck smoothing otherwise it showed an upside down pear shape instead,bryce also has on/off smoothing,just experiment and see if smoothing is enough in 3d app you import it into
I think it maybe depends on what shape you start with if it ends up standard as smoothed/unsmoothed,probably spheres are automatically checked as smoothed
I should probably know this, but don't. Does Hexagon have a heightmap generator for grayscale images?
I have big problem with an old .hxn model,made from an older machine,on my newer machine it becomes impossible to export,well I get a broken model and hexagon crash, I suspect the text font might be the problem ,maybe it isnt installed on newer computer or old file from earlier hexagon version?,so I started a new 3dmodel with different approach
one thing would be nice to know is,pros and cons of different hexagon versions,especially facts about the newest/older version crashesbug that prevent it to work properly or makes it unstable,so you can decide to use the other version for those tasks and maybe works different on different windows versions,hardware versions etc???
The two best versions of Hexagon are 1.21 and the most current version for Windows.
In this relatively recent set of posts - Hexagon has been perfect on my present computer for literally years - and now it is so laggy ((5 to 10 seconds for a simple scale of a box)) that it is unusable . If anyone who knows is active here and knows of a solution please email me at bowfluv@gmail.c__ If anyon can help me it would be appreciated .
That's very specific. Am curious, what is so special about version 1.21 ?
It was the final incarnation the first version of Hexagon, which tended to be considerably more stable than especially the early Hex2.
No bugs. The main feature (compared to 2.0 at the time) being that vertex re-ordering was not a thing in 1.x. Some customers chose to live with bugs in 2.x for the longest time because it had UV mapping and texture painting. Anyway, the current version has vastly less bugs than 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, and early 2.5. I still use 1.21 because I like its GUI a bit better than 2.5's. And I have 3D-Coat for UV mapping and texturing.
Thank you Ascania and Shawn.
Does anyone know off-hand if Hexagon 1.21 was in any 3D magazine giveaway, or was it last sold boxed (so I can look for it used on Amazon/Ebay) ?
3D World Magazine #107
Thank you Shawn. I just very recently bought a collection of back issue 3D mags from Ebay and you've made me realise I now have it (!). Best.
CTRL+SHFT+S Before doing ANYTHING!!!
(Thank you JonnyRay)