Archive for Hexagon

Creating a Holey Cube

{ September 4, 2018 @ 11:02 pm } · { 3D Tutorials, Hexagon }
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In Daz 3D’s Hexagon forums, one of our newer modelers asked about how to create a cube with intersecting holes from two sides. In his Penetrating a Rhomboid post, I suggested using the bridge function, which got halfway there, but I realized after he tried it that I could have been more complete in my description. So, this is how I did it.

Step 1 – Create the cube

I created a cube primitive with 8 tesselations to give me a nice center set of faces to work with on each side.

Holey Cube 01

The cube we’re going to pierce.

Step 2 – Make holes

I removed the 9 middle faces on each side, leaving the top and bottom solid.

Holey Cube 002

The center faces removed

Step 3 – Bridge two holes

I selected the edges around two opposing faces (click on one edge of each hole and use the Loop selection to select the hole). Then in Vertex Modeling, I chose Bridge and accepted the results.

Holey Cube 03

The first two holes bridged

Step 4 – Bridge the other holes

Then I repeated the process to bridge the other two holes. This creates the structure, but as you can see, the holes don’t go all the way through. Each bridge is blocking the view through the other.

Holey Cube 04

Both holes bridged

Step 5 – Tesselate the intersection

I hid the top of the cube (created a material zone with the top faces and hid that zone) so you can see inside the cube. I used Tesselate by Slice to slice each bridge as close to the other bridge as I could.

Holey Cube 05

Bridge overlaps tesselated

Step 6 – Remove the intersecting faces

Back inside the holes, I selected the new faces that were blocking my view through each hole and removed them.

Holey Cube 06

Intersections removed

Now you can see through, but if you look closely inside the hole there is a slight cap between the edges of each hole.

Step 7 – Weld the edges together

I admit to forgetting about the tools Hexagon offers at first. I started by manually going through and welding the vertices in each edge together. That was painful. Then I remembered the Average Weld function. It’s perfect for this as Hexagon is smart enough to figure out that those vertices are close enough to be welded. That went a LOT faster! Like a single click and it was done. 🙂

Holey Cube 07

Intersection edges welded

Step 8 – Test smoothing

Just to show I wasn’t quite done yet, I set smoothing level to 2. See that mess in the middle? That’s because there are still some faces from each hole that are overlapping there messing up the smoothing algorithm.

Holey Cube 08

Bad smoothing due to overlapping holes

Step 9 – Remove the overlapping faces

I removed the faces from one of the two holes, leaving the faces from the other one in place.

Holey Cube 09

Overlapping faces removed

Step 10 – Tesselate and weld

Once again I took the remaining faces and used Tesselate by Slice to create corresponding edges, making a grid in the center. Then I used Average Weld again to weld it all together.

Holey Cube 10

Intersection tesselated and welded

Final Product

Finally, with Smoothing turned to 1 you can see all my gaps and such are gone. I could adjust the edges of the holes a bit to make them more round instead of square, add some edges around the outline of the cube to keep it from smoothing too much, but that’s just tweaking it for the effect you’re going for really.

Holey Cube 11

Smoothed

3D Modeling Observations

{ August 17, 2018 @ 12:43 pm } · { 3D Tutorials, General Thoughts, Hexagon }
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As I’ve gotten back into modeling some of my own 3D content, I realized how it has given me more freedom of expression. A lot of my renders lately are of the roleplaying characters for my girlfriend and I to create snapshots of stories we’re co-writing. We tend to have very specific ideas about the look of our characters and the things they might own; so being able to create simple things myself has allowed me to reach my goals for my images without having to be limited by the content that others have created.

For example, our characters recently got married in-game. So we wanted the images I created to have wedding bands. But she’s particular about wanting to have silver/platinum and simple, but not entirely plain. While there are a lot of ring collections available from marketplace sites like Daz 3D or Renderosity and even freebies from places like ShareCG, nothing was quite what we needed and I didn’t feel like spending $10-12 for a collection of rings that were “close” when I could create some myself.

It took me a full evening to create the rings we wanted, but most of that was actually about getting them to work properly as props attached to the character’s hand rather than the modeling itself.

Moncreiffe Wedding Rings

Wedding rings worn by Conall and Simi

Another example was a simple picture frame that I needed. The story is that they are fans of Tim Burton’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” and so we needed a picture to hang on the wall with a frame that was appropriately just a little unusual. It took me less than 20 minutes to come up with this as opposed to buying a collection of frames or spending an hour searching for a free one.

Framed Nightmare Before Christmas

Picture from Nightmare before Christmas framed and hanging on the wall.

As a final example, the crib below is based off a design that Jenny really wanted to use for the baby. This project took longer because of a couple of false starts on my part. I could go into my mistakes and rework at length, but in the end it was mostly about knowing when to do the UV mapping of the parts of the crib. It also represents the first time I created something specifically to use Daz Studio’s dForce cloth simulation (the canopy is modeled from a basic cone shape and the dForce simulation makes it drape properly).

Siofra's Crib

Baby crib with a lace canopy.

My point to all of this is that none of these objects existed exactly in any 3D market or freebie sharing site anywhere. Learning how to model them myself allowed me to create exactly the items I needed for my image instead of just browsing through my collection of 1000s of pre-made items to find something that is “close enough”. Not having to compromise (and yes, being a bit proud of rendering with something I created myself) is a good feeling as an artist.

I encourage anyone who wants to take their artistry from composing the objects created by other people into a realm where you’re creating images that conform exactly to your vision to learn at least the basics of modeling. You may not ever want to get to the point where you’re creating your own clothing or modeling an entire forest. But the freedom you gain from knowing you can create your own lamps, picture frames, dishes, even furniture is a wonderful new experience!