Forum: Carrara


Subject: Hexagon is now available.

keithw opened this issue on May 10, 2005 ยท 60 posts


jval posted Tue, 10 May 2005 at 7:20 PM

Orio, I haven't actually used AmapiPro. My comments are just my interpretation of the information on Eovia's website. There is absolutely no reason to restrict Hexagon modeling to organic objects. Go ahead and make a car or furniture or an airplane. But if your model will eventually be used directly in the manufacturing process you will be better off with AmapiPro. It can communicate with 2D CAD systems for manufacturing purposes and also saves special file formats (IGES, SAT, etc.) for manufacturing machinery. AmaiPro's NURBS offers tremendous shape control which is very handy in product design. They can be used for organic modeling too but if you intend to animate the model then Heaxagon's sub-d polygons are better. For instance, in many situations you will have to convert Amapi's NURBS to polygons. Unfortunately the result often (most of the time?) has far more polygons then are ideal for animation. Hexagon should not be as polygon heavy. Hexagon will also let you work with edge loops which will be great for animating and morphing. (This last is way too complex to explain here. Search the web if you are interested.) You can certainly model buildings with Hexagon, especially if the result is intended primarily for visualization. But I don't know if it offers sufficient measurement accuracy for anything more. I think I read that AmapiPro is noted for its degree of potential accuracy. I haven't bought Hexagon yet but should get around to it in the next day or so. However I have similar programs such as Wings3D and Silo. Based on that I should think that Hexagon would serve admirably for modeling clothing (or anything else) intended for use in Poser. Of course, modeling is just a small part of what is necessary to produce typical Poser clothing or figures. Hexagon will import obj files so you should be able to bring a Poser figure into it for reference purposes. You don't have to import the entire figure though. Just bring in the necessary body parts- why complicate things with extra polygons you don't need? I don't know if Hexagon can be used to create Poser morphs though. If it doesn't screw around with the mesh or reorder the vertices it will probably be okay. But the only way to find out is to try. Given that I have Silo (which I really like) I'm not at all sure that I need Hexagon. However, I am very interested in how it might integrate with Carrara and it seems like its spline capability might be better than Silo's. But now that I know I can get it for just $99 I don't have to worry about deciding- it's not much more than a moderately nice restaurant dinner for two. - Jack