This tutorial is an addendum to my previous video for 3dsmax, in which I show a very simple technique to creating an interesting Ported Cube object in Blender.  The procedure shown here should work in any version of Blender from 2.6x to 2.75.  No addons are required, but I am utilizing the Pie Menus and Dynamic Spacebar Menu addons in this demonstration.  

Please don't forget to like the video, or subscribe to my channel for many more tutorials like this, in 3dsmax and Blender.  If you have any questions about the technique in this video, please don't hesitate to comment here, or on the Youtube page, and I'll try to address it promptly.  Thanks again, and hope you enjoy.

Just for reference, this is a render I made of the object, illustrating a possible use for it as a digital, or 3d printed asset, as I mention near the end of this video.  I would expect a 3d print of this nature to be costly, but if you make it thick enough to hallow out, it might not be that bad, depending on the scale.

Again thank you for this tutorial I have to say I did the same some time back by following a tutorial for Wings 3D and have to say the way you did it was 10 times faster and easier than the Wings version 

Thank you 

Again thank you for this tutorial I have to say I did the same some time back by following a tutorial for Wings 3D and have to say the way you did it was 10 times faster and easier than the Wings version 

Thank you 

Thank you, Lobo3433.  Yes, my friend David Brinnen made a Wings 3D tutorial of this object last year, as a 1 minute modeling exercise, using Wing's solid manifold modeling features.  David is also learning to model in Modo, where the same model took him almost 5 minutes to reproduce.  So the objective of creating this object in under 1 minute fascinated me, and with David's permission, I took on the challenge of developing a technique to reproduce it, in the same time or better, using 3dsmax.  Very quickly, I was able to come up with a simple exercise to achieve the shape in about 38 seconds, with only a few modifiers in 3dsmax.  I have that video up on my channel, with credits back to David's original Wings tutorial as well.  Being that there were a few steps in 3dsmax which couldn't be translated the same way in Blender, I decided to create this video, showing the alternative steps. Clearly, it's just as fast and easy in Blender. In the end, I think it's a testament to the powerful modeling tools in Blender, Wings, and 3dsmax, that a shape like this can be had in under 1 minute; considering even in Modo, it takes considerably more time.  However, I have shown David the 3dsmax video, and he indicated it may have provided him with some ideas to achieve a faster approach there. I may contact him again to see if he was able to figure out a new technique in Modo.

I'd even venture to say that if your modeling app of choice can't do this in circa 30 secs then have a serious consideration about it.

Well watching yours LuXxeon and remembering it took me maybe good 10 or 15 minutes in Wings (having never really used wings before then) was nice to see it being done in Blender in easier steps and yes faster 

Thanks again for the tutorial 

I'd even venture to say that if your modeling app of choice can't do this in circa 30 secs then have a serious consideration about it.

LOL!  Whenever we hear someone ask, "what modelling software is best?" or "which software should I learn?", we should just point them to this tutorial, and tell them any software in which you can model this shape in around 30 seconds.  Seriously though, I think this does make a good baseline for evaluating the efficiency of a modelling software's tools.  Think about it.  It uses all very common, readily-available features that any modelling software should have available.  Personally, i'd like to see this tutorial done in other software too, like Hexagon or Silo.  I think it could be done in 30 secs or less in Silo, but I wonder about Hexagon.  Heck, I wonder if C4D or Maya could do it as quickly?  Would be interesting to find out.  I think I still have a copy of Hexagon 2 installed on my other system, so I might fire it up and try it out.
So far, I did the tut in 3dsmax and Blender.  I found the Max version to be a little faster, only because when you first make the cube, you can define the number of cuts right in the primitve, so you save a few seconds applying the subdivide, and also the select similar works for those middle faces, so that saves another 3 or 4 clicks (seconds).  So it's only a matter of seconds difference between the two.

I think it might be just quick in Silo as long as you know where the tools are which at times is my only real gripe with Silo. Hexagon which is the first modeling tool I started to learn 3D with might take longer again because some tools are just not in intuitive places. Which when Blender changed their UI back with 2.5 it really made learning the app easier and not as frustrating when I tired 2.49. I feel at times the biggest issue between modeling packages is naming conventions for tools that either all do the same thing or very close to one another. 

Well I had to fire up my old copy of Hexagon 2.5, just to try it out.  I had to write down the location of some of the tools, because you're right, they are in strange places.  What the heck is vertex modelling anyway, and why are all the edge tools in there?  Anyway, once I got the tools locations down pat, I gave it a real go.  Seven times.  Faced lots of problems right away.  For one thing, almost nothing is assigned to a hotkey by default, so unless you went and assigned them manually, you gotta go digging through flyout icons to engage some of the necessary operations.  I couldn't find a quick way to tessellate the necessary edges to start out with.  When you use the Quad Tessellation tool, it either makes too few, or too many cuts.  So you have to make one tessellation with the Quad Tessellate in face mode, then switch to edge mode, and make a chamfer on those edges, and so on.  So it was a lot of steps there.  Also, there's NO easy way to select the faces, once you "extrude" them inside of the cube.  So, once you average weld them together, you're left still with faces that need to be deleted at the end.  I got a result, but it took almost 5 minutes.  I think even if I was an expert with the software, it couldn't be done in less than a minute.  I'd be surprised.

Oh, and I should also mention, there's no Similar Select in Hexagon, so that slowed me down a lot.  Especially at the part where you have to delete all the corner faces.  Does Silo have this?  I thought maybe I could select all the faces in a cross shape on each side of the cube, then just invert that selection to get all the corner faces, but Hex gave me problems even with that kind of selection, because it won't let me make face loop selections in two different directions for some reason.  Making certain types of selections is definitely a slower process in Hex than I expected.

I use to praise Hexagon as a great modeler for a novice to get familiar because at the time the price was right for a hobbyist but then development just stopped altogether. Silo was in the same barrel but development has started again and the newest version supports 64 bit OS and is also ported for Linux. i had to fire up Silo but found no Similar Selection unless it is Select by group which is not the same. I will admit that until after I got into the IT field I never believed free software could be as good as purchased (Yes very naive view learned rather quickly how foolish that way of thinking was so do not thrash me pleaase ;)) I have to say that being lucky to provide IT services for a few Graphic designers I had a chance to try out several various 3D application and would say as far as easy to learn 3ds Max was at the top Blender now being my choice not rich enough to afford max LOL Maya is not intuitive Modo is OK but think more of a learning curve like pre Blender 2.5 Cinema 4D a bit confusing. But back to topic it does not surprise me that you had the results you did with Hexagon 

I use to praise Hexagon as a great modeler for a novice to get familiar because at the time the price was right for a hobbyist but then development just stopped altogether. Silo was in the same barrel but development has started again and the newest version supports 64 bit OS and is also ported for Linux. i had to fire up Silo but found no Similar Selection unless it is Select by group which is not the same. I will admit that until after I got into the IT field I never believed free software could be as good as purchased (Yes very naive view learned rather quickly how foolish that way of thinking was so do not thrash me pleaase ;)) I have to say that being lucky to provide IT services for a few Graphic designers I had a chance to try out several various 3D application and would say as far as easy to learn 3ds Max was at the top Blender now being my choice not rich enough to afford max LOL Maya is not intuitive Modo is OK but think more of a learning curve like pre Blender 2.5 Cinema 4D a bit confusing. But back to topic it does not surprise me that you had the results you did with Hexagon 

 

Very interesting, Lobo.  Your personal observations seem to coincide with my own, at least with of the apps I have tried.  Maya was not intuitive for me at all, and before the 2014 release, did not even have polygon modelling tools of any significance.  Recent versions are much better at polygon modelling, and the tools are more powerful, but still not at the level of Blender or 3dsmax in my opinion.  I found Modo to be ok for your standard organic modelling work, but you need a bunch of plugins to bring the modelling tools up to par with the LoopTools and other options in either Blender or Max.  I have never tried Cinema or Silo. After messing around more in Hexagon tonight, I was able to get closer to a reasonable time for this shape, but it seems very unreliable, because with each modelling session, something new would go wrong.  Most of the problems were caused by me having to manually select all the faces and edges, which was prone to error, but also some things about the tools seemed buggy from time to time.  The thicken command, as an example, would sometimes work as expected, but then sometimes it would make the entire object disappear, and the undo command wouldn't bring it back!  Who knows what that is.  Also, the extrude tools in Hex are just so damn hard to control.  It's almost silly, the way extrusions behave.  I'm sure some people are used to it, but I've never experienced extrusion tools like that before.  I had polygons going out of control all over the screen while I tried to extend them and scale them all at once.  It seemed anything but "easy".

I found a couple of tricks to assist Hexagon crash less and not be as buggy. One Hexagon is not Large address aware so being in a system with more than 4 gigs of memory it will often act buggy crash and freeze up often as well. There is a small utilty to make it Large address aware and make it a bit more stable and less crashes but I also installed it at the root of my C Drive and not in either of the Program folders just doing that and using the the utility to make hex large Address Aware really helped. But since now I rarely fire it up except some old tutorials that I I do not use it often. If you would like the utility let me know even though doing a search on google you should find it and it also helps Bryce also in making it Large address aware

Thanks, Lobo, but I don't think I'll ever use Hexagon again after yesterday.  I just don't see any advantage at all to the workflow or tools, compared to Blender.  It literally felt like modelling with a handicap of some kind.  I finally modelled the ported cube about 20 times last night in Hex, and the very best time I could achieve was just over 1 minute, and that's only if I didn't make any selection errors.  I honestly don't see how people find Hexagon easy. The ONLY thing I found particularly useful in Hexagon was the Lay-On tool.  3dsmax has something like that called the Placement Tool.  I haven't found anything in Blender like that yet, but doesn't matter for every day modelling.  I'm happy to stick with Blender.

 get almost the same as lay on but as usual in blender theres half a dozen (or less) ways to do it ;-)

quick and easy is snap, don't always work as I'd like but theres a couple of add ons (think one is called align forgot name of other) or you can use dupliverts, with some messing about or even a particle system (bit like overkill but can be done) 

Great video!  I agree with Lobo, this technique is 10x easier than that Wings tutorial I watched.  Wings is great, but you always have to model with solid objects, so creating models there seems to restrict you to a certain way of doing things all the time.  Blender is more like the advanced expensive software like 3dsmax, you can start out with a single polygon if you wanted to, or with lines, or solid objects.  There's a lot more ways to go about creating stuff, and I like that.

Thanks, Lobo, but I don't think I'll ever use Hexagon again after yesterday.  I just don't see any advantage at all to the workflow or tools, compared to Blender.  It literally felt like modelling with a handicap of some kind.  I finally modelled the ported cube about 20 times last night in Hex, and the very best time I could achieve was just over 1 minute, and that's only if I didn't make any selection errors.  I honestly don't see how people find Hexagon easy. The ONLY thing I found particularly useful in Hexagon was the Lay-On tool.  3dsmax has something like that called the Placement Tool.  I haven't found anything in Blender like that yet, but doesn't matter for every day modelling.  I'm happy to stick with Blender.

I agree with you fully about Hexagon it really is not worth keeping in the work flow. I did find that the large address aware utility I mentioned also helped speed up Bryce which I still use often for some renders and scene making. But Blender is my main tool for modeling and and is the focus of my 3D learning path and what I come across that I can't do I usually find answers to places I am stuck at easier for the vast community Blender has 

My render of this wonder shape, in iray for the Daz Studio.  Model created in Blender.  Such a beautiful.

Nice render like that coloring does show off the model well 

Very good render, Zandar.  The model turned out great as well.  Nice work!

Thanks for a very clever tut, LuxXeon :)

Here's my take, done in Hexagon in under a minute - most of which was spent selecting individual facets.  BTW, the Hex equivalent of Blender's "remove doubles" is "average weld" and in Hex you can specify the number of tessellations - cuts - at the point of insertion.  The extrude tool is admittedly scary when first using it, with geometry exploding all over the place, but it is easy to get them under control with delicate movements of the mouse :)

Been using Hex for many a year and never thought I'd bid it goodbye - until getting into Blender!  Now Hex is pretty clunky for me.

One thing I do miss about it are the surface modelling tools - Ruled Surface, Coons and Gordons.  Drawing out splines splines and joining (lofting ?) to form surfaces. Beveling Bezier curves and possibly Nurbs are about the closest I've come across in Blender so far, but not quite.

I'm still very much on the early learning curve in Blender and would love to know from experienced users what equivalents to these processes Blender has.

Edit :Oh dear - seems I can't post a pic!

Hi, Roygee.  Good to hear from someone proficient with Hexagon giving their perspective.  I'm glad to hear I wasn't alone in my assessment of the extrusion tools in Hexagon.  I'm sure, with practice, it could become an art in itself to use that particular tool, but honestly, making just regular, straight extrusions from selected faces without scaling or insetting should be much much easier if the software is to be used in serious workflows.  I did find that the "Extrude Surface" tool does have an "Axial" extrude option, which is what I really wanted from it, but I found no easy way to set that as the default mode for the tool.  So Instead, you have to really practice, and practice, to master the way it works, which is very annoying in my opinion, and less than acceptable function for such a common modelling procedure.  I did find where the tessellation option was located for the cube primitive, which did indeed help to speed up the process, and brought the modelling time of this tutorial down to about 1 minute.  Still, having to manually select all the faces was the true deal breaker in terms of speed, compared to Blender or 3dsmax.  Also, once you extruded the center faces inward, and then used the "Average Weld" to weld the points together, it didn't maintain the face selections, so you had to go around the object once more, to re-select, and delete those faces, eating up a lot of time.

Anyway, all in all, Hexagon is an ok modeller.  It really could benefit from some more attention in the programming dept, but I guess that ship has sailed.  About the question regarding Ruled Surface, Coons, and Gordons, check out B Surfaces in Blender.  You need to enable the addon in preferences, but it allows you to do some great things with strokes and splines for building geometry, etc.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.64/Bsurfaces_1.5

Hi Roygee 

To answer or maybe help out this tutorial on How to "lathing"/"lofting"-model in Blender  is perhaps the best one that made the steps clear and concise for me. granted had to watch it twice but once I got it it made sense on how to best create and perform the function with in Blender. 

Hope it helps some 

Great pity Daz killed Hex through neglect, but, on the bright side, it lead me to Blender:)

Thanks for the links, guys - those are exactly what I'm looking for - going to have some fun with them!

Just as an aside and probably of academic interest at this point - you can speed up the selection of the corner facets in Hex by selecting the corner verts and converting selection to faces :)

Just as an aside and probably of academic interest at this point - you can speed up the selection of the corner facets in Hex by selecting the corner verts and converting selection to faces :)

Yes, that's another good way to get those faces selected quickly, although I found paint-selecting them to be almost just as fast.  My biggest obstacle with Hex was that after you use the "extrude surface" tool to intrude central square faces into the object, the software does not retain the face selections, so you have to waste time re-selecting them again, just to delete them.  On the other hand, if you use the "fast extrude", it does retain the selection, but that tool doesn't seem to work for axial extrusions like this.  Only the "Sweep surface", or "extrude surface" tools worked for that operation, but they don't seem to retain the initial selections.  What's worse, if you forget to Validate an action, and go on to another action, often times it causes buggy behavior that seems irreversible in some cases  No matter. It was a fun challenge, just to see how it would be done in other software, but I won't be going back to Hex again. I just wanna make it clear that I think Hex is a good software.  It just really needs some attention in the programming dept., and unfortunately, it's not going to get it, so I'm not going to bother continuing on with it.  I will admit that it does have some great tools, they just need more refining, and thought.

Another great tutorial, LuxXeon.

It was a fun exercise to execute in Hexagon.  I wanted to see how to handle modeling this in Hex with all it's shortcomings, and I was doing it from memory (after two viewings on two separate occasions).

Please excuse the poor DS3 render (not my strong suit - even used Uber2 at highest render settings), I know it sucks, but just wanted to show the completed mesh.

Well done, DaremoK3!  It turned out excellent!  I really like that ground texture too; great displacement there.

Luxxeon, any chance we could get a Blender tut based on the last one you did for 3dmax?  I noticed you posted it a couple weeks ago, but there was no Blender version of it, so I tried on my own to follow your Max video.  Didn't quite work out for me in Blemder to say the least! I think there must not be the same steps.  This is the one I mean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-55LauzlAI

There are a couple things going on in there that must be waaaay different in Blender for this one.  First, the "selection sets" thing, as you refer to them in Max, can't be done in Blender.  At least not with the vertex groups, which is how I thought they'd work!  No matter what I try, vertex groups won't convert to the face selections I need.  So that's the first problem.  Second problem is when you bridge together all the selections at once.  I tried everything for this, even using the Bridge in Loop Tools add-on, but it just doesn't work right!  The bridge edge loops creates a total mess!  See my results below.  Would be greatly appreciated if you could help with this one.  Seems this is one object Blender can't do as easy as Max.  Unless there's something I ain't doing right here.

@HMorton, I've been trying to work out a Blender equivalent of my 3dsmax tutorial, but haven't yet come up with a technique combination I am satisfied with.  I've posted my explaination of the problems with this object in Blender over at the Shapeways Design Forum, but I will repost it here too.

After many, many attempts to reproduce the shape using the Bridge tool in the Loop Tools addon, it seems the function itself is not suited for these kinds of bridging operations. It produces topological errors, and issues with the mesh that take a considerable amount of cleanup to solve. Ultimately, there are other ways around this, including creating the shape a different way, using extrude instead. However, the results are not exactly the same as the 3dsmax version, and tend to take longer.

The problem with the Bridge tool in Blender's Loop Tools addon is that it sometimes incorrectly calculates the interpolation between arbitrary shapes on certain types of topology, and produces folded, or twisted, geometry that can not be fixed through parameter changes alone. You can manually correct this issue by editing the bridge later, but that takes time on an object like this, and defeats the purpose. The Bridge Edge Loop system was never intended to be used with multiple selection faces, and complex connections, which is why the Loop Tools Bridge was created. This seems to be a known problem in Blender, though, as there are plenty of examples of it throughout the community. 

After researching this issue with Blender's Bridge tools, I came across an interesting tool in development, which I don't believe has been released yet, but would appear to solve the algorithm issues with the current bridge operation in Blender. For those of you who may be interested, have a look at Red Triangle's work on a new bridge tool:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:RedTriangle/Bridge

Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the example differences. This is the result we need, to make proper bridge connections on an object like the nested dodecahedron. Unfortunately, I don't think this has been released yet. So I need to figure out a different approach, unless there's something obvious that I'm missing to trick the current bridge function into working properly, or another addon that fixes this problem.

As far as Named Selection Sets in 3dsmax; you are right that there is no exact equivalent to this in Blender.  Blender has Vertex Groups, as you know, which are similar in some ways, but only work with vertex selections.  In some cases, Vertex Group selections can be converted to edge or face selections, but this will not always translate precisely to the edges or faces selections you may wish to save.  In the case of this object, Vertex Groups will not work to store the face selections we require.  However, there's another option which does work for this purpose.  It's called Mark Freestyle Face.  I don't have time to explain in detail how to use this feature, but marking Freestyle Faces can be used to save specific face selections, and recall them later in the modeling process.

Here's a brief explanation of how they work:  Select a group of faces that you wish to recall later.  Tap CTRL+F on keyboard to bring up the faces options, and choose "Mark Freestyle Face".  The polygons will turn a unique color, and you'll know they are stored.  This will allow you to define multiple selections on different sub-elements, and you can recall them easily at any time during the modeling process, simply by selecting just one polygon, then Shift+G to select similar, and choose "Freestyle Face Marks" from the menu options.

Hopefully, the improvements that RedTriangle have proposed to the Bridge function will become standard in Blender in future updates, but currently, there's no "easy" way I have found to reproduce this same object in Blender.

Having been given some outstanding guidance to overcome the shortcomings in the Bridge tool, I've finally been able to recreate the nested dodecahedron object in Blender.

I have to say, I may have never been able to figure out this workflow, if not for the help of Ramboblender over in the Shapeways Design forum.  Ramboblender is a very proficient, and advanced Blender modeler, who gave me some excellent tips and tricks to achieve the desired bridge connections we need for this object.

So, needless to say, I'll create a video tutorial for this very soon.  I have to admit, it was quite challenging to reproduce this in Blender, but once I learned how to deal with the Bridge issues, the procedure will not take much longer than the 3dsmax version.  Keep your eye on my channel for this tutorial.

Here's the final object.

Looking forward to this one the shape does seem to hold unique potential for renders. Thanks again LuxXeon for sharing all that you have learned and share with the community 

Looking forward to this one the shape does seem to hold unique potential for renders. Thanks again LuxXeon for sharing all that you have learned and share with the community 

Thanks, Lobo.  I'm working on this video tutorial tonight.  I'll make a post in the forum when it's up.

Hey, LuxXeon...

Haven't had a chance to come back sooner, but wanted to say thank you.

The ground is a default DAZ Studio shader named Flagstone.  I think the displacement is a little weak, and yields artifacting in my eyes.  I don't believe the displacement map is 16-bit, or any Gaussian smoothing utilized, so it appears to result in some stair-stepping.  I still like it though.

I also created the mesh in Wings3D.  That was a fun little romp to see how to work out the shape with the winged-edge limitations.  I think someone mentioned a tutorial for it, but I just made a go of it myself.  Took two tries.  First was wrong approach, but second was easy.

Also, looks like you created a new tut to try in Blender.  I will have a go at it when I get another spare moment.  Keep up the great work!