Hi all,

I was doing some playing around yesterday with subdivision surfaces (and auto-mirroring) and made this guy (Mr. Clownshoes):



While working on him there were a few things that I noticed that I would like to improve:

1) It can be difficult to see what faces are selected.

2) It would be nice if points resized based on your distance from the object.

3) If you decide you need to have more divisions you have to divide each edge into two using the Divide operation and then connect the new points together using the Edge operation. Not horrible, but somewhat time consuming if you have to do it to 4, 6 or 8 faces to get a "loop".

#1 and #2 have been requested by several people and are both on the list for an upcoming 6.x release. They can't (easily) be done yet with the current renderer. But, #3 hasn't really been requested and was relatively easy to resolve.

I've come up with a new Divide operation that will divide a quad (four sided face) either horizontally or vertically into two quads.

In the following picture I have selected a group of faces that encircle the arm:



Note that I selected these faces using a pretty useful, and I think uncommonly used, function. If you hold down the Shift and Alt keys when using the Group Selection Tool it selects all faces who's center's are in the selection rectangle. It makes it really easy to select group such as these.

This is the result of the divide operation - divided horizontally:



I think this is pretty handy for any "extrusion" type modelling.

To this operation "horizontal" has a distinct meaning. For primitives this is actually "horizontal". At least with the primitives in their standard orientation. But, horizontal for extruded faces means horizontal with respect to the extruded face. Note that you may see some exceptions. If you do let me know and I will try to make the consistent.

Note that horizontal/vertical does not work consistently with cube primitives in 6.0.2.4. It will in the next release. Also you can't take an existing divide operation applied with the "old" 6.0.2.4 (or earlier) divide operation and change its parameters (it causes a crash-error 91 I think). You'll have to wait until next release to do that. You can of course change the divide parameters of a newly applied "new" divide operation.

You can download the new Divide Operation here: http://www.3d-canvas.com/downloads/Divide6.zip. Just replace the Divide6.dll in the "Amabilis\Operations" folder with the one included in the zip file. It should work with all 6.0.2.x releases.

Richard

This is a GREAT improvement!  

I was waiting for this one, thanx Richard. ;D

A very handy tool.

James.

Agreed, that will be a very helpful addition.