History of Hexagon
Samuel S.
Posts: 322
Can someone share history of Hexagon?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagon_(software)
I am interested in knowing about the decision to go with Hexagon instead of adding features in Carrara at that point in time (in 2006 or earlier) .
You'd need to ask Eovia that, as DAZ bought both Hexagon and Carrara from Eovia.
As Eovia themselves had bought Carrara from MetaCreations in 2000, my guess would be that creating a new program was easier for them than trying to customize Carrara's code to add the new features they wanted.
Or maybe they simply wanted to have an independant specialized modeller along their "full suite" software.
Thanks; I agree and probably easier was the option they opted for without long term vision althogh they had access to full soruce code of Carrara which has very extensible and open architecture. DAZ still added features to Carrara, Hexgaon and Bryce and they really worked hard on it.
Hexagon's Modeler interface is cool as well and they probably did not want to change the interface of Carrara by adding more primitives or menu items for Modeler since it makes some users upset.
dunno about that, various plugins I bought like Architools add more with no hardship
I agree; I also like Architools and all of their Carrara plugins and I have even many more :)
people who know about coding... do you think it's difficult or easy to find out why hexagon crashes so much? :( there might be an error log somewhere...
I just tried to look for it in Hexagon subfolder under AppData and Documents folder but could not find any error log files not even under Hexagon folder.
I am not sure that why components/plugins of Hexagon are so tight that any invalid operation may crash whole application. Hexagon like many other powerful commercial easy to use 3D software is not an open source so hard to see what is going on.
Normally developers can create try and catch blocks to catch errors and then take necessary actions like presenting user with some message, log errors and cancel previous operation etc.
Someone with Hexagon development team can shed light into this issue.
We like working with hexagon, even if this has some errors.
Is a new version planned?
That question has been kicked around for years.
There are also more and detailed comments about Hexagon's history in the forums... not sure what keywords to search on though.
What exactly is "Architools", agian?
Greetings,
Fun fact... I used Amapi back in the day, and it was very nice. I loved it's name, too. The company was named 'Yonowat', and the software was named, 'Amapi.' In total, it was Yonowat, amapi.
All the engineers and modelers ended up shared between the various companies, as far as I can tell. I remember a company, Viewpoint (cool T-shirt, 'I hung with a bunch of polygonists from Utah.') which I think was one of the places that Zygote came from, which of course begat DAZ 3D.
My only point is that all the 3D software field is somewhat interbred.
@taemimun I know a bit about coding, and the most likely answer is a combination of drivers, libraries and older software. In other words the software is old, and makes use of code paths in the device drivers and libraries that aren't well maintained. So for instance Hexagon, for mild use, doesn't crash for me at all. (That's not to say it wouldn't with heavier use, but I don't know it well enough to use it heavily.) But I'm sure folks running with certain (probably relatively common) setups have it crash much more often. Also the code is old. Old code bases have trouble with complexity. It breeds among the features added over the years, interactions that are unexpected and unanticipated end up passing values that shouldn't be passed to functions that behave badly with them.
It's not the first call...or the twelfth...that causes the program to crash. They corrupt memory, and ten minutes (or ten hours) later the program tries to do something with that memory and it seems like out of the blue it crashes. When actually the grounds were laid for the crash some unknowable time ago, when a rogue function that got an unexpected value because of some feature that hadn't existed when the function was written, and now it stomped over memory that is only rarely touched.
Debugging that kind of problem is achingly hard. There are tools to help, but they're expensive, hard to use, and for an old, complicated program like Hexagon will throw as many false alarms as actual bugs. This is one of the reasons why moving to pure 64 bit is so damn hard. Because now you're expecting every method in your program to take larger values than they used to, and you have to check every single one to make sure that it can handle those values without going rogue. Without stomping over memory it doesn't own, and...well, what I described above.
Working with legacy code is an art, and it's a really, really dark and scary art. When there's nobody, or very few people, left on the team who have any idea WHY things were done (and even more importantly, why certain things were NOT done)...you have a recipe for failure.
I hear rumors that they're looking at a new release of Hexagon. If that's true, somewhere in DAZ HQ there's a necromancer, chanting runes and summoning dark powers with names like Valgrind, clang, BoundsChecker, and ltrace to aid them.
I wish them the very best of luck.
-- Morgan
Its an Architectural modeling plugin for Carrara, available from Daz store.
Hexagon was made with:
Software programmer
C++ compiler
3D tools library
GUI widets library
Import/Export library
GFX driver
The cost to keep each one of these payrolls/keys/licenses current and working together, with each new OS that is released, is too much for Hexagon.
I also agree and it looks like that business and companies focus most on technologies which bring profit to an organization and currently DAZ Studio and Genesis are winning the race.
In spite of this I still love Carrara and its companion app Hexagon and they are very affordable for hobbyists like me.
Hexagon came about as a spin-off of the polygon modelling tools out of Amapi at a time when the subdivision surface paradigm really took off and it was felt that the major 3D packages became too bloated to all-encompassing. The idea was to create a tool that did one thing - polygon modelling - really really well and that would allow for a more efficient creation pipeline. Other programs like Modo or Silo originated there too.
Thanks, I agree. Also Carrara's Sub-D, Vertex and its other Modelers have not been updated for some time. So I also use Hexagon sometimes as a companion application for Carrara based on complexity of object since it has latest modeling options than Carrara and it can export objects directly to Carrara’s native files. Silo also have a reputation of crashing as well but Modo has become a beast now although full version is still expensive for advanced hobbyists. I noticed that Modo's seems to have adopted a lot from Hexagon and Carrara but with improvements.
Well, Silo's reputation for crashing is not any worse than Hexagon's.
Modo is aimed at the professional market and always has. It was devised and developed by a group that split off NewTek. I reckon with them being former LightWave developers they had little need to seek inspiration from Hexagon or Carrara.
I agree. It was just a thought since when I played with Modo it seemed more like a Carrara like interface except that moving drawing plane annoyed me for a while. Light Wave and Modo’s interface seems totally different; Modo engineers finally decided to break the tradition but continued to add and improve features because of support from professional studios.
In the end I think all of above discussed 3D packages are great with their pros and cons. In the end I normally settle with the one which seems more productive and easy to me.
Action centers throw me off in modo. I prefer Hexagon's simple universal manipulator. Silo uses a similar one. I use modo just for rendering.
You can turn Action Centers off
Tell me about it. Also I now turn off Dynamic plane movement using page down and page up keys which helped me a bit. I like Modo's UV tools alongside Ultimate Unwrap pro but feel more comfortable modeling in Hexagon and Carrara. 3D coat and Zbursh’s UV mapping tools are okay as well. I really struggled with UV mapping of organics in the beginning since it is more of art than exact science.
I heard that latest Genesis figures were modeled in Modo somewhere in the DAZ book I think.
I recently added following Basic Cave Modeling Creation, UV and Texturing video using Carrara where all was done in Carrara:
I use 3D Coat for all my UV mapping and painting, after modeling an object in Hexagon and doing the edge creasing in Carrara first.
Thanks for sharing, 3D caot is really great software and its UV's tools are way powerful than Z-Brush's UV Master. I am still learning 3D-Coat, Zbrush and Modo so that I can use them effectively with Hexagon/Carrara.