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Good catch ... I'll watch for that next time I try Booleans and use the average weld. Thanks.
Can someone tell me what the standard install path and filename is for the Hexagon config file? I may well need to delete mine but can't find it.
I have Hexagon ver 2.5.1.79 on a home build 3rd gen i7 3770K 32GB RAM Windows 7 Professional NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650
c:/Users/*User Name*/AppData/Roaming/DAZ 3D/Hexagon 2/preferences.xml
c:/Users/*User Name*/AppData/Roaming/DAZ 3D/Hexagon 2/preferences_save.xml
Quality, well done that man (I am assuming that the name 'ben' is gender indicative, apologies if that is not the case)
This is an old post but as a brand new user I thought I'd add my twopence.
I've been using Hexagon for about a week and yes it crashes all the time but, as many have said, it's because I did something wrong and Hexagon does not catch errors very well at all. It let's you do impossible things then just gives up. Personally I think it's worth persevering with as the UI is great and it is so intuitive.
I found this post because of my issues with exporting a model I'd done a boolean cut on. Like an earlier poster said, Hexagon either crashed on export to .obj or appeared without the cut if I sent to Daz. This is simply because the geometry produced is unstable. Kudos to Roygee - triangulating the n-gons worked perfectly. It would just have been nice if Hexagon had flashed up a dialog saying that there was an issue with the geometry rather than just crashing.
Be nice if there was a sticky post where people could put in what caused a crash and what solved it. Might start one
That is a really positive way to look at it - with that attitude, you'll soon be using Hex without crashes :)
About n-gons.. Hex has no problem with them; the problem is when there are too many of them or they are non-planar. On the positive side, if the export had worked, it would not have rendered in Studio very well!
A good habit to get into, which will save a lot of heartbreak in the long term is to every now and then, and certainly before making the final export, to give your mesh a good once-over diagnostic test. Go to Selection in the top menu; right down the bottom are some tools for selecting n-gons, etc. Click on them and any bad geometry will be highlighted, so you can fix before it becomes a real problem.
Great advice Roygee - thanks. I will stick with Hexagon. Sure it's old and could do with an update but I'm finding it way easier than blender. For the record, I spent £500 on sketchup pro which I use in a lot of projects and that crashes a fair amount as well if you ask it to do too much. Blender never seems to crash but hurts my brain every time I use it :)
Whatever problems you're having, if you don't report them to customer support and work with them to get it reproduced, then there's no chance it will ever get fixed. Remember that posting in the forum is not the same thing as working with customer support.
Most of the time when people complain of a crash on this forum, they don't even bother to say what operating system, driver and version of the software they are using. All of these can affect the software. For instance, just a little while back someone was complaining that Hexagon wouldn't let them enter a serial number. Since many, many people have successfully entered their serial number, this was an odd situation. As we got intot the discussion it became apparent that the actual problem was that their display driver was crashing. This was either the fault of the display driver or the fault of Hexagon. Without access to their specific environment and the source code of Hexagon, it's impossible to tell which is at fault. However, since many people run Hexagon successfully the likelihood is the display driver being at fault. Game developers struggle with buggy drivers all the time and insert all kinds of crazy workaround code to deal with faulty drivers. The situation has improved dramatically over time; display drivers are much more reliable and stable now, particularly since Windows Error Reporting sends information on display driver crashes back to Microsoft. However, both graphics applications and 3D video card drivers are complex pieces of software written by fallible human beings. The possibility of errors in either one is something that developers work to reduce, but it is difficult to reduce that possibility to zero in an economical way.
Almost every discussion of a crash here in this forum is worthless from the perspective of someone actually trying to fix it. Customer support is going to make sure that all the necessary information is gathered to ensure that the problem can be reproduced. As a developer, it's very difficult to fix problems when you can't reproduce the behavior, particularly in the case of a crash. Most customer support organizations have a "help desk" ticket system and this is usually linked with some sort of bug tracker for the software. Developers usually see the bug tracker and not the help desk system. So if you really want your crashes fixed, you must work through customer support to get them tracked in the first place. That's the first step to getting something into a system that is seen by a developer.
My 2 cents for a repeatable "crash" ... whether it's "user shouldn't do that" or "bug" ... doesn't matter, if don't want crash, don't do it.
On a uvmap, selecting "one" line ... then selecting a "second" line some distance away and then clicking on "betw" hoping it will connect the lines => crash ... said function is apparently only working on "meshes", NOT "uvmaps".
Thanks Steve athome, You save my life!!! :D
I find that hexagon crashes steadily and often as well. It doesn't seem to have any relation to what i'm doing, since it crashed twice last nightwhile doing absolutely nothing: I had stepped away to occupy myself while i was waiting for it to restart (from a crash, of course) and it crashed on a new file with an empty scene. It has also crashed while modeling, moving, trying to seam the UV on a model with a CPU killer 70 polygons (seriously, its a black cylinder with rounded ends I made for an antenna on another prop.
I regret that I paid money for this. I regret even more waiting too long to use it to seriously expect any kind of refund. 6 hours yesterday trying to make the toe of a boot that took FOUR MINUTES in Sculptris, with the penalty of a more complex mesh. You can't say I didn't give it a chance.
Hexagon has a nice interface, reminds me of the old Truespace GUI. Hexagon creates really nice, resource conservative models. Too bad it isn't stable enough to actually get anything done.
Hello, all.
I just switched over to a new computer and, after having run Hex using an old Intel chipset, which wasn't very... pretty, I am pleased to find that I can run it reasonably well, without crashes, on my slightly "newer" computer. Besides all the tips on setting Hex's own options, I offer my customized settings for my Nvidia driver. For me, these settings allow me to use Hex without crashing unless I am performing an operation (ie: Requires "Validation") and I rotate the camera very fast while, simultaneously, using one of the operation tools, like one of the sculpting/displacement brushes.
I am running Win7 Professional, i7 CPU, only 8gig RAM atm, GeForce GTX 560Ti.
Here are my Nvidia settings. Of particularly note, notice that Triple Buffering is turned completely off. This is important to do at the hardware level, if you can, since Hex doesn't seem to know didly about how to address that and I have never had any stable luck with it, before, adjusting it within Hex's options, when using better chipsets than a standard, old-fashioned, Intel set. Thread optimization is also Off as is Texture Filtering, which is completely unnecessary in Hex, since texture painting in Hex has never been pretty to begin with. :)
Link to pic: http://i.imgur.com/9tlBwMM.jpg
I hope that can help some of you.
Note: Win7Pro automatically disables my Aero theme, so if you're running a theme, set it to disable when Hex's exe is active or just disable it, manually. There's no reason to confuse Hex further by giving it overlays it was never built to understand.
Wow, thanks, I'll go check mine and see if there might be an improvement to be had :-)
The better your GPU, the smoother it should run. I run Hex on three machines (a lappie at work, my desktop at home, and I have a third lappie I use for editing or entertainment while the desktop renders), and none of the three are junk, even if they aren't supercomputers. the crazy part is the oldest of them is the most stable. There is still no predicting what will crash hexagon, though. Restarting and replacing lost work make every hexagon session ridiculously tiresome. I lost the same half-built model three times last night before I finally gave up and built it with a 7 year old version of Truespace, which does not output as friendly an obj as hex does when I can get it to work.
These crashes are not the result of pushing the machine or the software. I build one piece of a model at a time, with nothing else in the scene. Most crashes seem to happen in the 30-40 minute range, and are as likely to happen when moving an un-altered primitive or changing views as dealing with a complex model. So I give up. I'm shopping for another modeler that doesn't have an interface requiring a college degree in geometry to use and outputs nice clean models, so any suggestions, feel free to email me.
Again, a real shame, because when I bought hex and used it the first time, I thought it was miraculously easy, and when it starts in a stable state, it is. Makes really nice objects, too, so if you have more patience than I do, it's a nice piece of software....
This is simply "not true" about any piece of software.
Hexagon is pretty optimized, for its day, in the way it displays things. It can handle pretty large polygon counts, again, for its day... What causes issues in Hexagon with crashing are basically two things: OpenGL backwards-compatibility issues and memory addressing. That's it. It doesn't matter if you're running fifty $1000 video cards slic'd together on a server-based machine with four CPUs - If your card's drivers have issues with older OpenGL programs or memory addressing confuses Hexagon, it will bork up and no amount of cash thrown at getting more power for Hexagon to use is going to solve the problme, as that has nothing to do with the problem. :)
Hexagon, for instance, runs much smoother on a machine that I have that I can hot-switch to use a very old, generic, Intel-based video driver chipset. Hexagon loves that old chipset! But, it hates the relatively new Radeon set that machine can also use. Currently, I'm running it with no problems, provided the conditions in my post above, on a much newer GeForce chipset driver. The added benefit, here, is that this driver/chipset will adequately deal with texture painting, wheras the Intel chipset has little in the way of recognition for displaying the dynamic textures being painted in an OpenGL-based rendering window.
Hexagon can work, though it's troublesome to get it into working shape and altering the driver environment to suit it. If you wish to switch, that's fine and I'm behind you - Hexagon is a great program, but it has had virtually no engine stewardship in years. DAZ has worked on the "bridge" component, to support DS, but there is little else that can be done, since Hexagon's engine is based on a programming language that is no longer in development. That's why we won't see any new versions of Hexagon. At least, no new versions based on the language that Hexagon uses right now.
Some like Wings3D ... or Blender [free and developing along quite abit if you like its UI] ... the rest are big bucks but are also popular like Zbrush, Modo, Max, etc. Highly recommend using free trials before purchasing. They all have "learning curves".
I have found it a good idea to hang on to Hexagon though as at times that bridge is the "only" way to get some models in and out of D/S and still be creating the morph or whatever. Like with Sculptris ... one can use the bridge to get the item from D/S to Hexagon, export it out of Hexagon, import that into Sculptris, morph it, export it out, import it back into Hexagon, ship it over the bridge to D/S.
Saving in Hexagon "frequently" saves a lot of lost time remaking stuff. It's almost a guaranteed crash to have "just one more step and we're finished" ... so "incre save" before making that last one step. Mysterious crashes if it has anything to do with touching ... or even just selecting the "face" button ... are usually caused by an unwelded line. Esp. after tessellating Hexie for some strange reason likes to unweld a line or two - anywhere on the model. Some model using only lines and dots for this reason. I look for and fix them. The tool utility to "merge duplicate points" usually solves those problems.
I have no idea where you get your wacky ideas. Hexagon is written in C++. C++ is not "a programming language that is no longer in development". If you aren't talking about C++, but something else, then again I have no idea where you get your ideas. Did you work for Daz? Have you seen the source code? If not, then it seems that you're just making stuff up.
I do not recall where I read it save that it had to be somewhere in the old forums but I too had read something about the programming code for Hexagon was getting rather too old to update. However they did update the engine for it once and I like to believe that if we should all live long enough, maybe they will again. And maybe spray a few more bugs.
Perhaps they were thinking of the Mac version of Bryce.
As was said above, it was from technnical discussions from the old DAZ boards. (My nic only counts posts on the forums since they were upgraded/changed.) IIRC, there are elements in Hexagon that rely heavily on libraries that were constructed using a now "dead" programming language, no longer in development. So, getting Hexagon up-to-grade in handling newer systems and extending its features would, in essence, rely on re-writing all of that, which would not be cost-effective for DAZ to develop. And, that's why if anyone is waiting to see a new version of Hex, they'll be waiting for a very long time, until DAZ decides to develop an entirely new program (or buy someone else's). There might be updates to keep the elements of the Bridge working, maybe updates to extend some features that lie outside of Hex's primary libraries and such. But, there won't be any substantive new iterations for Hex (ie: Hexagon 3, etc), at least according to DAZ's statements, years ago. They're allowed to change their minds, of course. But, it'd be a very expensive decision. Of course, I'd love to see a new version or any true improvements to improve stability/functionality. But, unless DAZ is making "stoopid" amounts of cash, I don't think they'll throw money at redesigning Hex.
(Ps - I'm not sure why you're so excitable. Is it because you read a Wiki page? I'm just going off of discussions that happened a long time ago and are not, unfortunately, on these boards anymore.)
To aggromemnon - I just updated my video drivers yesterday, GeForce, and now Hex is crashing like a heroine addict.... /sigh I tried for a few hours to "make it work" and it looks like the only thing I can do is run it on an old intel based chipset, on an old machine, if I want any hope of stability. Since I'm not going to do that, you had better reserve me a place in line when you're shopping for a new modeling app. :) I'll bring an apology and an extra cup of coffee. (PS - The other info in my post is still generally correct, it's just that Hex just died for me.)
Unless the video drivers are indeed working better for the other programs, could roll-back?
:-( that Hexie died otherwise over there. Tech support?
Morkonan, you recall correctly - this was from ages ago and all that has been done since was to get the bridge to Studio working for Mac. From what Daz said in an official statement, they do see the need for "some modelling capacity" for Studio. That could either mean they would develop a basic modelling ability in Studio, or improve something in Hex to be able to handle G3 better.
In general, the days of dedicated modelling apps seem to be numbered.
From what I notice in this forum, it appears that the only real active interest in Hex is for kitbashing Studio dolls and clothes. Most serious modellers have moved on.
I personally have gotten so comfortable using Blender, I wonder how I avoided it for so many years:)
Blender was avoided for years because they've only changed of the UI in the last year or so ;-)
I got as far as getting it installed again ... just don't have the time or patience or whatever to dedicate the hours to learning it right now. Have Hexagon working well enough for what I do which is yeah, basically making little morphs for the Studio dolls and clothes. Simple props and sets but anything too grandiose and it has seizures.
You're right - Blender does take a lot of learning; fortunately there are countless numbers of free tutorials and folks who are prepared to help.
About Hex crashing on more complex stuff - here's a pic of the last model I did in Hex (Cutty Sark). Took something like three months, without a single crash!
That's V4 on the prow - talk about kitbashing :)
Nice one Roygee, I would very much like to see a close up of it.
I am IMPRESSED. That's awesome. If you're sharing/selling, let me know!
I'm still at the stage where I make enough mistakes that closing the program myself and opening a previous save happens too.
Thanks:) She's still a ways from complete - meantime I got distracted. Will make a point of gettng her done asap. As usual, I'll share for free.
One thing that has held me back is a lack of good reference images of the bow and stern. I know I have some details wrong, but took some artistic licence. Someone on the Carrara forum promised to take pics for me, but vanished from the scene. So, if there is anyone who visits London watching and is up to taking a trip to Greenwich, I'll really be grateful:)
They look great Roygee. I know what you mean about getting decent reference images, in the past I've bought an AirFix model of a Spitfire so I could take my own photos.
I fixed the problem!
OK, for those having issues and if you are using an NVidia Geforce chipset and drivers (And, possibly, others - See below), besides the changes I made in my driver configuration, posted earlier in this thread, and in compliance with basic Hexagon options changes relating to OpenGL and the like, here's what you MUST do:
In your Geforce driver options, set up your driver for a custom driver config for Hexagon, as I showed in my post, above. However, you must also change the "Power Management Mode" to "Prefer Maximum Performance."
The problem with older OpenGL-based applications and NVidia's Power Management mode is well-known in certain circles. I did some digging and discovered that many developers of older 3D apps, most for workplace use, that relied on OpenGL had issues with newer cards/chipsets/drivers. One of the most common issues was the power-mangement features of the specific card. The GPU in a video card changes its needs as necessary. This dynamic power switching is, generally, a good thing, since it limits power consumption and heat generation. However, in older OpenGL programs, there's a problem with detecting these new power management dynamic conditions. This often results in "Driver has stopped responding and has reset" issues, like many OpenGL problems. But, that's basically a catch-all alert message that tells you nothing much... like most darn Window's alert messages. :)
If you're having this issue, try changing your Power Management features to supply a constant source of power to your card's GPU instead of dynamically switching it. This "might" also work with other card chipsets, but I can't vouch for that. With cards that do not have a driver feature like this, it's possible that card has a configuration file that you can edit, manually, to achieve the same effect. Check the tech-boards for your card's manufacturer.
Note: Hexagon, when crashing in Win7 Pro, sometimes retains garbled temp junk in memory/temp caches that can thoroughly bork up the rest of your session, no matter how many restarts of the program. I found this out when I crashed it, horribly, and could never, ever, click "Cancel" for an operation or any form of "Undo" for a dynamic operation, like sculpting. This persisted, no matter how many restarts I did, until I restarted the system. I haven't narrowed it down, since it didn't occur again, because I fixed the dynamic GPU power management problem and experienced no more crashes. This is likely indicative of a problem with memory addressing, since we already know that's an issue. Something ain't releasing that memory on a crash, I think. But, I'm no code-monkey.
Good luck, all!
I downloaded the newest bastage-son-second-cousin for Blender, the other day.... I have avoided it because the UI was designed by committee and, apparently, the committee was made up of blind dyslexic monkeys. :) While I want to get on board with Modo, it's becoming increasingly obvious that Blender is offering more and more capabilities every day, for free. And, with Poser now incorporating Blender's "Cycles" rendering engine as an alternative engine (Poser new release scheduled for next week) it seems pointless to continue fighting Blender's hot-key hell and "hidden" basic operations and unintuitive, cobbled-together, confusing spastic module-interface-gone-insane interface. It's not a "U.I.", since it can't be actually... used. ;)
So, I'll be hitting the Blender forums and tutes, soon. Yes, I will continue to use Hex as often as I can, since I have yet to find anything that is as fast and easy to use as Hex for basic and even advanced modeling. (Hex's manipulator is the best I have ever found, with all important modeling controls right on the darn manipulator! Well, no extrude, but I'm not complaining a bit.*Haven't looked elsewhere in quite awhile, though.)