New 2 DAZ. Curious about Hexagon
drcharbonneau
Posts: 0
Basically that. I'm considering buying Hexagon, but have heard mixed reviews in the Commons Forum. Could those of you who use it regularly explain the pros and cons of the software, please?
One issue mentioned is stability. One concern I've had is the learning curve, say compared to Blender. Another is limitations with DAZ 4.5, in that if I create a wide selection of say plants in Hexagon, would DAZ be able to incorporate a plethora... like build a jungle?
How difficult would it be to create true to life animals?
Get Hexagon or just stick to learning Blender or both?
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Hexagon is temperamental and a bit buggy but if you use it correctly and validate and collapse dynamic geometry when you should i find hexagon a great solution for modeling and much simpler than blender. your other concerns are related to your computer and its limitations. any computer but a mainframe has them and in 3d you always have to watch your polygon limits. hope this is helpful, id buy it, which i did
Thanx for the info.
I am on a PC. W7. 64bit. 2Ghz. 4MbRAM. 500Gb HD. Is that adequate for most work or are we into ROFL mode?
you wouldn't want to create a scene in hex or any modeler, you create the mesh and bring it in to your 3d program and create the scene there. one wouldn't create a series of plants as you say in hex but one at a time and export them to your scene creation program. hex is not a rendering engine as is blender or daz. strictly modeling. for that its more than adequate , for rendering again it would depend on the size of the scene you wanted to render and your processor. your set up, i think you meant 4 gigabytes of ram could be beefed up. your graphic card is important the more cores the better and a dedicated hard drive for virtual memory
Yes. I did mean 4GbRAM. This is a one year old Acer with a Celeron quad core. I imagine by the time I get serious about super-realism, I'll get a new machine with 12 or 16 GbRAM and likely a high end graphics card.
For now... wouldn't it be possible to build a group of plants on a cloth structure, say a few clumps of grass, import them, then manipulate them to no end so the cloth wrapped itself around say a mound or a porous rock? As for the environment, I'm working at learning Blender, but leaning toward getting Bryce along with hex. I'm saying that I do know the difference, being reasonably adept at 3D modeling, but also having messed with Vue a bit. Vue needs too many add-ons, especially for my current budget, although it's promising and works well on my desktop PC in XP32bit with 2GbRAM.
That's good to know about the HD for virtual memory. I hadn't thought of that. DAZ looks like it can do quite a bit and I have that.
I appreciate all input from you folks, even if it's a bit redundant, or even if I'M a bit redundant. Different thoughts from different perspectives and user levels is great for learning about the tools, the tool makers and fellow end users...
im glad i was a little bit helpful. i dont use blender but in carrara, u could use a softbody object let it drape over a rock or something use a distribution map in a shader on the softbody for your grass or whatever. you wouldnt have to use real instances of the grass saves a lot of processing time and file size you couldnt do this in hex it has no physics engine
Time will tell. I'm not even a week into learning all this yet...
good luck, and enjoy
When I first started with Hexagon I found it frustrating, still do sometimes
I have and do use many 3d apps and have a heap on my pc. I must say that Hexagon now seems to be in my modelling work flow on all of my projects, I feel it has one of, if not, the, cleanest and easiest to navigate interfaces of all of them. Great for the hobbyist and pro alike.
If you know about mesh modelling and some of the pitfalls with bad meshes then I think the 'bugs' in hex tend to be more infrequent :)
all the best.
As a coding monkey who single handedly cloned ProE5, I know about "bugs" from bloodshot eyes staring at a code editor.... and giving up to simply live with them. AutoCAD was famous for needing patches. My clone works reasonably well, but there are times when it flat out fails, so I've been looking for more stable programs. Plus biomorphic models have been a long time quest recently revisited. I have to transfer funds to PayPal after next week's banking mission, then I'll likely get both Hex and Bryce. It sounds like both are well liked with some minor qualms. Could be much worse I'm sure. Till I do get it, I'll start purusing some other threads just to get the feel of other members here.
Thanx for the opinion and input.
Well now, welcome to the world of Hexagon. Regarding which proggy to render with, it may be that this one http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/ will be of interest to you. Don't think that because it's free that it is useless. It also comes in a 64 bit version which is called Echo Boost. The forums are great and the members will do all they can to help beginners and the material library and user materials are superb.
It does have a pro big brother which has evolved from Kerkythea. So in the case of the latter, give it a try, won't cost you anything but time, this one is the one to try ~ Kerkythea 2008 Echo Update (v2.0.19) . :-)
Okay... I take it Hex is only 32bit?
Yes. :)
Actually that's not so bad. I'm running most of this on W7 64bit. I imagine I'd need to run it in compatibility mode, or does it load normally?
Same as for Bryce, I'll be getting it in a couple weeks. Till then I'm asking queries about various things like networking. As for Hex, will it be difficult to model a horse or other animals?
If you look at my tagline, you'll see that you don't need high-end specs for hexagon to run efficiently. I have only 2 cores and 2 gigs of ram, and hexagon rarely crashes.
Also, a "dedicated hard drive for virtual memory" would be a complete waste of time and resources. OSs simply don't need that much room for scratchpadding data, and hard drives are like the proverbial molasses compared to the speed of ram. And one other tip: Unless a user has a specific reason and KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT HE'S DOING, a user should NEVER set the page file to a fixed size. Changing the allocation almost invariably results in a clunky machine that spends all its time swapping data back and forth between ram and pagefile. Let the OS dynamically allocate its own paging (which is the default state when windows is set up).
I just downloaded and checked out the kerkythea modeler. Not that impressed with modeling tools.
One thing it stated about "billions of vertices" had me wondering if there's a limit in Hex...
Kerkythea is NOT a modeling programme. It is a RENDERING programme. So it's not surprising you don't think much of it's modeling tools. :)
I run Hexagon on my Win 7 64bit O/S. You should not need to run it in compatibility mode as it will automatically load into the x86 program section. It is unknown exactly what the poly limit is but you shouldn't run into any major problems at this stage of your learning. :cheese:
Animals ? If that is what you are into then yes, Hexagon is perfectly able to model animals, the question is though; are you ?
afreaginname is quite right, you do really need to beef up your ram as Win 7 will take a rather large bite out of your existing 4 Gb. Patching Hexagon to take advantage of more than the 32 bit memory limit does help though. Also as he indicated you do need a half decent stand alone graphics card preferably a Nvidia as generally they seem to be more capable of handling the graphics which we throw at them.
Am I? In the computer? Not yet, but I usually learn faster than most. On paper? I've been drawing people since age 7 next to an older sister who was drawing horses with excellence since she was about the same age and an even older sister who was equally as gifted. Classic art learning teaches basic shape, then quickly forces the learning of human anatomy. Once that is mastered the artist can draw about anything. When I was 11 I won the grand prize in a science fair for a project on animation which included a sequence of about 100 frames drawn on standard typing bond with a light table I'd built myself a couple years earlier. Of course I was running a turning lathe, drill press and band saw at age 8. It wasn't till I was in my late twenties that I focused on paintings of animals.
Here's a sample of some of my work from the 80's. What I saw in the Hex promotion page is it can apparently do extrusions, chamfers, rounds, blobs and, last but not least, cloth and other soft stuff. Yep! I'm in. Just waiting till the financial wheel rolls the right direction and that is only kept at bay by early month reservation, in case some great urgent need presents itself in this century of surprises. Look at the work. Considering I learned first DOS, then AutoLisp, then BASIC, then C/C++, then Assembly Language, then VB, then Delphi, mostly on my own and wrote a reasonably stable clone of ProE5 with Delphi and EBasic for some added 3space commands, it shouldn't take that long before I'm up to speed with the rest of you. ;-)
Incidentally, the only part of all that work I don't do is the neon (mercury vapor tubes, in the Baby Place channel letters) and other glasswork... yet. The baby in that job was airbrushed with Spray lat sign laquers and the other lit panels use the same paint. In the 70's I made some of my living, between engineering journeys, by doing trick paint and van murals. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my...
In your opinion, though, I could start with bones and build outward using Hex, DAZ and Bryce? Imagining it will take me a few months to become proficient at those and Blender, I'd be flush enough to build a more advanced machine. I worked at Bendix Aerospace as an electronics tech for quite a while, so pretty much know how to build a server type of machine. I'm ESD solder certified and even have some SMD experience.
I really appreciate your input on the recommendations and technical aspects. I'm already planning months ahead.
:lol: Well that put me politely in my place. You surely seem to have all the necessary skill sets. Wish that I was so blessed. :cheese:
However, someone who does the type of modeling that you are obviously going to do will probably jump in with their first hand knowledge. For my part it is second hand, as I'm not really into modeling figures/.animals. But I can say that as far as I'm aware one does not model a figure as in the classic anatomy methodology in Hexagon! I'm not saying it's not done, just that I've never seen it done.
In view of your aim I would have thought that you obviously also need to try out is this http://www.zbrushcentral.com/forumdisplay.php?110-Sculptris-Main-Forum the FREE baby brother of Zbrush in both cases think of a lump of clay but on your computer. That said, you can sculpt in Hexagon, although not with quite the same tools as can be found in either Sculptris nor Zbrush.
Regarding Daz it most certainly is centred around figures and accompanying content. Genesis would appear to be a great morphing model, with which, if you are into that sort of thing will give countless hours of enjoyment. Just not my scene. So wait until more knowledgeable members will hopefully chime in.
Best of luck and enjoy. :-)
I really had no intention of putting you in your place. I was elaborately answering your question (although THAT may have been attmpting to dethrone my arrogance... ;=) ). Mom was a deft artist, Dad was a master carpenter (he pioneered the fold-up speaker industry at ElectroVoice...), last child LC) has to be VERY creative to compete with two buggy zitsters, so finding the 3 year old LC organized enough to be well on the way to building an undercamber airplane (Sky King influenced) in returning from work one day should have been expected. I remember that as my first spanking; not for building the airplane in the living room, but for using Dad's wood without permission. It took years to get over the fear of the 6'-3" giant of a craftsman. You'd think he'd have noticed that his 3 YEAR OLD, for God's sake, was wielding his hammer and had a working concept of an aircraft from a TV show...
Not intending to boast. With excellence comes arrogance. With arrogance comes calamity, often accompanied by irony. If you are a regular guy with a paintbrush who simply has a deft understanding of Cartesian coords, and software, consider yourself blessed. The more gifts you get, the more the Grinches are there to steal them.
Your input is certainly welcome and I'll check out the Zbrush site. Isn't Zbrush itself OpenGL? Do you have a gallery page of your work somewhere?
Beyond that, sometimes the student ends up teaching the teachers a few things during the teachings. Barring any calamity this week, I'll transfer funds next weekend, a few days later I'll unwrap the package and likely will have a good number of questions, same as I do now with Blender.
Where I'll be eventually wanting input is how difficult it is to sell one's work.
Toodles...
;-) May the force be with you. I shall watch with great interest. :)
:-) ROFL!
Just place no great expectations on short order. When you're up to your waist in alligators, it's hard to remember your original purpose was to drain the swamp.;-)
I'm not a great modeler by any means, but I found Hex relatively simple, GeekAtPlay.com has some great tutorials.
I imagine it'll all pull together as I actually get the software. Blender is helping me understand riggings better.
Hi RedSquare,
Downloaded Sculptris. That's pretty cool! I have to explore it some more, but it just might prove a valuable tool. I haven't yet looked at it's output file capabilities, as in export.
Getting along with Blender, but have a long way to go there. Still plan to go with hex and Bryce as I've mentioned. It's a shame those two don't have shareware trials to get a feel for.
Thanx for pointing me toward Sculptris.
My pleasure. Enjoy. Just save as a .obj and after UV's & materials added take it into either Blender or Kerkythea and ~ render!
If you are getting to grips with Blender all power to your mouse/tablet, I keep dipping my toe in the water but quickly withdraw, perhaps one day I'll get serious 'cause I have to say it sure is becoming a not 'arf bad piece of software whose development cycle is a wonder to behold. :-)
I did find a drawback, though not a deal breaker. I imported an object from DAZ into it to rework and it slowed down to a snail's pace. Nonetheless, it is useful for adding details to skin. As of now I'm trying to get some feedback on DAZ itself so I can learn how to rig an object imported, which, from Sculptris to DAZ, succeeds quite well. I learn best from reading, rather than the videos. Everywhere I go, YouTube is touted as the way and I've even been snubbed in some forums because I don't want it. I run out of razors trying to keep shaved during views or even downloads, those too being a hassle at certain times of the day or evening because I get knocked off and i don't want to rely on someone to knock me up in the wee hours (unless of course it's my wife presenting the Oui hours...) so I can have priority data speeds.
Scuptris is so simple to use that little help is needed. DAZ needs a written manual, preferably a .pdf file one can download. I've gone to the DAZ help site, even put in a search on a particular subject (rigging, in this case) drawing a blank. That could be a deal breaker.
Have you ever tried Cybermotion?
http://cybermotion-3d-designer.en.softonic.com/
It's a bit pricier than Bryce, though less than Carrara, but the scene objects are well automated and I've always found it excellent as a renderer, modeler and environment tool. Lots of capabilities, same as Blender, but, like Blender, it's not a CAD/CAE app.
I just did an experiment to see how well Cybermotion works with DAZ.
A bit of playing with scale and such will be involved, but to create the mountin, get from the 'puter with CYBer to DAZ on this machine and get to these rendering points took all of 10 minutes.
Least I can do for the sake of fair exchange. Everyone has been helpful. I've already made progress.
A question about Hex:
Does it allow for generatrix type objects, such as a revolve or a sweep. I'd think an extrude would be a given.