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That's my biggest gripe with Win10. I can change the font size through the registry, that's no big deal. But being forced to use an ugly sans serif font for system text... *sighs*
Have you checked the timeline carefully to see if these poses make bodyparts go through other bodyparts? That's always been a problem with dynamics; even ancient Poser "cloth room" tutorials make a special mention of this check.
yeah, bad times, bad times. first off, yeah, I looked at the three line, even tho it was draped current frame only, and starting from the "memorized position" aka the zero figured pose. and it was at the very beginning of the sim at that zero pose that things went south for the particular pose presets that have broken all the dForce stuff I tried on them. I'm not sure what is going on with the poses, and it's only one of many things on my plate, lol.
(ugh, I thought I finished that thought days ago, sorry)
I just gave the new nvidia driver 391.01 whql a try, and so far it's good or no changer.
391.01 WHQL is doing a tad better than 388.13 so far on windows 10 with GTX10xx cards. The GPU is not going to 139mhz comatose mode clocks when I'm in the middle of trying to work with 3D objects in an OpenGL program (Daz Studio). Hence why I had the Heaven menu open at all times in the background when working in the latest ver of Daz Studio, to keep the GPU from falling asleep. The OpenCL ccrash with some pose presets is still presistant tho.
In my experience, going full actual timeline is somehow more stable than doing the current frame + memorised pose thing, even though in theory it's the same. The point is, with the timeline you can adjust the pose per frame if you wish (just don't forget to save keyframes). And dForce seems to be sensitive to "wrong positions", so moving things around slightly so that fabric doesn't "pinch" between bodyparts too early or something, now this can help. Fiddly, but every hobby-affordable dynamic sim I've tried has been this way.
sorry for the delay, I have a lot on my plate.
So much so I totally missed the launch of some fun props.
The props (Kitty Treats Cat Props) I had no probs at all with, it was the dynamic clothing on Fwsa Khloe, and the furry stuff that kept crashing hard. So much so I can't open the saved scene files now. For some odd reason, whenever you apply a pose preset to the critter (not the hair), it causes the scene to fail to load from a save, and with the fox, it is an instant crash.
Also, that really cool outfit I first had on Khloe, just didn't work out, as it didn't follow the figure completely, and dynamics just made the thing fall apart. I would really like to know how the artist made that work in the promo for FWSA Khloe, lol. (I need some coffee, and to sort through some stuff)
Iray Iray Iray, what are you doing. There are two things that until the situation improves, will keep Iray from being my primary render engine, and the rest I'll just assume is unrelated "Photo real"misconceptions and bad choices with making surface shader maps.
If you are an artist with a choice between food or a new graphics card for Iray, a new card for working in Iray is not worth two to three times MSRP for, and it is absolutely not worth starving for. And that extends to a new computer, not just a new GPU.
I know of two others that I would love to help out, tho I'm not really in a position to do much at all. And to be honest, the needs do NOT justify two to three times MSRP for new stuff. One had her computer’s 2600k motherboard die on her, the other it tugs at me every time I think of the FX8350 I'm working on that has two more cores than what she has (FX6350), and both of them would need to upgrade to DDR4 at the stupendous prices of lat. At the asking cost, it really is not worth it, and puts it beyond my means to do anything about it.
So, where does that Put Iray for me, lol. For people that do not have Iray capable GPU cards, it is a showstopper. The limits of GPU memory don't help either and is a major show stopper for me. I happen to be lucky enough to have a GTX1050ti card that I got before prices when stupid, and it's 4GB is so limiting that I run out of GPU memory before I get to the shoes on a single HD figure, and forget about complete environments and scenes. Until I can load up and render the entire Stargate Atlantis City ship TV show 3D model in Iray, it will never be a viable replacement for so many other render engines out there.
Also, after fussing with a new figure all day yesterday I noticed another major pitfall. Apparently the color depth is NOT what I was lead to believe at first. 24bit sRGB has 256 shades of each color from 0 to 255 (a full 8bit value for each of the three RGB colors), yet in Iray apparently there is only a hundred shades of each color from 0.00 to 1.00 and that is pathetic. Any time I try to select a color between any of the 100 steps and apply it, the 24bit sRGB value is rounded up or down to the nearest Iray equivalent, and that is in a way incredibly limiting in color depth, lol.
I have no idea what rat-hole of Photo-Real-phile-ism (Twisted combination of Photo-real and Audiophile) Marcius ended up in while making these maps, however the end result is something that is completely useless for use in Any rendering engine if the goal is to have a figure that dose not look like there suffering from Hypochromic anemia (Iron Deficiency Anemia). I can not get enough red in there to get rid of the purple and green spots all over the figure.
I will thanks Marcius for one thing. Due to how bad Nuka's maps fail to work in any other render engine, I will Never buy another item from the Daz3D store that does not Explicitly list 3delight as an option. It is not worth the grief to make it work outside of Iray. In the past I have stayed away from most things that do not Explicitly list 3delight unless I really wanted the item and was willing to put in the time making 3delight mats for it using the included maps. This is not the first time I've run across mangled maps that don't work at all in 3delight, however this is the first time I don’t have the ability to just make my own maps from scratch to make the item work. I am done with items that do not have "3delight Material Presets" list in the "Whats included and Features". Yes, Nuka's maps are that much of a disappointment to me.
Nope. Don't fret. Same everything, it's just DS rounding up what it displays - it stores your high-precision value, just pretends it doesn't want to "clutter your visual field". You can test with any float slider. This linear colour swatch is the same inside.
Basically, DS linearises colours anyway because that's how render engines wants them. Open up a RIB and see for yourself if you don't believe me =D
It's just that those who don't use linear workflow get their colours linearised wrong =P
Due to TOS, there is only so much I'm willing to show of the maps. lol, I'm not sure that would explain the odd color shifting in the maps, that looks more like someone just swapped the CYM header with a RGB one without converting anything the actual image, lol. I did try to swap the "Base Color" (defuse) with the "Translucency Color" (Sub Surface) one, because looking at the diffuse maps it almost looks like there swapped, tho the Trans maps have the same color and shading issues (and lack palm treatment for a darker shade figure anyway), lol. This really looks like someone just took a CYM file, relabeled it RGB and dropped the resulting map into the diffuse channel, lol.
I don't think 25 shades of shadow and 75 shades of light logarithmic vs 128 shades of dark and 128 shades of light linear has anything to do with these maps. lol. As for the settings in the Iray surface shader, it really reminds me of the difference between 24bit and 16bit color depths back in the 3DFX days, lol. It does sort of add up tho, as GPUs do a lot of trimming of number format sizes to make things compute faster, like the difference between the 16bit shader (GPU die part) vs the 1024 bit FPU's in something like the Power Processor. You can get a lot of speed out of trimming down the bit-width of the logic, whereas modeling your ALUs and FPUs logic after something like the Curta calculator, only goes so far to making it fast.
I assumed if the interface was dropping from 24bit sRGB to whatever only gives you 100 values, that may have indicated something, lol.
Guess not.
working on my first cup of coffee. I did fuss with a few figure shape combos the past few days. I think Nuka's shape may be useful still, tho I've given up on her maps. FWSA Maisie turned out to have more useful maps in the end. There is Nothing like working with maps that are normal skin tone colors, lol.
So in any case, I looked at the backlog of projects that never got finished, and decided today I will attempt to make a simple end table in hex, if hexagon will cooperate, lol.
I'm just not decided yet just how tall or wide to make the shelves yet.
ok, I think I'll go with the original size, as it seems to be a good guess. 32 inches tall, and abou16 inches wide, tho I may still change that if it's not to difficult to do in hex.
The biggest thing I'm thinking about now is just how the base and top will mount to the pillar. I was first thinking it could be done with a simple threaded rod top to bottom, tho with the shelves being attached with a solid bolt from side to side, that doesn't leave much room inside the pillar for a threaded rod top to bottom, lol.
I'll think of something.
More Progress. The bottom tho looks a tad, bland.
I looked at the promos, and they're surprisingly like those Poser days of yore when SSS got barely introduced and every character looked made of wax, about to melt. In a few light setups it does look passable, but most of the time, let's just say "toon". Maybe this was the intention - that vendor has rather non-realistic stuff in their store.
The splotches you found on those maps apparently get smudged big time by SSS and look sorta smooth as a result - you could do a very similar thing in DS/3DL with something like UberSurface, but it will look like wax as well and so be extra picky about lighting.
"3Delight materials" are nice to have in theory, but unless there is a clearly labeled promo, you won't know if those materials are any good.
yeah, true. I just go by the simple fact that the PA had to at least set up the shader, and would notice if it will look good at all, rather than me throwing away money on stuff that may not work at all. There are some other things I've read, that would imply that all the surface of a person should be done mostly with Subsurface with nearly no defuse or gloss at all, hence that melting wax look, lol. While I'm sure in reality subsurface does play a lot, it is not a good replacement in renders for velvet (peachfuzz), gloss, and defuse for skin. Especially considering a lack of bump map resolution for all the pores and hair that is left out from a distance, lol.
I've forgotten how tedious Headus can be at times, lol.
And I still need to make the shelves.
Now that I think of Peachfuzz, did they ever add velvet to the Iray engine? lol.
ok, after this
and more of this
I'm calling it a night,
I'll work on this more tomorrow.
That must've been one shady source... a) You can't get anywhere without a glossy component, whatever it's called (reflection, specular, doesn't matter, it just has to be there for almost any material, for "hero" shots definitely) - wax definitely won't happen without it. b) You can get away without diffuse and not have anything look like wax if you have the right subsurface scale and other parameters, although in practice you'd want some diffuse because it will help with noise, and subsurface in a pure raytracer is noisy.
The dude in this test render has no diffuse =D Reflection he does have. Well it's obviously not Iray. But it's 3Delight pathtracer, so a good enough example of raytraced SSS. You see the noise in the shadows. Yes the shadows are soft, the emitter is huge... soft shadows are good for testing noise.
Good heavens, Zaaaarcon, pleeeeease don't get me started on "peach fuzz". It's so blown out of proportion in Poser/DSdom. IRL it only happens in a very few spots - like some females will have visible peach fuzz on the cheeks. Males won't at all because they shave. On most adult bodies, vellus isn't _that_ dense and/or long to be seen at all. And either way, even if we are set on replicating the look of that Special Woman (tm), velvet just doesn't work for peach fuzz without carefully calibrated control maps. It just looks like a layer of wheat flour without maps.
I'm pretty sure you can do anything in Iray the renderer. Now whether DAZ has these options available in their DS Uber material... I just don't know, no uso Iray =)
lol, that is actually a lot more impressive than all the features transparent blobs I've seen, lol. When light from behind the person goes clean through and washes out any hints of surface shadows, yeah, some things are overdone too useless excess. There is a big difference between a PBR shader, and what is in Daz3D, and there are significant limits on available compute resources to render such mythical PBR shaders.
I guess I am a glutton for self-torment, lol
Getting there tho.
ok, I had to get some rest after getting that almost set up in Daz studio. I did get the UV mapping sorted out (no UDIM for those that can't play along yet, it would be nice if devs got that going, these maps are getting large, lol).
Part of what was a mess, as I had initially made that speaker for dimension sizes only, and there is just so much I still don't know how to do without it becoming a gloss-anomaly mess.
The midrange and tweeter are going to be the death of me I think. I can start from a cylinder add loops and make the overall round parts. It's transitioning to square that is a bit of a nightmare. I know mostly what the end resulting mesh needs to be, I'm just not sure how to get there with adding and resizing loops, lol.
and adding round holes, on the sides of a cylinder mesh, I don't know, lol.
Them speakers had been on a sticky note on my desk for eons no, cuz I wanted to design a simple sealed box flat response reference speaker (not a ported resonator, lol). I got the MR5mk2 speakers, and it ended up on a back burner, lol. The other thing I've been second-guessing is the subwoofer satellite crossover of 120hz with the 5-inch speaker in the satellite. I would like to lower that to 60Hz or thereabouts.
Also, there was a bit of a chat elsewhere about how older motherboards had better VRM cooling and did not need the overkill as much.
And now we are stuck with V-core VRMs that thermal throttle the CPU to save the motherboard from turning into lava on your desk. lol.
105.9c is a tad hotter than most caps are rated to handle.
RIP old friend, RIP.
Unlike VRMs, OCXO's are made to run hot.
So, back to trying to make a speaker, without losing my mind, lol.
Hi, maybe booleans can help for the speaker cutouts. I can tell how to do it in blender but I dont know how well it would work in hexagon.
yeah, this is my crux. I have no clue how to get the big circle mesh, to make neet flat quads, and match the smaller circle vertices.
I have what, 4 points, that I need to make mesh up smoothly to what, 16 points at minimum. /shrug
I just tryed some boolean modifier in blender and no matter what I did - the topology gets messed up after I applyed the modifier.
I started with a cylinder with 32 verts all around. The second boolean cylinder got the same verts count. I've guessed I need 8 faces but it turns out I need 6 to have the bridge in between.
For the rounded edges I've used the bevel modifier and ignored that it would produce ngons.
With the boolean modifier I tryed different settings and got interesting shapes but never the cone shape I wanted.
In the end I've selected only the outer edges, made an ngon face and inserted some edges to get a mixture of tris and quads.
ok, yeah, that is sort of what I was thinking with the cone vent holes, sadly in hex there is only a 3 digit decimal XYZ point location precision, so manipulating the points on the side of a cone, can result in the surface longer being 'consistant' enough for gloss/reflection to not look off.
Grrr, I need to fix this, I've tried seting up a few ideas in hex tree times now, the the GPU driver keeps crashing. The driver windows update insisted on puting into this computer. And when ever the driver crashes, it takes out Daz Studio and Hexagon with it.
It's evening here so I'm not sure what you mean... Yeah in the DS community there is this mythical idea of a PBR shader - folks tend to think it's something magical. But in truth, a PBR shader is just any shader that uses energy conservation and plausible shading models (plausible, again, in the sense of energy conservation - rougher highlights get dimmer, this stuff). Most games today run PBR shaders, and they are realtime. That's all there is. Resources are for pathtracing, not PBR.
You should go to Nvidia's site ASAP and override that winupdate monstrosity with a fresh driver from the real source. That [SEHT] MS sometimes sneakily installs can wreck all sorts of havok. Like, it once slowed Blender UI (!!!) down to a crawl on my system.
yeah, well, we lost power this past weekend during a storm, and on boot-up, Windows insisted on re-downloading the 390.77 drivers, lol. There is no choice in the matter for win7, oddly. Any of the following will result in windows installing the 390.77 drivers on boot up (regardless of what kind of shut down or reboot the bootup was from). If you have a driver older than 390.77, or regardless of what driver you have (older or newer) and the 390.77 install files had been removed from the win7 boot drive to save space. I figured the MS server may have had a bad copy of 390.77, and tried DDU and installing the 390.77 drivers directly from Nvidia, and both are crash prone on Windows7. And when they crash, it takes out Hexagon and Daz Studio, very inconvenient at best.
So, as for trying newer drivers and not deleting the 390.77 install files folder on my c-drive.
They all have a problem with keeping the GPU in Comatose mode clocks when any OpenGL thing is running, even with the driver set to 'Performance mode' that should be the fix for that.
I discover on win10, with the 391.01 drivers, that if I had Unigen Heaven simply open on the menu screen and not running, that was enough to convince the driver to get with the program. However, on windows7, it does NOT work. So that leaves having a DirectX benchmark running in the background while working in Daz Studio, and that is not cool.
Yes, with a GTX1050Ti, it is barely better than trying to work with the GPU in Comatose clocks, however, it still stutters. And that is like trying to draw or paint, with someone deliberately shaking you at the same time.
I know for a fact, that on Windows 7, the 381.65 drivers worked flawlessly for OpenGL apps and Iray stuff, on the GT730, GTX9, and GTX10 cards. Thank you very much, Microsoft for reducing the productivity of your operating systems. lol, and 391.01 just crashed while Typing this, Perfect MS and Nvidia.
No system restore point for your 381.65 config? If you have it and if you want to keep Win7, most people would recommend restoring and then "freezing" the system state: cloning the disk image for safekeeping and then forever disabling internet access to that OS.
It's what folks on the Cakewalk forums were telling each other to do during these last few months when Sonar's fate was not decided yet.
ok, good point, and I was thinking as much. Especially after hearing in passing that MS would be dropping support for something (Tho I think that was an older ver of win10, not win7). There has been a win update for something, and after that update, I have not noticed any crashes yet this morning, Fingers crossed. I will try to get a primitive cone back into hex to screen-cap why splicing doesn't exactly work, no promises yet tho.
The R7 system appears to be doing ok tho, and I'm still in the process of copying over texture maps and stuff from the FX8350 comp. And that is I guess why I haven't tried to get Hexagon installed on the R7 comp yet. The old computer has all my source material on it, because that case is big enough for the ten hard drives and four SSDs worth of stuff. Newer cases appear to top out at only 3 drives, lol.
And on a side note, in Buildzoides latest ramblings vid on aftermarket GPU coolers, he is correct, Orange would be nice to have for some stuff.
Syrus_Dante, thank you, and sorry for the delay. Someday I hope to have the time to dig further into the line drawing and 'bulian' like things that I think Hexagon has. As it is, I had only watched one vid that showed something similar to that using a cylinder to make holes in something else, however I hadn't had time since to dig further into how the hell to do that, and the vid was useless as the person neglected to say what keyboard keys and mouse buttons were being used as I was watching stuff magically "just happen" as the mouse cursor was hovering over the object in the video, lol.
I have a more fundamental issue with fussing with the surface on a slope, and it has to do with 'fixed point math' that a PC is able to do (and Hex rounds that down to 3 digit precision at best), and the effects of gloss and reflection on a surface that is supposed to be flat that is not. For example, let's say I want a slope of 1 to 3 with 2 loops in the center of the slope to do something with (like where some of the cone shape will be cut out to form the vents in that speaker frame). The points in the middle of the slope will need to be whats called an irrational number just for the entire surface of the slope of the cone to be consistent for the polygon gloss and reflection calculations. Hexagon rounds that up to 3 digit precision, and that alone makes the entire surface of the slope no longer flat.
I can demonstrate that with a simple rectangle, buy slicing it into three parts, and moving the center of the rectangle over just 0.001 units in hex (as was done to the Rightmost rectangle below.
Now, 0.001 CM is not enough of a deformity for a normal object to appear at a distance to not be straight, yet the gloss calculations get all confused for some reason.
And that was just a cube, the XYZ points on a circle have far more precise numbers needed to make a cylinder, and each must be left alone, or hex will assume it to be the closest rounded number that it will show. That is why I was not so eager to dive further into making that speaker 100% lifelike, when all I needed for my self was a 3D size indicator to make a box around. It would be nice to do, it is beyond my skills at this point with what I do know how to do. (and now Grammarly breaks, lol)
ok, I decided for my sanity, I would use the cubes to mark what is not getting cut out, as the inverse curve was getting a tad out of hand for the much larger openings, lol. And thankfully, since the win-updates a day ago, the rapid crashing has, for the most part, slowed down, and I was able to actually get the stuff over to hex from studio before the Driver acted up (and it has yet to act up to be honest since, on the win7 box).
I'll fuss with that in a bit. I was also looking at some other stuff, and just happened to forget what folder window happened to be what one on the taskbar, and discovered that I guess now windows no longer gives you the name of the open folder as part of the preview thing.
How is that supposed to be helpful Microsoft, lol. At least the text list win7 shows is a tad better for figuring out what one is what.
So it's been an interesting week, lol.
And I'll guess Steve and crew also had an interesting week as well. This is in a way a good thing, cuz Steve doesn't need to feel bad about saying it is what it is, all the good and all the bad, even if it may not go over well with the product maker. Also, thanks to the Ryzen CPUs, and the 8700k, I now need to update a set of charts I made well over ten years ago.
Because the info has some relevance to what Buildzoid was showing with memory timings vs just raw memory clocks.
You are talking about 'effects of gloss and reflection' and a problem with precition.
But I think what you mean are these shading issues with the three boxes in the Hexagon. The right box example where you deformed the the edges by 0.001 cm seems to be enougth to change the appearance of the "vertex normals" in hexagon's preview.
I don't know how to change that in Hexagon, but in Blender I know with every new geometry you have to switch from flat-shading to smooth-shading and adjust the smoothing angle of all edges at once.
Until recently I didn't know of these smooth-shading adjustments, I ignored all the smooth shading, exported my obj files somehow without specific vertex normals and hoped that - once imported to Daz Studio they will look smooth with the default 30° smoothing angle of all vertex normals.
The discussion below starts with UV-unwraping in Blender but is also about vertex normals, smooth shading and beveled reinforcment edges for the SubD modifier and specific edgeweights in Daz Studio.
Towards the end I posted this video explaning the smooth shading in a simple way without a specific 3D program.
The speaker geometry is an interesting shape and a good exercise how to construct proper geometry with the cutouts.
I tried it myself lately with more or less good results. If you are intrested - here is my complete gallery of the progress I made with this shape in blender:
http://ibb.co/hmhLVH
http://ibb.co/jRCyHx
http://ibb.co/ibKOjc
http://ibb.co/mNKZqH
http://ibb.co/m2dvZc
http://ibb.co/fSb4Sx
http://ibb.co/g4Lynx
http://ibb.co/m51A0H
http://ibb.co/bykW7x
http://ibb.co/nf7B7x
Its all some kind of procedual with the various modifiers I used - like the mirror on the x and the y axis. The big problem right now - the solidify modifier dosn't merge the speaker rim to the cone shape.
Also the edgecuts I made to support the rounded cutouts are not aligned to any other edgeflow because I used the so called knife tool that uses the current viewport angle to project the edge-cut on the faces so I made the edgecuts in orthographic top view. I need to rethink of how to align the edgecuts and I already have an idea that will include a plane shape boolean cut.
ok, I think I sort of follow what is going on there, the cockpit looks closer to the 747 I have, tho I think my Electronic Attitude Display Indicator (EADI) may be a tad different. lol. (yes, it's a bit of a joke)
As you can probably guess, last time I could not figure out where the landing gear was, and I think it crashed, lol. In hex, I was just interested in getting a bit of a lip before just cutting out the mesh to make holes. So, here it goes with selecting some of them surface quads, then extruding them down in, After adding the extra loops.
That's about where I got before I was distracted by other stuff, lol. I promise I will get back to this, ASAP.
Earlier today, there was some chat about GPU water blocks, and I had noticed that some of them sort of look like car parts, and I did a quick search for a random pic of a car engine in a car with the hood open. I then noticed that one of the cars had an interesting air intake that sort of gave me an idea for a computer case air guide. I doodled it up with some thoughts on a photo of my computer case, and posted it a few hours later when chat had gone silent for a short time. I was a tad surprised by the response, and it dawned on me, similar could have happened at any computer case manufacturer, lol.
Some engineer has a brainstorm for a case cooling airflow configuration, while drafting it up the engineer finds a few references somewhere in another industry in something like a plane boat or car, and is sidelined by the entire office because a way erupts between fans and haters of whatever was referenced by the engineer. Given an environment like that, I can totally grasp how we ended up with the flood of no-airflow cases the past few years. It wasn't just Cooler Master that came out with cases with less airflow than former models (Silverstone PM02 vs PM01), and the first H500P case was not that bad compared to many other failures that happened (like the 805 infinity mirror case).
The H500P-mesh has improvements that Cooler Master need not act like a Passive aggressive child over. The way Cooler master is behaving is what is giving me contempt for the product, not the product its self.
As for the PM01, I looked at my doodles and decided that there is no way I can make that work in the case without adversely affecting airflow, so I'll let that sit on the back burner and simmer a bit longer. There are no bad feelings over what happened in chat, and I was also joking around as well, lol.
ok, The graphics driver crashed last night just before bed, so I got to get this stuff fired back up (hexagon, Daz studio, etc), tho I sort of have a plan or idea. As for the Speaker, it is a cylinder, and I simply added a loop, resized the loop, placed the loop, then added the next loop, and repeated that till I had the overall speaker shape.
So, what I have in mind, after using the cubes as a measuring tape of sorts to mark where to add the upper and lower loops, and what faces were not going to be extruded down, ...
is to select the upper row of vertices (lines) in the extruded section, and resize them (as a full loop of selected lines all the way around in the extruded part) till that upper edge is around 90 degrees.
as is right now, that upper edge is quite shallow, and I know from experience that is going to be a gloss shading nightmare, lol. Yes, I could add edge loops around there, however, adding edge loops before the major shape is done, I have found can pin you into a corner when making stuff, and it's easy to end up at a point where you can't do something because the edge loops are in the way, lol.
I'll be honest, I appreciate the screencaps in the photo album, yet as someone with zero experience making stuff in Blender, and having given up on blender tutorials some time ago, I can only follow what is happening to the shape of the speaker in the vaguest of terms. as for what keyboard key is being used in what attack-button-combo I have no idea, lol. I'll guess others that have experience with blender would have no prob following that tho. On that note, Daz Studio and Hexagon use different keys for selecting multiple things at the same time and I can never remember what one is what. One is holding the shift key while left-clicking stuff, the other is the holding their control (CTRL) key while left-clicking stuff. I do know that in Daz studio, the wrong key does nothing and you just end up selecting individual things, and in hex, the wrong one just brings up the Extrude curser-thing and its easy to stop pressing the one keyboard key and go with the other keyboard key (so long as you didn't actually move the extrude curser thing), lol.
Funny thing. I had purchased a Hexagon course from the daz store, and it was about an hour of vids of this guy rambling on while quads where magically appearing on the edge of the mesh, and magical moving into position. After I had watched that course, I still couldn't use hexagon, and to this day, I have no clue what keys he had used to make the quads do what they were doing, lol. Others had pointed me to a much better set of courses that are part of a website and on youtube (I'll dig up the link in a sec, cuz I do need to finish that course), and the best part of all of it, was the pause button actually worked. So I could hit pause, find the menu or button is clicked, and follow along. The blender class was so bad, that by the time the vid paused, the instructor was already a dozen steps beyond the one I was looking for the button for. That was the straw that broke the camels back for me, not just that the interface looked nothing like what I was sitting in front of and I couldn't find half the buttons being used in the vid, lol.
http://www.geekatplay.com/hexagon-tutorials.php
OK, I can live with this, added just two horizontal edge loops at the top part of the frame cut-out.
Because it is a cylinder tho, I can not add vertical loops, without it messing up the circular shading of the cylindrical shape of the entire speaker.
Oh, one other thing while I'm rambling on while messing with the speaker. Adding unnecessary edge loops, just makes UV mapping the item that much more painful. edge loops work better the closer you can get them to the edge, and that also means you will need to zoom in that much more to slice the edge and not the edge loop while slicing the object up for UV mapping. So going nuts with edge loops will only make life more painful in the end, lol.