Help from coders needed

solo

Out of all your requests, the UV unwrapper would give me the most grief. However, I think they are all possible to do.

3 out of 4 is more than what I imagined was possible, that's awesome news.

I am just trying to imagine the stuff I will be able to achieve with these additional tools in my arsenal.

EarthMover

As far as vertex manipulation, you can do it if you use the move tool with nothing selected. You can also snap to endpoints, so I never understood why you couldn't select vertices.

Adding a bigger arsenal of selection tools is a must for organic modeling. Soft selection is great, but there are other selection tools that would be more useful, more often. Thomas has started to make this happen with his select loop plugin that I use every day in my work.

Thomas, would it be possible to create a "Paint select faces" function to your toolset as well? Similar to TIG's ruby that allows you to hold shift and drag over lines to select them, could something similar be made for just selecting faces? I think this would help out in organic modeling.

Also a circle select, similar to Modo and Lightwave would be great. It would be nice to toggle between being able to group select by either having to circle around a whole face to select it, or just having to draw around a partial face to select it. This would aid in selecting harder areas withing organic modeling.

Sorry to hijack with my own requests, I just think these are necessary as well for quick organic modeling. I love the subdivide, unsubdivide option. I like how Hexagon just gives you numbered iterations that you can click on for subdivision levels. You can go all they up to 6 and then back to 0 to return to the unsubdivided mesh.

Whaat

@solo said:

I use ‘subdivide and smooth’ as a staple tool and I now need it to work in reverse, I need it to un-subdivide and unsmooth, I know that the poly reducing ruby is available and to a certain extent it works but it’s very unstable and it does not reduce quite as I would like it to.
So if it’s at all possible to have an extension to SDS that undivides with the same iriterations and in the same way it would make my new workflow a breeze and one that I can explain with ease to folks interested in character , creature and general free form modeling.

If you model with subD using a proxy, you can always change back to fewer iterations. The important thing is to keep the proxy. If you are not using the proxy, you are throwing away most of the power of 'Subdivide and Smooth'.

solo

Dale

I use SDS in many ways, like for making cloth and draping items I group and use SDS then using crease and move tools I edit my mesh according ly. When I am creating say a character I explode and use SDS at one iriteration at a time so that I can move the mesh I've just subdivided to it's destination and evaluate how it will fit in the area I need it, I then would like to undivide it and make any changes needed and the subdivide it again and so forth until I have what I am aiming for. once I have all my pieces need to build my character which are undivided as I stitch them together undivided and once the whole character/object is one continous mesh I then subdivide the whole thing as one mesh.
So the ability to divide and undivide without being in a proxy which can be very obstructive and confusing to work it would be my ideal solution.

Whaat

I think I understand your workflow but I am wondering if you have ever tried this:

After you create a proxy model from a group, go to your components window and insert the sub-surface component as an instance into your model. You can create multiple proxies and surfaces.
Position the proxies and change the material to suit your modelling tastes.
Position the subsurfaces to form your completed character model.
This way, you maintain all the proxies so that you can adjust the amount of subdivision for ALL the various parts of the model as you go.

Is this workflow possible for you in a practical situation??

solo

I have and do work with a second subsurface instance occassionally, I use it to form my basic 1 iriteration forms for further refinement, however this method gets complicated and cluttered quick with multiple proxy meshes.
I will play with it more and see if I could make this work for me however.

Is there anyway to have an option then for 0 iriterations? that way one can resort back to a simple shape for stitching, I occassionally dump the subsurf and use the newly shaped proxy as my mesh (I copy past it changing it's material to default) but that is a long winded method, but does work.

gaganraj

those tools would be another huge addition to sketchup....

solo, one of these days could you elaborate on how you do detail manipulation with the available tools? i've seen some of your past threads on it, but for some reason I just don't get it!

Stinkie

@thomthom said:

@whaat said:

Out of all your requests, the UV unwrapper would give me the most grief.

I think it'd be one the that would give the most joy to the people.

Yeah, this one surely would be a hit. I'd buy it without blinking, as would many a SketchUp user.

thomthom

As for vertex editing, have a look at http://1oo1bit.com/products/products.shtml under the Edit and Modify section. Note "Move Vertex"

Haven't tried it yet.

thomthom

Just saw the video of the tool, appeared to only work on one vertex.

pilou

@unknownuser said:

Subdivision modeling

Seems you are making a SUZ_brush