@mynameismatt89 said:
Thanks for the plugin in TIG, I'll have to check it out.
Though the ExtrudeEdgesByRails plugin isn't what I am looking for. What I am trying to do is after using the simple loft plugin, or your plugin, I want to edit the hidden geometry of the shape. In all of the images attached to your thread, and in all the shapes that I have created, the hidden geometry is triangulated surfaces. What I am trying to find is a plugin that will allow me to change the hidden geometry from these triangulated surfaces into a different shape (a series of hexagons for example) so that when I convert the hidden geometry to a series of tubes (using a plugin like "convert arcs, circles, curves, lines to cylinders") I am left with a mesh that is made up of a series of hexagons, not triangles. The "Terrain Reshaper" plugin allows something like this, but you can only convert the mesh to a different size and shape triangle, no other shapes.
Is something like this possible?
I have I not worded what I am looking for properly?
Thanks,
Matt
The 'hidden geometry' is typically smoothed edges. You can make a mesh with my tool that is not initially smoothed but you can 'un-smooth' surfaces by selecting then and using the right-click context-menu smooth and putting the slider to the left so nothing is then smoothed - you can also un-smooth specific edges by having hidden-geometry switched on and using the eraser tool with shift+ctrl held down - any smoothed edges you rub over are made un-smoothed [the eraser tool can also be used to smooth [eraser+ctrl] and hide [eraser+shift] edges - to unhide a hidden edge select it when hidden-geometry is on and right-click context-menu 'unhide']...
Many meshes need triangular faces to work because a four [or more] sided shape might have 'coplanar' edges and therefore it cannot have a face - a three-edged shape will always take a face.
There are tools to erase coplanar edges - it's an option in EEbyR - using them will take out any unneeded triangulation.
You can see if an edge is vital to any faces by erasing it, if faces disappear it is forming a boundary edge and cannot be dispensed with - if all faces remain then it was simply dividing the face into two coplanar pieces and so that edge can be erased safely.
My tip on converting smoothed edges back to solid ones then allows you to convert then to tubes with other tools as desired. If you have for example a sphere made of triangles and manually change the edges of hexagonal units you can select those only and make the other inner smoothed part a glazed bubble... If you delete internal edges that are vital to faces you will get a hole as faces cannot survive the amputation... However, if the remaining edges of the hexagon are coplanar you might force a new hexagonal 'flat' face to be created by drawing over some edges, or making one subdivision and smoothing it...TrangulatedDome.pngTrangulatedDome.skp