So it's like having your cake and eating it: you go minimalist with the facets and SU still pitches in and makes it look nice and curvy? Good oh.
Thanks for clarifying the 'remote-move' thing. I may be wrong, but this does not seem to work with single points selected. The Move tool stays put, then 'bollocks' you if you try to pull away from it. If this is the case, perhaps the folk at SU could iron out this anomally?
The iterations thing also makes sense now. As a matter of fact, I love the way you can create a (cartoon) head out of cubes & pyramids, then transform the thing into soft 3D curves at the push of a button.
Mind you, try going as far as iteration 3 on my PC and the old girl just gives you 5 minutes-worth of the Windows 7 'blue circle, then crashes period!
By the way: how come S.U displays the 'hidden geometry' of its spheres as being composed of squares?
![:confused: ๐](https://community.sketchucation.com/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f615.png?v=3orp1bvic7q)
@alan fraser said:
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Yes, you can preselect one or more lines or faces, then choose the Move tool, then move them...either directly, or from a distance. That is by placing the Move tool directly on one of the selected bits and dragging it...or by simply dragging the move tool along something else entirely in the model, be it a face, edge or axis that happens to be going in the direction you require.
However you can't preselect a single vertex. As you say, you have to just place the Move tool on it (after making sure you haven't already got something else selected) and just directly drag it.
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All faces have to be coplanar...completely flat. A rectangle or anything with more sides can only be flat in one very specific circumstance, whereas a triangle is always flat...the three-legged milking stool principle...they never rock, however uneven the surface they're placed on.
So any time you start monkeying around with the vertices of a polygon greater than a triangle, it will either refuse to go in the direction you want it to (because that would entail ceasing to be coplanar) or (if you hold down Alt while moving..to envoke autofold) it will go in the direction you are after, but will create the necessary autofold lines to enable it to do that.
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I already described the 'nifty trick'...preselecting stuff, then running the Move tool along an edge or face somewhere else in the model that happens to be going in the right direction.
A variation of this can be used with the Rotate tool...preselecting what you want to rotate then finding a face that is perpendicular to the axis of rotation that you require, placing the Rotate tool on that surface, locking that angle with Shift, then moving the Rotate tool to the desired centre of rotation, then doing the business.
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Hidden geometry is just that...hidden. You can either hide a line (Shift + Eraser) in which case it will hide, but the hidden edge will still remain sharp...there will be a noticeable angle between the two adjacent faces that it separates. OR you can smooth a line (Ctrl + Eraser or the smoothing dialog from the context menu). This will visually 'blend' the two adjacent faces into a single apparently curved surface (but it's just a visual trick...they are still separate and individually coplanar.)
If Hidden geometry is turned off, both lines will appear to disappear. However a hidden line will stay hidden permanently, whereas a smoothed line will reappear if you orbit the model so that it reaches the edge of the object and you are viewing it tangentially.
Hidden Geometry in the View Menu simply turns existing hidden geometry on and off...visually.
Subdivide and Smooth actually creates more geometry by subdividing what you've already got.
The iterations refer to the number of times you want to do this...ie subdivide the subdivisions.
NOTE: SDS is not the same as triangulating...which is why I tend to manually triangulate many things. If you manually triangulate the faces of a cube, you'll go from 6 to 12. If you SDS a cube with even just one iteration, it will divide each face into 4, then triangulate those 4 faces giving a total for the whole cube of 48.
The facetting on my faces is just pure skill and awesomeness. ![:rolling_on_the_floor_laughing: ๐คฃ](https://community.sketchucation.com/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f923.png?v=3orp1bvic7q)
Actually, you'd be surprised how much you can achieve with comparatively few faces. When you are using so few, it's also fairly critical which direction many of the diagonals run in...triangulate a 'square' in the wrong direction and it can look completely different. Luckily we have the Flip tool to correct that.
As an example of how subtle you can be with very few faces, here's the same head again with a few vertices tweaked, resulting in the head going from caucasian to oriental. The eyes have been changed largely by the addition of an epicanthic fold, hiding the upper eyelid.
Of course you have to know your way around human anatomy to do this kind of thing. You have to be able to draw convincing people on paper. SU is a tool, not a magic wand.