Available here is the first public testing version of HE Mesh, a new secondary Wing3D-style mesh object type in Blender that is not meant to replace the old one.
Note that you have to copy gnu_gettext.dll and sdl.dll from your release Blender dir.
IMPORTANT: making an HE mesh is as easy as pressing ALT-C on a normal one!
—Notes:
There is a bug where subsurfed HE meshes will randomly have black quads in it. This bug was previously caused by amatuarish code I’ve long since gotten rid of, so I have no idea what’s causing it.
Still, I want people to see what I’ve done. Especially those of you who may be disbelieving at what I’ve done .
IMPORTANT: orco rendering doesn’t work with HE meshes, so when you have textured objects make sure they are mapped to Global or something like that.
—Getting started:
Make a mesh, and then press ALT-C to convert it to an HE mesh.
Try selecting a vert, pressing DEL key->Collapse Vert.
Try selecting a vert, and pressing E key->Verts
Try selecting a face, and pressing E key->Region
the extend edge isn’t winged extrude. It merely “extends” (extrudes) boundary edges (i.e. edges that only border one face).
It’s meant for like if you’re modelling a face, where you start out with one polygon and slow build up your loops.
oh, and make sure to save often! this is all beta, and especially selecting a face loop (ALT-rightclick) will every once in a while crash Blender . Beside s that, there arn’t any other crashing bugs I can think of–it’s your job to find them!
And especially give me suggestions on how I could improve existing features! I happen to be a user myself you know, and I want this to be as easy to use as possible.
lukep (Jean-Luc Peuriere), gave several highly important insights (or should I say corrections) early on in the development of this. If not for him, all HE Mesh would be right now is 1000 lines of useless code.
And, of course, the selection mode stuff comes straight off the normal mesh, which was designed by Ton. The collapse vert comes from Wings. Let me see. . .certain key components of the internal design were modelled after normal mesh, especially the concept of an EditMesh. Plus, even though I wrote much of the selection code myself, much of it was merely “paraphrasing” selection functions from the normal mesh type and getting them to work with HE Mesh. Really, Ton is a genius, few programs have selection interactivity as good as Blender does.
The idea for making the abstract tool API came from looking at video tutorials for Modo, where they were using tool macro record to make a soccer ball.
Look at the wiki page! I rewrote it for this release.
But essentially HE mesh is a new object type, like nurbs, metaballs, or the normal mesh. It is it’s own thing. It’s designed to fully support wings3d (nendo)-style modelling.
It is not meant to replace the normal mesh, which is why I’m calling it “the normal mesh” rather then “the old mesh.”
BTW, if on using the merge tool the console spits out “Internal Error: bad face (for ngon mesh)”, don’t worry, the merge tool is acting normaly. It’s supposed to have it’s own check that makes sure that error isn’t printed, but I guess that it’s not working.
and I don’t know if it is possible, but modo has this and it’s really good :
alt- click on an element (vertex, face, edge) make you switch to the corresponding selecting mode.
well… a lot of wings user will maybe jump ship when this feature will be “final release”. This is a “missing piece” for a lot of modeler when they look at blender.
I’ve already given you praise over at blender.org But Gabio is right, imo. This together with Theeth’s transform refactoring is going to improve modeling in Blender by leaps and bounds. Only thing left would be customizable shortkeys, but I can do without it:)
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. Beside s that, there arn’t any other crashing bugs I can think of–it’s your job to find them! 