Looking for a bit of history I haven’t been able to find: it used to be (about twenty years ago) that 3DS Max polygon modeling could only use trigons, right? When did it get the ability to work in quads? When did it get the ability to work in n-gons?
There was this difference between an editable mesh and editable poly if i’m not wrong with the names. The poly had quads for… ages… (before 2000) n-gon IDK. (poly had extra elements to re-triangulate or edit triangle)
i believe editabe poly was introduced in 3d studio max 4.0.
Iirc, editable mesh had fake quads. This was acomplished by hiding certain edges.
Editable poly introduced real ngons.
Edit:
https://forums.cgsociety.org/t/question-editable-poly-or-editable-mesh/789708
And 3d studio max 4.0 was released in 2000, thanks!
I’ve seen it said that 3DS Max was the first generally available software that could use ngons. Is this true? When were others in the field able to use ngons? When was Blender?
In the link it say that it uses winged edges which was used previoiusly in Nendo and Mirai. No idea what these two are or where, though.
Interestingly winged edges are why Wings3D is called Wings3D.
Huh, good point. I’m trying to pin this down for 3D modeling artists on home machines (Apple, Dos/Win, maybe Linux), rather than media-industries’ in-house software. I asked about 3DS Max because, to the best of my recollection, that’s the one people seem to have been using when the earlier ngon debates are mentioned. (For example, Blender got workable ngons in update 2.63 in 2012.)