So, now that we've had a chance to play with it for a few minuites, what does everyone think about Hexagon 2

Oh, please, lets try and leave and Daz promoting/bashing out of this and stick to just a disscussion of the program, cuse it seems people are more conserned with who is publishing what as to what is being published.

Me personaly, its just what i expected, wonderful. and i havent crashed it yet.

Its Amapi designer (on steroids) with a different interface. Hex' interface shows the functions much clearer than Amapi tho.

It's also much less stable than amapi pro. It reminds me of the instability of Amapi6.  If you could overcome that, you could build anything.  Its hard to tell what NOT to press.  It appears that when you dont press what its expecting you to press, it crashes (total lockup).

It also suffers from typo's in the interface. (sorry, Im anal about that kinda stuff in a menu).

for instance:

"disolve"?

I like the way you can move things by moving an arrow (like carrara)...but it also appears amapi folks still have the spacebar means of restricting movement.

all in all, its a winner...but very unstable! They need to clean up the problems of it crashing when you click something it doesnt expect.  Perhaps disable the buttons, make things modal, or something!

BT

One bug and one crash so far. Reading the manual now trying to understand the new functions. So far looks very cool but haven't done anything practical yet.

Did not read my Hex 1 saved file right. Dynamic geometry lost in read. Would not create a Dynamic geometry with the Hex 1 file loaded. Symetry still worked though.

Quote - Its Amapi designer (on steroids) with a different interface. Hex' interface shows the functions much clearer than Amapi tho.

It's also much less stable than amapi pro. It reminds me of the instability of Amapi6.  If you could overcome that, you could build anything.  Its hard to tell what NOT to press.  It appears that when you dont press what its expecting you to press, it crashes (total lockup).

It also suffers from typo's in the interface. (sorry, Im anal about that kinda stuff in a menu).

for instance:

"disolve"?

I like the way you can move things by moving an arrow (like carrara)...but it also appears amapi folks still have the spacebar means of restricting movement.

all in all, its a winner...but very unstable! They need to clean up the problems of it crashing when you click something it doesnt expect.  Perhaps disable the buttons, make things modal, or something!

BT

 

After messing with it more, its got features of uv mapper and z-brush too. (very cool)

still having trouble with it crashing tho.  Since I'm experimenting with what it can do, Im clicking things that I probably shouldnt be, and it lock up in an infinite loop..the hour glass come up and thats all she wrote.  I have to ctrl/alt/delete it.  Ive done this many different ways..and its all in that its looking for input that Im not giving it.  Definately needs modal control and disabled buttons when its looking for specific input.

Still, pretty cool tho.  Id be afraid to try to model anything of any detail tho because its just too unpredictable when the button I click isnt what it was looking for...

so, Id highly recommend saving every few minutes (to a different file name) to keep from losing work.

BT

Quote - all in all, its a winner...but very unstable! They need to clean up the problems of it crashing when you click something it doesnt expect.  Perhaps disable the buttons, make things modal, or something! BT

Hex2 is very buggy.  More than the previous version.  Eovia France added more bugs than fixed.  I'm not recommending the program, not even for $1.99 from Daz.  Daz will be in for the long haul if they decide on doing any repair work in order to release a stable Hex3.

Still very buggy....been trying to get paint tools to show up in display...so far have managed to lock up application several times but still no paint. After a long struggle got texture to show up, at least. Still studying manual and experimenting. The UV tools do work -- although they are poorly documented, of course. I still have hopes for this as a modeler and UV wrangler, but I'll agree this seems to be a "save often and get out of the application as soon as possible" tool.

I've been trying out spheres.  First applying a spherical UV map on it and then using the displacement brush on it using a smoothing of 4-5 for it.

Being curious, I collapsed the DG on a displaced sphere while doing some brushing on it.  Internal Errors galore appeared.  Hex2 was locked up for awhile, but I just kept pressing ESC until the errors quit.  Lost all my displacement though.  Must remember to click Validate after doing any displacement brushing before clicking on other things.  Hex2 needs menus and icons greyed out to prevent users from thinking all things are do-able all the time.

The displacement works pretty good when rendered in Carrara Pro 5.

I've been reading the manual and it sounds like the displacement brush does not in any way invoke adaptive mesh (like DCG's Anything Grooves.) The manual dances around this a bit, though, with talk of detailed veins on broad muscle shapes, but, basically, if you want to brush on fine detail, you need to smooth (aka tesselate) the entire mesh to stratospheric size. At least, that's how you are going to be exporting it (or does Hexagon think it's a render engine, too?) However, using the brushes is at least as smooth and intuitive as the videos would have one believe. Worked with the UVtools a bit and they are smoother than Carrara's. I look forward to seeing what I can do with a real UV challenge.

So in other words, DAZ sold a bunch of folks a Betatest license for $1.99. And those of us who pre-ordered get to have the MFD for the MilDog and Toon Trash for our $100+ vote of confidence in Eovia. 'Nuff said. I'll start saving up for Blacksmith.

M

Yeah, I am dealing with the UV/ texture thing now. It isn't documented,as well as other things. I played with displacement some. It is a bit more intuitive. People who have gotten the UV and Displacement thing usable should post some short tuts for others. The texture/paint/UV thing is what many seem lost on. There are plenty of ways to get an internal error tho so I am sure patches will be forthcoming. Can anybody get the command window (that in hex1 showed kb commands) to show? I have it enabled, but don't see the shortcut help as I use them.

after much work i got the uv thing to work, but it was a pain in the butt, and i dont remember what i did. I just finished my first model and went to import it into carrara and... BAM! none of the displacement i did was their, and the export bump/displacement map doesnt work..

I got the UV thing to work . But still no paint. I have a sphere uved, then even applied domains made sure I selected the paint texture etc, but can't paint. So I am missing something about this "reveal' approach. Still looking thru docs. Looking at the bug reports some are just plain silly. Gotta be fun to go thru that. At least they listed it as trivial. Were they trying to be funny or what? Maybe just helpful. So anyone who has "mastered" the paint thing, I would love some info.

Reported by a user from bug reporter:

Summary 0010463: 'Ambient' is spelt wrong Description 'Ambiant' is used throughout Hexagon 2, but is incorrect spelling.

Heh on "Ambiant." I am still trying to convince Eovia that no operation I perform in Carrara will cause me to "Loose" data! (On an unsuspecting world, perhaps?) The only thing Eovia's people are saying now is "make sure you have the most recent video card drivers." Only texture I've gotten to show up so far is the checkers used in the UV editor -- but those didn't show up until I closed the editor window.

I finally got textures working. Yeah, but the funny part is they said "spelt". Europeans often spell things differently, geesh they need to know how many languages? Ambiant is the french spelling.  My only concerns so far is that it is too easy to crash if you do something it doesn't expect. Cool program, but the error handling doesn't really look finished. I expect patches soon tho.