Hexagon hit the street today. It looks like a great poly modeler. Users are saying great things about it. I'm going to be getting it in the next couple of days. Post here with your experiences! -Kix

-Kix

Well, so far, it seems to be extremely fast, even on my ol' Pentium 2 machine. I loaded in a subdivided organic mesh from Wings and was able to use Hexagon's tweak function with soft selection on the entire upper body with no noticeable slow down as I pushed and pulled parts like jello.

Oh, I should mention that since I had (and registered)an old copy of Amapi from a 3DWorld magazine cover-disk, I was able to get the competitive upgrade price of just $99USD.For all this program does, it was a steal. Folks, if you have Amapi on your computer and an extra $110 or so layinh around the house, you should give this program a nod. The one thing I'm still getting used to though is the grid display in the work window. You can switch it off (or part of it) but it's not really that big an issue...I just got spoiled by WINGS. I still haven't found a way to map the mouse but you can make your own shortcut keys.

So hows the interface, another mad Eovia design or have they joined the real world? lol! I have to say, until there is a demo, I'll be very cautious about this, every version of Amapi I've tried on Mac has been a disaster, either impossibly slow or ludicrously buggy! I hope they've done it right this time, they do have some great ideas and I understand Amapi is great on Windows! - Baz

heres a pic of the full user interface Baz. you can customise this by clicking on the tabs at the sides of the boxes to collapse them if you want more room, or you can choose "imersive" in the prefs editor. you cant map the mouse for camera rotation as such Teyon, just click and hold the alt key while moving the mouse to rotate the view. cheers stu

also you can turn off all the grids in the scene /propeties dialog box at the right of the screenshot. i meant to mention the custom menu is also pretty cool, you just right click on any tools and add to the custom menu, this saves you going looking for the tools you use most ;) a neat touch i thought. cheers stu

correction to the above you can choose "normal, immersive or custom from the display/user interface/ drop down. stu

Cheers Stu! That looks cool, I'd like to lose a lot of those menus and claim more modelling space but it sounds like that's possible! :o) So as a champion of Amapi which do you prefer?

two weeks ago Baz i'd have said Amapi every time. but now man do i love these edge tools they are awesome lol stu

heres a 10 minute pic Baz, im not even trying btw, this program is pretty much doing all the work. that said its slower than Amapi to work with but then Amapi always was bloody fast :) stu

Cool! Thanks for the info Stu!

no probs Baz. im dying to see what Teyon can produce with this app. so far he seems to be liking it so all is well :))fingers crossed. oh and heres the poser render of that head cheers stu

heres a screen cap of the "immersive" mode Baz. "immersive" obviously uses keyboard shortcuts primarly so ive loaded up the shortcut editor for you. you pretty much get full screen for your workspace. im a point and click guy myself so i dont really use this mode myself, im too damn lazy for my own good lol. cheers stu

Hehe, I'm a shortcut addict so this looks good to me, cheers mate!

not a problem mate, sorry i was so slow responding to you. cheers mate stu

hmm, you mean eovia actually listened to people like me complaining about the garbage interface with amapi? though this one looks like daz studio. can you resize those panels without minimising them? or, better yet, edit the contents of the panels? to rip those particular tools you never use out and combine those you do to get rid of space wasters? ( other than the custom panel I mean ) can you get a professional default 4 pane view? ( left / right, top, front & perspective ) single pane view is bogus, means you have 1/4 the control over objects. ask them why they kill the menu in the max workspace setting. the menubar would be usefull for those that haven't memorised the keyboard shorcuts. though the screenshots do make me happier with amapi, they got rid of the metacreations interface. ( bryce, poser .... ) big useless goopy buttons instead of small compact sharply defined buttons, that's the metacreations crappy interface. look at bryce's tools for positioning objects in a scene, useless. the materials room with bryce is worse. ( the materials code to create the materials can make some great stuff, the interface of the room sucks ) I stopped using a lot of apps when the demo versions died because the interface was lousy. ( amapi, bryce, poser. ) others the premise for the modelling method doesn't work for me. ( blender, wings, anim8tor ... ) others I just won't use because that would mean having to buy winders. ( max. ) as much as I like the app, I hate winders. buying an os for one app ain't worth it. gonna be testing something with max trial though, see if I can get it to work in crossover office. ( since decompiling would be illegal to make a version to run in linux. )