Seeking Hexagon wisdom - folding, bending a plane?

jashart_prime

I've been using Hexagon casually for several years now, but have definitely not mastered the finer points and would appreciate any pointers.

I'd like to take a plane and realistically fold one part over the remainder, like partially folding a blanket. Ideally it would appear to have slight cloth thickness. The efforts I've made have been way off base so far; whenever I select part of a plane and rotate it around, the faces that connect the two parts stretch like taffy, amongst the many issues I've encountered.

This may be laughably simple to the experts but I find Hexagon maddeningly non-intuitive. If anyone can spare the time for some advice it would be most welcome.

Thanks,

James

Ghostman

Have a look at Tools / Utilities / Bender and see if that helps.

jashart_prime

Yeah, I'm familiar with bender--the problem I have with it, you can only use it once on an object, and my efforts with it ended up looking like stiff cardboard or something. To get a realistically folded cloth is going to require more, like bunching and then folding, or some combination of actions. I don't know, maybe it's not really doable in the way that I had in mind. I just thought based on what I've seen with some clothing that's been given a dynamic look, perhaps there was a process I've missed out on; but certainly those really complex clothes may have been modeled in something other than Hexagon.

Roygee

Is this something like what you're looking for?

jashart_prime

That has some nice deformation, as though it's draped over something. If I could combine that with a true fold-over, I could probably make something I could be happy with. What did you use on it to get the soft edges? Could it then still be folded over with the bender tool?

RedSquare

Or something vaguely similar to this ?

jashart_prime

That one has that stiffness I referred to -- I'm slowly coming to the realization that it'd take a different software suite other than Hexagon to do what I'm seeking.

I certainly do appreciate all the responses and ideas, though. Many thanks.

hiker_1

i think you'll find that hex can do anything that any other modeling program can accomplish... but it's sounding like you'll have to do it in steps... maybe making the fold like RedSquare demonstrated, and then come back and fluff it with Roygee's technique...

And between the two, you may also want to play around a bit with soft selection as well... i recently had to make an "Aussie" hat, and soft selection worked quite well to grab the brim and fold it up to the crown...

Design Acrobat

Squarecrow said:

That one has that stiffness I referred to -- I'm slowly coming to the realization that it'd take a different software suite other than Hexagon to do what I'm seeking.

I certainly do appreciate all the responses and ideas, though. Many thanks.

Yes, for cloth simulation you need a dedicated software for that.

This is a cartoon WIP with the cloth simulated in 3DCoat. There are many cloth simulators, some of them very high dollar in licensing fees.

Romancefantasy

Do you have a reference photo of what you're looking for? Maybe you could accomplish what you want with bump or displacement maps.

Roygee

You can certainly do any shape you want in Hex - that example of mine has already been folded three times and there's no reason it couldn't be folded another three - I didn't realize at the time that you wanted a blanket draped over a bed.

I suggest for something like this, you get the basic shape before doing any wrinkling on it.

This is a very fast example - could be done a lot better if I took a bit of time. In the first pic you can see that both the bed and the blanket are made from two cubes. Tessellated the blanket a few times to give enough geometry to work with, then smoothed level 1 to get the corners round. Cut in a few edges closer together where the folds will be. Good idea to UV map at this stage - after this it gets messy.

After that pulled some edges out and over - be careful not to get facets intersecting. Then it a matter of beating it up using the tweak, soften and displacement tools.

Of course - the pics had to come in reversed order - wish they'd get this forum working properly.

PS - if you have an app which is capable of doing physics, the drape could be made more naturally.

Ascania

Right-click, select "Set Pivot", click on one point along the edge you want to fold at, select the polygons you want to fold and rotate.

ds-mail_2e0cb9c256

I'd like to offer a different suggestion...assuming you are doing a still image not an animation....

Don't think about an object in the same way the real object exists. For example: for a folded cloth, don't start with a flat "cloth" and try to fold it. Start with the final object and analyze its shape...perhaps the easiest way is to form a line or shape and extrude along a path...or form the shape and then add thickness.

Or draw lines of shape and make a Gordon or other surface form. Or make various pieces and weld together. You can add variation or surface texture in rendering or in modeling; depending on what final result is needed.

In other words. modeling takes thinking out of the regular box of real life and visualize in graphical 2D and 3D forms/shapes/geometry...like clay pieces you then assemble or extrude like play dough. The thinking it thru process is different than building it by usual materials and hand tools in the "real" world. Think in terms of math. Use boolean thinking (but usually avoid boolean modeling). You can even "merge" two objects in 3D space; hiding parts of one inside the other -- hard to do that in real life.

Once you have a methodology you can explore easier ways to use the tools if the construct seems to take too many steps.

And always remember the final result is to trick visual cues that make a 2D print or electronic image to appear to be 3D; there are many "fool the eye" methods; including post processing a rendered image. For example you can add the appearance of displacement all from within Photoshop using a black & white (gray-scale image). Use as many of the tools in your toolbox as you need. As an analogy: If Hexagon is a "hammer", don't forget you also have a screwdriver and a saw too.

RedSquare

I totally agree, my example very quickly done employed the use of the Gordon tool. What I didn't bother to do was to attack the mesh verts with the tweak tool to develop folds and irregularity to what was a very basic mesh. to which I had added thickness although insufficient IMHO. ;-P

Tugpsx

While Hexagon can do a lot of realy great things, you may be interested in Marvelous Designer 2 http://www.marvelousdesigner.com/
With this you can get realistic drapings and can do creation of unlimited clothing, fabric or even metallic (adjusting stiffness) props, figures and objects.

There is supposed to be a plugin for DAZ coming soon.

Or from page 196 of the manual.

Two methods of use:
First method:
Draw a curve to be used as the guide to the deformation.
Select the object to bend.
Select the Bend tool in the Utilities tab.
Click on the curve to bend the selected object.
Second method :
Select the object to bend.
Select the Bend tool in the Utilities tab.
Draw a curve to be used as the guide to the deformation, using a tool in the Lines
tab, without leaving the Bend tool
Validate the tool to finish the curve, and apply the deformation.

Roygee

Bit OT here, but I've long hoped a user of MD would step up. Far as I can make out, you would need the animation editor as well, to do the sims. Total cost around $300 for a hobbyist. I've seen the video demo's and it is obviously very capable, but is it really worthwhile for a hobbyist? What about system resources - from other clothing sims, not nearly as good as MD, I would imagine you'd need a pretty powerful machine to handle it?

JoeMamma2000

Marvelous Designer is insane. It's brilliant. It's fast. The guys who designed and developed it should get a Software Innovation of the Decade Award. It's rare you see software with that kind of innovation.

Anyway, back to the topic...

Personally, I think that ANY modelling of anything cloth-y requires a cloth simulator. It's called "Dynamic Modelling", where you simulate how a cloth responds to gravity, etc., using a simulator, then save out the resulting model as an .obj for whatever use you might have. The reason it's so important is that it's so freakin' difficult/impossible to hand model anything that looks remotely like cloth that responds to a real environment (gravity, etc.) and that maintains the cloth's internal parameters (folding, stretching, etc.).

Yeah, you can put folds in a mesh, but it's almost impossible to put the correct size folds and stretches that correspond to the type of cloth you have. And people subconsciously know what kind of folds should appear in a bed sheet, but few modellers know how to describe it to themselves and reproduce it. Although if you're like most people here, making stuff for others' consumption is not much of a concern, but if you want to, at some point down the road, learn how to make models for an audience, this kind of stuff is critical.

And FWIW, I think it's critical for anyone who's any sort of modeller to have as one of his tools a cloth simulator. Luckily, Blender is free, and it has one. There are others out there also. It is so incredibly useful when you want to model anything that is cloth-y, like fabrics, sacks, bags, etc.