What is new with Hexagon 2.5?

RKane_1

Okay, so I am posting this in the commons even though it is a copy of the page that talks about what is new with Hexagon 2.5 because I think it is worthy of perusal and discussion. I know a lot of you guys who model have your own programs but I urge you guys to give this a try and for those who HAVE given the new Hexagon 2.5 a try, please take time to let us know what you think of it and the new features.

What's New in DAZ Hexagon 2.5!

DAZ Studio Bridge

DAZ Studio Bridge allows you to take models straight from DAZ Studio and back. Change and morph your model in Hexagon and export back to DAZ Studio in one, easy click. Once back in DAZ Studio, you'll be able to choose if you want the changes to be morphs, alternate geometry, or new geometry. Your runtime just got easier and your creativity limitless.

Brush Modeling

Hexagon 2 introduces an evolutionary way to sculpt and to texture your models: Working like your favorite image editing tools, Hexagon 2 software's brushes emancipate you from the topology of your meshes, and let you smoothly edit, refine and paint your models. Fully supporting all popular graphics tablets, such as the Wacom line, the new brush system offers numerous presets, and supports your own customized brushes and various parameters such as hardness, size, strength, opacity, blending, and more.

Freehand Modeling Tools

Freehand modeling tools Smooth, pinch, inflate, push and pull polygons smoothly. Sculpt your shapes using displacement brushes, and refine the geometry of your models in a fully intuitive way. Displacement Modeling

Displacement Modeling

Use brushes to add high-resolution details, and generate displacement maps or bump maps which then can be exported to Carrara and other external rendering packages.

Bump Map Painting

To keep from generating heavy models while modeling very fine details, such as skin grain or micro-relief, Hexagon 2 let's you paint displacement as bumps. A bump map simulates geometric displacement, which then can be exported to your rendering software to generate highly realistic images of detailed surfaces.

Instant Ambient Occlusion

An advanced OpenGL engine provides an ultra-fast ambient occlusion, allowing you to get a very rich preview of your models, simulating global illumination, and better appreciation of details in your 3D objects and models.

Second Life Sculpted Primitives

Model special primitive objects in Hexagon that can be exported in TGA format, then imported and used in Second Life.

Real-time Shadows

An all-new option of the 3D display engine now delivers real-time shadows of the objects between them. This delivers a more realistic preview of your models and scenes before entering the final render stage.

Major Polygon Count Improvement

Hexagon 2 now handles large models more than 5-times faster than Hexagon 1! In fact, this become more evident and dramatic as the number of polygons in a model increases.

Support Pen Tablets

To enable even more precise and flexible modeling and texturing, Wintab-compatible tablets (such as the Wacom line) are now fully supported for 3D paint and displacement brushes.
Contextual Menus

To improve workflow, a contextual menu can be opened with a right click, providing instant access to all options and utilities according to the selected item(s) (Manipulator, Selection, Object, and more).

3D Paint - Paint and Reveal Textures

Use one of the numerous predefined textures, provided by Spiral Graphics Genetica 2.5, or any imported texture, and directly paint material onto your 3D model, using the new brush tools.

Autosnap on Surfaces

All construction and modeling tools now support advanced snapping on surfaces, allowing you to stitch on the surface of an object to draw a curve, and more.

Multi-resolution Smoothing

Models can now be edited at every smoothing range (level of detail), and so once you have created very fine details with high-resolution smoothing, you can still modify lower levels of geometry, such as more global modifications of your model. These global modifications will also be propagated across the upper levels.

Medzin

A little confusing on "new".
Hexagon 2.5 was released back in 2008.

Mattymanx

The most recent update is not that old though. There has been a lot of bug fixes between 2.5 and now.

It is also worth mentioning that Geekatplay.com has over 100+ free tutorials for Hexagon. The 17 starter tuts are here - http://www.geekatplay.com/hexagontutorials/begining.php

There are also helpful tutorials on youtube.

Medzin

No doubt that Hexagon is still adequate for the purposes of lots of people.

But it looks like changes to the program are "bug fixes" because it broke after improvements were made to DAZ Studio, Carrara or the Windows operating system.

I can't see that there is any active development. If there were, it wouldn't still be 2.5

I think DAZ took it over in 2002, when is was 2.2 and it went to 2.5 by 2008, but nothing significant since

Mattymanx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagon_(software)

2006 they bought it. But all the same, 6 years and little developement

patience55

... please take time to let us know what you think of it and the new features.

Okay ... I was one of the people who was downloading and trying out all the beta fixes until the latest final release. I was quite happy that one of the improvements was the ability to handle "larger more complex .obj" files that had been created in other programs [like Blender or Max]. However for the final release something went way wrong IMHO as it's too unstable to do any sizable projects with. Just keeps crashing. Also has more issues with the video card which is non-changeable and the idea of changing computers to keep up with beta/whatever you call all these program releases is not going to happen ['cause 'puters are already newer models, W7]

On one laptop the ability to make 'lines' is a joke. It doesn't handle the proper placement of the 'dots' at all ... not even for the uvmap templates.
Works fine on another computer of mine, BUT that computer does not have D/S on it [nor will it - read something in one of the end user thingies that for D/S4.5 we'd also be giving the company permission to access our computers sans notification for whatever their good reasons were, and like, no. I don't even allow M$ to update files automatically - nothing personal, I don't like computers rebooting in the middle of projects, etc.] Would have been thoughtful to make D/S4.0 and D/S4.5 able to work on the same computer in the same user acct. ['cause that's an offline computer]

It is a workflow jungle at times ... esp for creating things for Genesis. It would have been rather thoughtful to have made it so that both Hexagon versions could run on the same computer on the same user acct.

What does work well with the latest release on the laptop with D/S4.0 is the bridge back/forth to Hexagon for creating my "little morphs".
It took a mind boggling lot of work to figure out how to make and save those things ... manual sure would have been nice [think I still have some tuts over at sharecg.com on how to now] ... And 'now' there's another version of D/S. Hmmm ... well you know ... management decision at this point in time is "no". I'm staying with 4.0 as it works with the latest Hexagon for the Genesis morphs. I like plain English files, not babble. Trying to find missing textures and reset up mat files to fix mat poses is a NIGHTMARE. Plain English files only please. One does not need "babble". And no, they do not all open with various zip programs.

So with creation of useless .duf files and ... as per other posts, .exe files that plain to be running at startup for ?why .... okay ... think the company is going to be losing way more than just me as an active customer. Still can't quite get over that nonsense about in order to change the cc info the process cancels the membership. So ? They don't want members?! Well, members that have their membership canceled because they can't change the cc info are not going to buy at full price 'anything'.

Cheers