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PolyDup


dast

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Looking for feedback on the current state of the plugin.

Originally I had planned to provide selection tools as part of the plugin. But since you can simply use the native live-selection, loop-selection and fill-selection to do all the selection tasks I don't really see the point in duplicating these features.
Besides, if you also have the Dials plugin it's easy to create a setup where you have all necessary tools grouped into a dial, accessible by a single shortcut.

An idea might be to provide an internal dial-like functionality to easily access the different extract slots, to paste from / copy to. Activating this dial via right mouse click.

I am not sure if the concept is clear of using the CTRL key (CMD on mac) to activate the copy functionality? An alternative idea I had was to hover over the selected polygons and use the CTRL-C or CTRL-V keystrokes to copy or paste. Without the need of a mouse click.

Next, I am not too happy about the identification of the extract slot. I wasn't sure people really wanted to spend time naming these extracts, as the whole purpose of the tool is to quickly perform a copy/paste of part of a mesh. Compare it with copy/paste a part of a sentence in a text editor to rearrange the wording ... or copying part of an image to in an image editor. You're not exactly naming the item you copy, also because you only have a single item in the clipboard. Here, with the possibility to have up to 5 items "in the clipboard", I thought it would make sense you could identify which of the slots of the clipboard you want to interact with. For now each slot is made up from the name of the object you are copying from, appended with the lowest point index of the part you are copying from. In most cases this would provide for unique names. Maybe a different color per slot might be easier to identify than using a name?

I also had thought of taking a screenshot of the part of the mesh being copied, to be used as a thumbnail. But displaying 5 thumbnails would probably take up too much space in the attribute manager.

And in the end, I am not even sure many users will want to use this tool for more than copy-pasting a single item in one session. As such, there is no need to identify things.

Suggestions welcome ...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Spend some time working out to visualize a preview of the copied polygons to be injected into the mesh. More changes to come ...

 

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On 5/27/2020 at 7:42 AM, Quasar Engine said:
 

Hello, is the beta file no longer available?
This plugin idea is magic is what Modo does.
Cheers!!!

Hi, sorry for the late reply.

The beta file has been removed as it was becoming obsolete.

This topic has had over 1300 views, a handful of downloads ... and only a single person provided feedback.

I thus need to realize that not many are interested in this plugin, and as a result of that I am heavily reducing development time in favor of other work.

 

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What a shame is a fantastic plugin, I am very interested, is there a way that you could sell me a license? You should sell your idea to MAXON's, cinema needs ideas like these since Blender is getting ahead of many 3D programs and soon Blender will be more popular.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 6/4/2020 at 5:33 AM, Quasar Engine said:

... is there a way that you could sell me a license?

Plugin will be available for purchase when completed, from Tools & Pixels website.

In the meantime I have picked up development of this plugin again. I have added a rotation widget, allowing to adjust the angle of the extract prior to pasting it into the destination mesh. I am thinking of also allowing to adjust position and scale with such widget.

A new beta will be provided shortly ...

 

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This is awesome Daniel. I’m not sure why so little feedback but I will certainly purchase right away and appreciate your plugins. I’m really glad to hear this will be available. Sadly working at home with two toddlers leaves me very little time for any dabbling in 3-D, but just wanted to express my excitement for this plugin and the cool features you’ve demonstrated

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Daniel,

 

I would agree that this looks to be a fantastic plugin.  I am surprised at the large number of downloads without any feedback and agree with your action to take it off-line for now.  But please do NOT stop developing it....you are on to something here.

 

Couple of questions:

 

  1. Does the geometry to be copied have to come from the same object that they are being copied to?  Can they come from another object?
  2. Once the geometry is stored, is that storage permanent or can it be saved to a library (....you can probably guess where I am going with this...can this be a follow on to Polygnome).  What I love about PolyDup is that the polygon's stored can be both open and closed selections and therefore a small library of what is essentially loop selections can be used to build and large variety of finished structures.  Therefore, far more versatile!  You need to consider increase the library feature beyond 5.
  3. As selections are now modular, any thought to a "replace" replace function?  For example, you are building a column mesh of 2 x 3 polygonal loops - each loop being 2 polygon's high.  Think of each loop mesh as the "floor" of a building.  You have 5 different patterns (or floor designs) and you have created a structure that is 10 floors high.  Upon looking at the 6th floor, you want to change it.  Therefore rather than deleting floors 6 to 10 and rebuilding, as each floor follows the same 2 x 3 polygonal footprint, you just replace the 6th floor with something else from the library.
  4. There needs to be some error feedback if you are not selecting a set of base polygons that match the same footprint as those in the library.  A couple of things to consider:
  • Allow the library feature to contain multiple tabs of base meshes all based on footprint.  For example, one tab is 1x3, another is 2x2, another is 2x3, etc.
  • You make a tab of base meshes active prior to making the selection on where you want the new geometry to be copied to.  When making the "copy-to" selection, should the user select the wrong base area that corresponds to the active tab, the program lets you now.  For example, say you are working with 2x2 bases.  Should the user accidentally select a 3x2 base area or a floor outline that is 3x2, the program highlights the 3x2 selection in red and/or a message pops up that says "wrong base area selected".
  • What would be really cool (but extremely hard to figure out) would be auto-fill.  Once you select enough polygons, the program automatically fills in the rest of the selection and highlights ONLY those objects it has stored that would work with that auto-filled selection.  I have no idea how you program this, but it certainly would speed up the workflow.  Just a thought.

Again, I see some great potential to this plugin....so please keep working on it.

 

Dave

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

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5 hours ago, 3D-Pangel said:

Couple of questions:

 

Now THAT's some feedback. Thanks for bringing up these points, Dave.

 

Some of the posted demonstration video show this already, but it sure is important to mention this.
The geometry copied from one object is not limited to be pasted to the same object. It can be pasted onto any polygon object, of the current scene or any scene which is currently opened in Cinema 4D.
You can thus copy geometry from object A in project B, switch to project C and paste the geometry onto object D ...

 

When copying geometry it is "temporarily" stored into a selected slot.
I mean "temporarily" as it will be overwritten with any new geometry you decide to copy and store into that same slot. At this point in time 5 slots are available. This plugin is meant to copy/paste geometry on the fly. It isn't meant to actually store the copied geometry into a library, which is what PolyGnome allows. However, I might provide a future update which allows a way to "export" the copied geometry towards PolyGnome's library. But nothing has yet been decided in this regard.

Alternatively, it could be possible to provide a way to extend the number of available slots. But as any application allowing to copy/paste content to and from the clipboard is limited to a single item, I figured that having a way to copy/paste a few items would be enough ... without the need of having to provide a whole library management system.

 

I might misunderstand your point, but PolyDup requires at least an open end in the copied geometry.
Contrary to PolyGnome, PolyDup does not allow for welded or floating assets. With PolyDup the copied geometry is always welded when pasted.

 

Replacing geometry will currently work, but only if the geometry matches in size. In future updates additional widgets might be provided to adjust the pasted geometry.

 

Currently the plugin provides visual feedback if selected polygons do not match with selected geometry to be pasted. This is based on number of polygon stitches that are required to weld the geometry to be pasted with the existing mesh polygons.
For now the plugin requires a matching number of stiches between mesh and pasted geometry.

 

With this plugin I do not have the intention in duplicating the effort of PolyGnome, as such will not provide a way to build up libraries of assets. However, as mentioned earlier, I might provide a way to export copied geometry towards PolyGnome.

 

Again, thanks for the feedback. Highly appreciated!

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Polygnome and PolyDup are really complimentary modeling tools and meant to go together (IMHO). 

 

Any thought to making PolyDup in two versions: standalone (essentially what you have now) and integrated into Polygnome as Ver 2.0.  In the integrated version (Polygnome 2.0), the open ended geometry of PolyDup can be stored and accessed similar to what Polygnome can do.  What I love about both programs is the ability to quickly build geometry.  But what I really love about PolyDup is the ability to merge the open ended selections in various combinations of new "closed" geometry which could then be saved in Polygnome.  If you integrate PolyDup into Polygnome, you could really create modeling libraries of infinite variety very quickly.

 

Plus, you go from having two products to three: Polygnome 1.0, PolyDup, Polygnome 2.0 (or call it something completely different: PolyFactory, PolySupreme, Polywannacrakcer, whatever).

 

Dave

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

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