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

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

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.
Hexagon 2 delivers a full set of predefined brushes, along with all parameters and options that let you create very fine displacements on your models, such as wrinkles, bumps, pleats and more.

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.

Mapping UV

UV-Unfold

To help reduce the sometimes tedious work of mapping UVs on a complex model, Hexagon 2 includes a UV-unfold tool. Simple define the seams and pinpoints, and your UV-model is automatically unfolded. You can then work on this unwrapped view to edit UVs much more easily.

UV-Mapping module

The Hexagon 2 UV-module provides a combined 2D view of textures and of the UV-space. UVs can be manipulated thanks to Hexagon’s advanced selections and manipulators. The UV-module also includes features such as “UV-detach” and “UV-merge”, as well as a “Relax” function, which expands UVs at best across the mesh of the 3D model. The 2D UV-view is synchronized with the 3D views, and manipulations done in one of them is reproduced in real time in the other one.

Texturing

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.

• Transparency
  
  Use all the power of your 3D paint and brush tools to directly create complex transparency areas and / or patterns, which otherwise could be extremely tedious to model with geometry.

• Combine effects for advanced materials
  
  Textures can be combined together as well as can single colors. Painting can be performed simultaneously on color, textures, transparency, bump and displacement. This unique capability lets you create a material which is a subtle combination between geometric reliefs and textures.

Display

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.

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.

Smoothing

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.

Smooth creasing

Hexagon 2 lets you define sharp edges on a smoothed model to keep breaks on specific parts. Creased edges can be exported to Carrara, and also generated as breaks for all other 3D exports.

Performances

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.

Ultra-fast high polygon count models edition

Thanks to local redraw techniques and partial smoothing computation, the process of editing very heavy models, including those with a high level of smoothing, is done in real time. Judge by yourself.

Modeling

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.

Deformers on selection and FreeForm Deformation Cage (NFFD)

Deformers (Twist, Bend, Taper) now work on subparts of objects. A new and more generic deformer has been added: the Free From Deformation Cage, which allows smooth complex deformations of a model, using a 3D Nurbs cage.

Tesselate from a Line

For complex tessellations, simply draw the tesselation path over the object using any curve or polyline. You’ll now benefit from the new ‘autosnap’ mode which allows you to stitch your path onto the surface. The object will be tesselated following this path.

Interface & Workflow

Support for 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.

Resizeable 3D Views

For more even greater comfort and flexibility, the layout of the 3D views of the scene can be quickly adjusted.

Dockable Palettes

Each palette can now be detached from its panel, and docked on the screen. This allows you to customize your working environment for maximum productivity.

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).

Additional floating 3D View

Les This feature provides a synchronized 3D view of the model, from any view angle, allowing you to better control the 3D impact of any manipulation.