Cineversity

I’m trying to convert an Icosahedron sphere to hexagons following the steps shown in this tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCGArXNEDis

The problem happens when I select the edges and try to Melt/Merge them as described in the tutorial.  Instead of being left with a sphere made of just hexes, each hex has what looks to be extraneous edges running through each one as shown in the attached screen grab

I want to be able to manipulate each hex individually with an effector and PolyFX.  When I select a hex it acts like a single polygon, but my HUD says 7 polys are selected, and PolyFX splits all of the individual polys, NOT the hexes.  If I go to EDGE mode I can’t even select those edges to manually delete them.  I see they’re a slightly different color than the ones comprising each hex shapes.  What the heck are these and why are they being generated when I do this operation?  I have a feeling I’m missing something very simple.

I’ve also attached a scene file.

Thanks.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

Hi Shawn,

Have a look here:
https://www.cineversity.com/vidplaylist/turn_any_object_into_hexagons_with_instant_meshes

A pure Hexagon mesh, while the Hexagons stays flat with the same edge length and angle among them will always be a flat plane. The sphere here has some derivations from that pure formula. More about that, if you like to dive deeper: Buckminster Fuller is the master of geospheres.
Hexagons are created from 3 or 4 sided polygons.

Here is your file back:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/emLaYgYQ9VN7R9MZxH9JCtMHxBJtXDRFY93kOsSTdpz

The PolyFX will have trouble, I have to have look into that. For now I suggest the Fracture Object. (Disconnect was used on the sphere)
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/Rlt0mbrUe9S9cPJ42QypqTeohxvaKj5NxndJshWJtNP

You have asked what you are missing: the N-Gons should stay intact. Then you can build at least with the Fracture a PolyFX-like-setup.

All the best

Hi:

Thanks for the reply; sorry I didn’t get a chance to reply sooner.  A portion of this project went sideways, so we were dealing with that.

The client sent us a useable hex sphere, so I used that under a fracture object to create the Mograph effect we wanted (spheres travel along the surface of the sphere, shrinking the hexagons to expose gaps).  The Mograph cache for that effect was 10 GB for 2000 frames, so I baked the sphere out as a merged alembic which got the size down to 3GB. 

I guess those lines I was seeing through the hexes were N-gon lines, which can be filtered out of the viewport.  Still fuzzy as to why the Poly FX splits those up the way it does (and why the HUD says 7 polys are selected when a single HEX lights up orange.

Best.

Shawn

Hi Shawn,

On the end pretty much everything is a triangle. I’m not aware of any render engine that would use N-Gons.

Each polygon has a Normal and kind of its own little axis, given the points. Normal and points result with Phong calculations as a surface. This keeps is fast and stable, since edges can’t bend. To calculate the surface in a smooth way with just one Normal and many points, and edges perhaps oriented in each direction would increase render times extremely. Again, I never have heard of such, and I do 3D modeling since over a quarter century.

N-Gons are considered in-between steps to keep the flow during modeling nice. There is no advice nor suggestion to keep them. Typically, a nice mesh is based on nearly equal sized edged forming a square. In which direction it might be bend, will determine how the two triangles will be defined, to replace the quad.

Here is another way to create such a sphere, perhaps for a similar project. By creating little objects, the data needed to store this example (MG-Cache), in PSR for 492 faces was ~350MB for 2000 frames.
You can make the Extrude editable to get really independent objects.

Screen capture
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/UKrfKzV4yVaz3P3JMDU1cmCAGMy5bHbB4cv4TALrosu

My best wishes for your project