Pls. open the provided illustrations in full screen and download the attached files containing collages of them in full resolution!
Ten years ago, this kind of option would have been considered an optional, of marginal use or a fancy tool that is better tackled by scripts. However, it pretty became basic nowadays and most of the software out there has more than decent built-in solutions for these kinds of tasks. One cannot grasp the utility and versatility of such tools until it starts to use them and realizes how much has missed it all this time. This is useful when, for example, when you want to cut out perfect circles on any surface, when you want to build structures that jut out of existing shapes etc. One can use circularize with other modeling operations to model shapes quickly. For video examples for traditional polygon modeling, it's enough to hint at older or more recent Arrimus 3D tutorials with both Blender and 3ds Max (link1, link2). For Modo here is a quick video from Pixel Fondue (link)
Now, that 3ds Max team has come up with some fast and versatile solutions for direct modeling like the Interactive Smart Extrude functionality and the much quicker Working Pivot alignment, a competitive solution to rearrange selections into circular arrays (and N-sided shapes) will only exponentially advance the possibilities of the new workflows introduced with these tools. Lesser need for Boolean operations, lesser need of using cut operations and cleaning work (with traditional Quad modeling this is even more critical), lesser need of creating extra primitives within smart extrude etc. The quick designs made up with Smart Extrude will look less blocky and more interesting much faster. All these tools combined along with a future updated Multi Cut tool (that “slices and dices”) will pretty much make 3ds Max the king of direct, straightforward polygon modeling.
There are at least 3 methods to (kind of) rearrange selections into circles in 3ds Max natively. For example, one can use the Spherify Modifier, which is nice because you can also morph, or one can use the Geopoly in the Ribbon Tools. And ofc there is the old Loop Tools Circle Command (from Ribbon). But none of these is convenient enough to use and each of them fails in many cases. Therefore, they are not good alternatives to scripts that already do this conveniently and work in more cases like RapidTools fastEdgeLoopRegularizer (link). Loop Tools Circle Command is buggy, slow and doesn’t work in many cases, at least not without workarounds. For ex, as some of you have already noticed, Loop Tools Circle Command can only circle edges where there's an inset around them.
3ds Max doesn’t need 3 unsatisfying ways of doing the same thing, it only needs a fast, versatile, up-to-date, refined, competitive and well-integrated tool. Furthermore, built in solutions for tools that pretty became basic nowadays are always common sense. Autodesk should go beyond fixing and updated it by taking the lead at least on this low-level polygon modeling functionalities and make it super versatile.
And ofc, there is The Competition. Maya 2018 (if one can considered it as competition) also received an awesome Circularize Components function (link) with bunch of neat options. It’s ridiculous how polished and versatile is that tool in Maya, a software that isn’t, by any means, focused on modeling. It seems they have thought of everything. Cinema 4D which used to have a limited amount of modeling tools came with a slew of improvements with S26, one of them being a quite competitive Fit Circle tool with lot of control after the software used to relied on scripts to do that (link). Blender has its default addon LoopTools with a Circle functionality (link) that works surprisingly well. And last but not least, there is the Modo’s Radial Align tool (link) introduced by the milestone 901 update was inspired by a largely used popular script and this is showing because the result is just brilliant. Apart from the obvious circle arrangements, this tool also supports N-sided shapes defined by user which results in triangles, pentagons, hexagons etc. dispositions. It also has a unique option (Rotate) to reconnect the proper edges when the results get twisted (check this video around 0:30 link).
This new tool should reside in the Command Panel not in the archaic Ribbon Submenus (as part of the badly integrated Graphite Modeling tools) and by default accessible from Quad Menu (or a future updated modern context menu but that’s another story). Consistent Hotkeys are also needed. Its Options should be added to a 3ds Max Caddy Controls.
The most obvious and common-sense place where Autodesk should get the concept and maybe the tech for a new tool in this area is the Circularize Components of Maya. But, it should definitely get the N-sided mode and Rotate reconnect features of Modo or the Influence and Radius from Blender, as well as a couple ones I came up with inspired by other tools (like Randomize, Semicircle mode etc.). When comes to the name of the tool, considering all of these, it can be diffiicult to properly choose one to accurate depic the function of this tool. In essence it rearranges your selections in regular or N-gons or put it differently in radial patterns. Therefore, Radial Regularizer or Radial Align would fit the best, but, for the sake of consistency between Autodesk software, Circularize should also do the work.
MODE
Controls the alignment procedure:
While rearranging your selections into perfect circles would be the most used mode, triangles are always nice-to-have details in scifi designs and having the ability to define a shape with the number of sides of your choice ofers way more flexibility. This will alleviate the need to use the cut tools and reduce the post cleaning work. In Architecture and furniture design arches or semicircles are even more common shapes so I think this mode can be tackled inside the same tool even if this doesn’t enter in the same field of radial dispositions.
TYPES OF SUBOBJECTS
The tool should support all subobjects (vertices, edges, polygons). For it to work:
For the other N-sided mode, in Modo, if the number of selected positions is less than the number of sides, the program interpolates the remaining points between the corner points of the polygon.
TYPES OF SELECTIONS
Like it's Maya countepart at least, (and to a certain degree, by what I've been testing so far, in Blender as well) it should work on selections whether being previously insetted or not (unlike the LoopTools>Circle) on single or multiple groups of selections (identical or different in count and size), on multiple groups being planar or not, if they consist in multiple cross-section loops, simultaneously on both internal and external border selections (even if not aligned or different shape or count) etc.
TYPES OF SURFACES
It should work on Planar or Non Planar surfaces, on Corners areas, with Cross-Section selections, Surfaces with Curvature etc. All this use cases are illustrated below and you can also watch this YouTube video of a comprehensive review of Maya 2018 from 14:32 to 17:48 (link)
OPTIONS
The Tool should provide at least these options found in Maya, Modo and Blender:
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MY OTHER IDEAS
MODELING
UI AND VIEWPORT
OTHERS
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