[Hinge from Edge tool] Hinge from Center, Hinge from Vertex, Quad corners, Width segments and other improvements

Kranos_Orphydian · ‎01-01-2022

Pls. open the provided illustrations in full screen and download the attached files containing collages of them in full resolution!

Hinge from Edge tool is already a great tool for quick hard surface design details and useful in other modeling chores situations like making arches, elbow tubing, curved sections of roads or tunnels etc. Arrimus 3D is using it beyond its potential with some more or less elegant workarounds (watch from 8:50 onwards video link). With a minimum development it can be a very polished and versatile tool.

Hinge from center

Having the selection hinging from the center can be so useful for achieving much interesting design details than with regular hinge from edge. The workaround of temporarily adding an extra edge loop in the center then performing two Hinge from edge operations from the same edge with opposite values negative and positive is not the most elegant and fastest way of achieving them(see Arrimus using this technique from 1:35 onwards video link).

In Maya, the similar Wedge tool seems to be capable of that but not 100% sure. Going by the Maya doc: "If multiple edges are selected, extrusions will rotate around their average orientation" (link).

3ds Max Hinge from Edge tool Hinge from center.png

Hinge from Vertex (to avoid lopsided hinge extrusions of group of polygons)

With a selection group of polygons even if symmetrical you get a lopsided hinged extrusion when the edges to work as hinges are not straight and collinear with each other. The workaround of straighten them, temporarily, performing the hinge operation from one of them and then moving back the mid vertex using snaping or edge constraint is again not very elegant and intuitive (watch from 4:50 onwards video link). Not sure if this can be achieved having the mid vertex as hinge but we definitely need a way of averaging the hinge extrude direction.

3ds Max Hinge from Edge tool Hinge from vertex.png

Quad corners and width segments option

Having quad topology at the hinge corner instead of having lots of triangles concentrated there produces much better subdivision. The workaround of adding an extra edge loop across so you can limit this effect and then removing some edges at the corner area to get rid of triangles is easy to do but not a very elegant solution. Besides this, having width segments option is quite an obvious missing feature.

3ds Max Hinge from Edge tool Hinge from edge Quad corners and add width segments.png

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teratron · ‎01-06-2022

Good ideas!

[Hinge from Edge tool] Hinge from Center, Hinge from Vertex, Quad corners, Width segments and other improvements

[Hinge from Edge tool] Hinge from Center, Hinge from Vertex, Quad corners, Width segments and other improvements

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