Looks like Hexagon’s a no go for me

So I sat down to try a simple tutorial on making a coffee mug in Hexagon and I can’t even create a primitive. Followed the instructions but nothing happened and the program just crashes again and again and again.

I suppose it’s an issue with my aged computer, though Hex 2.5 is an older program and I thought I’d be in the clear. Ugh. Very frustrating.

I finally read the instructions on how to use the Nerd Footsteps tool I bought many years ago (it’s now at Hivewire.) So I taught myself something today, just not what I’d intended.

I guess I’ll be sticking to kludging together primitives in DS for the time being. Not so great for creating a round mirror, a feature of another recent attempt at background filler props for a render project WIP that has elements spanning several decades.

I wanted to recreate something similar to this:

And I got fairly close, except for the round mirror:

Using a sphere for the mirror, even after scaling the Z axis way down, produces a distorted effect.

Now if I were creating an image in which someone had bought a piece of antique furniture at a flea market and then discovered the mirror was actually a time portal, the effect has great possibilities! Alas, I’m not doing time portals.

The only other thing I can think of is to use a plane with a round transparency map. But maybe I can still work with this just by using some creative posing and/or camera angles.

Or…a cylinder. LOL!

More fun with primitives

I have been busy reading because a whole slew of library books I’d had on hold — both at the regular library and e-library — arrived for checkout all at one. This happens way too often; you’d think I’d learn to better space things out.

And one of the books is Caroline Alexander’s new translation of The Iliad, which is not going to be a quick read…

(( I’m also binge-watching the last season of Daredevil and The Defenders on Netflix. Too bad these Marvel series have been canceled; Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin is such a fantastic villain. ))

Outside of the reading and binge-watching, I made a few pieces of retro furniture with primitives. Some styles of furniture props are suitable for kludging together with shapes like cubes, spheres, and cylinders. Clearly Stonemason and Jack Tomalin have nothing to fear from me, but it was instructional nonetheless:

I screwed up the lower drawers on the shelving unit. There are two, though the end result looks like one big drawer. I probably should’ve fit the two cubes together less snugly than I did, but it’s good enough.

I’m not sure about the physics of this second weirdly-shaped shelf. In real life it might be a little tipsy.

Busted out all the retro rockets I own. Too bad that Mongo one is no longer at the DAZ store.

I’m almost done with my pose conversions for G2 and G3, except for fine-tuning the hands/fingers and some fiddling with overall limb translations. IOW, the hard part. Then it’s on to G8, since I do have a free conversion utility for that generation. Dawn and Dusk are dead last on account of there being zero conversion utilities for them and it’ll take a while. I’ve had decent luck using G2 poses for Dawn/Dusk, so I might give that a try rather than going from V4/M4. Dawn and Dusk have a few extra posing bones that V4/M4 do not.

Speaking of Dawn, a few years back I made some gothic xmas textures for Jan18’s free Belle Heirloom Petite Dress for Dawn, for The Fantasy Attic’s holiday giveaway. I recently uploaded the textures to Renderosity Freestuff.

Anyway, wilmap refit that dress for the Genesis 2 female. The textures work on the G2F version, but the material presets don’t apply. I haven’t looked closely, but I’m assuming it’s a UV mapping thing. Is anyone interested in these texture presets for G2F? If so, I can redo the presets for her. G2’s an older figure, so not sure anyone would find them useful.

If so, just let me know in the comments.

I haven’t had much success in New Year’s resolutions, but I’m going to try and dedicate Thursdays to learning new stuff. Like Hexagon and the awesurface shaders. And tools in DAZ Studio itself I’ve never done anything with — rather a lot, I think.