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Frustration with Face Selection + possible BUG in UNDO stack.

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chuft-captain:
ENSONIQ5,

I agree that working on 1/4 of the mesh is a good idea, regardless of the workflow. What do you recommend as the best way to accurately split the mesh (exactly on the axes). Important to do this as exactly as possible so that are no tiny gaps when mirrored later.
Is there a way to delete every part of a mesh in a selected quadrant? ... or is the cutting tool the only way?

Cheers
CC

chuft-captain:
Trev,

I understand your point, but seems to me it's just a tradeoff between ease of undo versus complete un-recoverability. I'm not suggesting ALL actions (eg. POV rotates, etc) should be preserved, just "significant" changes.
My personal opinion is that in many Anim8tor workflows changes in selection status of FEP is a significant enough action to warrant inclusion in the UNDO list, not least because the fiddly nature of these "edits" means that mistakes are likely to be frequent, consequences costly in terms of rework ( as my example demonstrates), and would not be expensive in terms of memory use in the UNDO stack.

Text editors like Notepad++ preserve all significant state changes in this way, and it's not usually a problem as long as you notice your mistake before too much new work has been created. Granted, the issues are a lot more complex in a 3D editor, than in a text editor, but the basic principle is the same.

I take your point about noticing a mistaken delete, but that
is just the nature of the beast, and applies equally in the text-editor example.

However, the point of UNDO functionality is to recover from recent mistakes. If a mistake goes un-noticed for a long time, then a decision needs to be made to either roll back and sacrifice subsequent work, or roll forward and apply a patch for the earlier error.
Just a decision you have to make depending on the circumstances, and the relative size/complexity of subsequent work vs original error.
When the UNDO stack preserves all significant state change, then you have the opportunity of making this decision (roll back or patch). When it doesn't, then significant amounts of effort can be lost with a single unfortunate click. (Which is where we are at present IMO).
Hope this makes sense.

Regards
CC

ENSONIQ5:

--- Quote from: chuft-captain on October 24, 2017, 05:21:31 pm ---ENSONIQ5,

I agree that working on 1/4 of the mesh is a good idea, regardless of the workflow. What do you recommend as the best way to accurately split the mesh (exactly on the axes). Important to do this as exactly as possible so that are no tiny gaps when mirrored later.
Is there a way to delete every part of a mesh in a selected quadrant? ... or is the cutting tool the only way?

Cheers
CC

--- End quote ---

I would use the knife tool constrained to the grid which should cut dead on the axis centres, assuming your grid isn't too fine.  Once you've knifed the mesh just delete all points from 3 of the quadrants, leaving a single quadrant to work on.  In fact you could just cut as close as you can to the line and not bother with the grid, when you come to the merge stage and start merging points together each new merged point will be mid-way between the two points that merged to form it, and therefore dead on the axis with no gaps.  You may need to fiddle with the merge range a bit, so long as you cut pretty close to the line you should be able to use a very small merge range which will prevent merging of points that should be separate.  Note that meshes need to be joined before their points can be merged.

lppena:
Is it possible just to uniformly rescale the 2nd copy to fit inside the 1st?

chuft-captain:
Thanks guys for the suggestions.

I've managed to get this done with a combination of your suggestions.
1. By dealing with a quarter of the model this reduces the size of (de)selection tasks, and also makes the job easier thru easier access to the inner faces.
2. I'm then using the detach-faces method to separate into 2 meshes once the correct set of faces is selected. The hardest part of the entire process is getting the right set of faces selected - this is still somewhat time-consuming and prone to error, but less than before.
3. Once separated, I copy inner and outer into separate objects or layers, and then mirror, and join solids to recreate the original quadrants.

I didn't find it necessary to incrementally select small sets of faces then hide them and join them all at the end. This would probably reduce likelihood of mistakes, but at least for now I've found that reducing the size of the problem and easier access to inner faces means I can pretty much get it done in a single step (although I did notice one tiny error).

Now I just need to gradually improve this process so that it is less time-consuming and error-prone in future, as I will need to go through multiple iterations developing this model.

Thanks for all the suggestions. This is a really great forum. I haven't been here for quite a while, but got some very helpful suggestions almost instantly.
Really much appreciated!

Thanks again
CC

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