Anim8or Community

Hi,

I'm working on a mesh which is essentially like a curved box with windows. (I'll attach a couple of screenshots to this post to give context to what follows.)

What I need to do is to split this into 2 separate meshes; One mesh containing only the inward facing faces, and the other mesh with all outer facing and other faces (such as those making up the "window sills").

So the approach I've taken is to work on 2 copies of the mesh. In one I'll strip off all the inner faces, and on the other I'll strip off all faces except the inner faces.

This however is proving to be impossible to do in an efficient way (if at all) for a number of reasons.
I'll describe the workflow I'm using step-by-step so hopefully you can see what the issue is.
(Let me know if you need to see screenshots of any of the intermediate steps in order to understand.)

Mesh 1: (get rid of internal faces, leaving outer faces and window sills)
1. Face select mode; Restrict to BACK faces only; In the LEFT viewport, select the lot using area select.
2. Re-enable FRONT selection. In the front viewport, use the MMB to de-select any faces I want to keep (eg. outer faces and windowsills on the opposite side of the mesh ... selected by the previous step).

At this point, the inner faces on just one side of the model are selected, and I should be able to delete them and then perform a similar procedure for the other 5 sides.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple because a number of "window sills" are still selected (by step 1) on the side of the model I'm working on, because very few of these faces are perfectly orthogonal to any given viewport.
So before I can hit the delete key to get rid of the inner faces, I have to laboriously find and de-select those extra faces on the window sills, else they will be deleted as well.

This is a laborious and error prone process, and during this process I have to be careful also not to de-select any of the faces I actually intend to eventually remove.

The problem is that I have to find and deselect ALL of these ectras without making a single mistake before I can hit the DELETE key. This is turning out to be virtually impossible due to a BUG (or a functional flaw) in the UNDO history...
It appears that only actual modeling changes are being pushed onto the UNDO stack, which means that if at any point in this laborious process I make a simple de-selection error, or click the wrong mouse button, or forget to change modes between operations, there's no way to undo that single action.

At that point I have to go right back to step 1 and start all over again ... only to fail again.

So far I haven't been able to do even a single side of this mesh to completion, despite multiple attempts.

IMO, all actions (not just model changes) should be pushed onto the UNDO stack, as it's just too easy to make a single mistaken select / de-select, or mis-click in this long process.

I'd appreciate it if anyone has any clever techniques / suggestions to get around these issues in order to achieve the original goal.

Be interested also to know your opinion on the UNDO issue Steve, as it's all to easy to make accidental de-selection errors (putting me back to step 1) when using a MMB which also doubles as a scroll-wheel. If only I could just UNDO the last "action", then I wouldn't be forced back to square 1 every time I make a mis-step in the process.

Regards
CC

Some custom icons to decorate your new Anim8or 1.00 shortcuts...

Nice Steve,

Just what I needed! 

Follow Claude's instructions
 Was about to post same (except I was going to suggest making a copy of the default shortcut first.
-- Also, you should ignore my earlier advice to temove the DLL ... I thought you wanted the new default splash, but I realize you're after your own version.

The command line Steve is referring to is the Windows cmd.exe (type cmd in the search field of the windows menu and you'll see it.)

Claude's instructions are equivalent to the cmd line instructions from Steve, -- it just gives you a more convenient way to run it. ( If you want you can even create 7 different shortcuts and simply vary the final number specified in the target field in order to have the choice of all 7 splash screens whenever you like depending on your mood.)

This has been implemented and is looking good. Thanks Steve for slipping this into the release at the last moment.

I was referring to my using group for layer TWICE

Birds of a feather, flock together!

No need to be embarrassed about a couple of typos, but the fact that you were thinking about groups and layers interchangedly (is that a word?) .. suggests a possible elegant simplification...
Maybe groups and layers are conceptually one and the same. This might open a whole can of worms though. (EDIT: Don't tell the birds about the worms!)

Do you mean ... "What group layer should the group be in if the objects are in different layers? The default group layer?"

I'm not sure what the best approach would be.
One approach might be to just put the group in the lowest layer of the selected objects.

But what if there are other un-selected objects already in that layer? Maybe you should scan the layers of the selected objects with a preference for placing the group in a layer which is otherwise empty --- this would nicely separate it from the other objects.

But what if none of those layers are empty of extra objects? Do you put it in the nearest empty layer, or create a completely new layer for the group? ... This would appear to require that there is no limit on the number of layers which can be created, whereas at present there's a limit of 8 layers.

Regardless of the layer selection strategy for grouping, once grouped, on a future un-grouping action, I think that the un-grouped objects should probably remain in the current layer rather than returning to their original layers.

      Maybe Ctrl LMB Click-Drag. I'm lefthanded. That would work for me better 

Sorry to jump into this thread as I haven't been following it, however I noticed this comment and thought it worth mentioning that allowances for left-handedness are better handled in the mouse-configuration options of the OS where you should be able to reverse the meaning of LMB and RMB on your computer. (This shouldn't be a consideration in the design of the application.)
I guess you almost certainly already know about this and were just joking about designing for left-handedness. 

Regards
CC