Polygon selection

[Joel]

I saved Jeanny’s clear explaination of how to use the Polygon Selection function:

Is there a way to use the Polygon Selection function after I have selected the polygons, not before?

For example, I can set Polygon selection to #1 and then save some polygons. If I then add more polygons using Shift + select, I can’t save the newly selected polys as Polygon selection #2 because when I change from #1 to #2 the selected polys are deselected. Simply put, I wish it wouldn’t deselect them. Am I overlooking something obvious?

I asked this in 2017 but I don’t think I found a solution.

Polygon selection

Polygon selection You have to designate a Polygon selection number first, then select the polygons. I wish the process was backwards, where I select the polygons before saving the selection. When I change the selection number, it reverts to zero polygons selected. In the example shown, I had...

www.cheetah3d.com

Bonus questions:

Surprisingly, Frank Beckmann’s reply is now deleted. It’s bad enough that he’s not currently posting, but is his massive contribution to the Forum now hidden? How does that work?

I don’t get how the Forum Search works, either. Advanced Search results for “select polygons” by Frank Beckmann drew a blank:

 

[Paul P]

I tried searching for "select polygons' for user Frank Beckmann, after Feb 2012, and got 8 hits. Not sure what exactly you were looking for, but the search function seems to work fine. Maybe you need to vary the words - sometimes the wording you remember may not be the wording used, and it can trip up your search results.

 

[Helmut]

Not sure if this helps, but you can use placeholder materials for different poly selections.
* In my example I have grey / sel #1, yellow / sel #2, red / sel #3 and blue / sel #4.
* You can use the same material (same by parameters), but it needs to be duplicated / triplicated, ...

* To expand / reduce a selection:
* In the object editor select the material which represents the required selection. The properties panel should indicate the relevant shade selection.
* In the viewport shift+select for expand / cmd+select for reduce and drag the material to the edited selection for an update.

* I have added a small sphere as a marker for the selection #3. In SS #2 I have added 3 polys and removed 3 other polys from the original selection #3 (red).

* You can toggle off the materials when you do nor require them or simply delete them. The defined poly-selections are maintained, even when deleting the materials and can be used when deploying relevant tools to a selection.

 

[misoversaturated]

It would be great if there was a script to merge or subtract different polygon selections.
I'm always using a crude workaround that doesn't always work reliably.
When using the "convert selection to (polygons/edges/points)" from the selection menu it will not produce a new selection but instead add to what was there before.

So if you had an edge loop selected and then change to polygon mode, select polygons and change them to edges these will be added to the previous edge loop.

If you have different polygon selections you can go to each and change them into edges adding them up on the way.
(It is possible to use invert selection to manage subtractions though this can get very confusing.)
But once you convert this accumulated edge selection back to polygons, all adjacent polygons sharing those edges will be selected too.
Now you have to reduce the selection which will not always work as expected.
This works similarly when switching points instead of edges.

As to why Frank has hidden his profile and doesn't turn up in searches I have no idea

 

[Hasdrubal]

About Frank: Like Paul I have no problem in finding frank's posts in the search (for "select polygons" I got 11 results, 8 of them after 2012, so basically the same result). I think that all of Frank's tips and comments still are there unaltered.

As for the limited access of his profile, I'm sure that was always in place. He belongs to the few who advocate privacy and the use of tools like duckduckgo. He tries (as everyone should, actually) to feed the different "data krakens" like google as little as possible.

 

[Paul P]

It's also worth noting that for almost all of its history, Frank was pretty much all alone in providing forum support for Cheetah. This is going back 15 years or more. I can't imagine how much of his time has gone into helping people over the years. We are fortunate now that we have a few other very good people who provide great support.

No doubt Frank is taking a breather, and no doubt he will be back at some point.

 

[Radian]

He helped a lot and is a big value of this forum. But let us be honest here. He is a complex (difficult) person and is always on "edge" with comments he receives. He even send me an angry private message because I "dare" to talk about Blender and made some references.

 

[Paul P]

Frank's positives outweigh his negatives by a very big margin. If you walk a mile in his shoes, you may find that even the the most even tempered person would get a little stroppy sometimes.

 

[Radian]

Frank's positives outweigh his negatives by a very big margin. If you walk a mile in his shoes, you may find that even the the most even tempered person would get a little stroppy sometimes.

I will not make it a big thing here. Just saying what my experiences are with him in the last 9 years. He is helping a lot of people and I'm grateful for that. But he's also very difficult when it comes to comments and or going against his methods. I'm not the only one with this feeling but i'm the only one who dare to say it. He is not a Cheetah God, but he's acting like one. There are several other Cheetah members who are very good and provide the same good support. I like to debate about things and have nice conversations, but I don't like to have to look at every word I say to "not provoke" him. There are limits to my respect.

 

[Hasdrubal]

Everybody has a right to his opinion about someone else, no question about that. I only have a problem with it when someone isn't there anymore to defend himself. And we can only guess why he totally left the forum, maybe really because of a little quarrel (which would be a no-go), but there are lots of other reasons in the middle of a pandemic where a lot of people have lost someone, suffer from the consequences of "long-covid", have trouble to make a living or just got pissed off with all the bullshit that was going on in 2020 and partly still is going on. No matter what your own position is, for everyone it looks as if the other halve of the population went totally bonkers. Maybe he just thinks that he used enough of his time here, who knows.

And no, he wasn't the Cheetah God, but, truth be told, probably really the person who knows most about this app from a user point of view. And as helpful as a lot of others here are, he put in a lot of work into solving other people's problems. That must have taken a massive amount of his spare time, especially with gifs as explanations and so on. So he was important in building up this exceptionally helpful community, which isn't an easy feat.

I really respect him for that, but still didn't always agree with him (sometimes he was right in the end, sometimes he wasn't). And while I try to give my best not to provoke anyone unnecessarily, I never felt a need or an expectation from other members of being special careful with him. Also a lot of us mentioned other software, Blender and others, where we pointed out that this or that is missing in Cheetah and sometimes even recommended the use of Blender (in my case, always as a last resort, because I really don't like that software for lots of reasons). All in all, there is no reason not to use different apps at the same time. Because no 3d software is best suited for all things. I think, he knew that all along well enough and had himself some other apps on his computer. And at least I never got any private message because I mentioned other apps.

As with "daring to speak out" ... I don't think that nobody else dares; we just don't have the same opinion, don't feel the need to point it out if we have the same one, find it simply rude to talk about someone in his absence or just respect how much he helped.

In the end, it's not important what we think. I only hope he is well, that's all.

But the most important thing is this: Nobody has a right to expect from somebody else that he (or she) is entitled to somebody else's help, time, resources, or that it's someone else's duty to solve other people's problem as long as it isn't his job he gets paid for it. I somebody does help, it's a gift. If someone doesn't want to help (anymore), it's his bloody right.

 

[Radian]

That is your opinion of cours. I disagree, and that's my right too. Like I said before, I don't respect people that are disrespectful to me. Even it's a Cheetah wizard. I will leave his last pm here to show how nice and respectful he is:

"Do you think this forum is the right place to advertise any other 3d-package? Really? Think twice. Thanks."

Let's close this now, it doesn't matter what we say. In the end, I just want a respectful place to learn & talk about Cheetah.

 

[Joel]

This thread took an unintended turn.

I owe Frank Beckmann a lot for all the help over the years. He took a “sabattical” a few years ago and I was glad when he returned. He deserves a lot of credit for C3D’s success.

More recently people like Helmut and Misoversaturated have stepped up to answer questions like mine.

Mis: I tried your trick and it performed as advertised. Not sure how I’ll use it but I have a habit of filing these things away (see Jeanny’s tip above) and eventually applying them.

Helmut: Thanks for this and countless other detailed explanations. I tried following your example but I fail to grasp the concept of a material Shade selection — I have never used it, barely noticed it because I never used any of the Material Properties. Lacking experience with that, I can’t relate it to my question about Polygon selection. I asked the question mostly out of curiosity. It has always struck me as counter-intuitive to assign the Polygon selection number before selecting the polygons. If it were the other way around it would be very useful.

I’ll take some more time with your suggestion — I’m just missing some basic knowledge.

Which brings me back to Frank. 3D is hard to learn in general, even harder to use when seeking a specific result but you don’t know what tool, what settings, what sequence of steps. We all get stuck. Without this forum, we are likely to stay stuck. Without people like Jeanny, Helmut, Mis, and, especially, Frank, we are unlikely get much done in Cheetah 3D.

Lots of things going on in the greater world right now, so who knows what Frank’s doing. The real mystery was how he managed to contribute so much, so often, so instantaneously. No doubt he found something in greater need of his time and expertise.

 

[Radian]

This thread took an unintended turn.

I owe Frank Beckmann a lot for all the help over the years. He took a “sabattical” a few years ago and I was glad when he returned. He deserves a lot of credit for C3D’s success.

More recently people like Helmut and Misoversaturated have stepped up to answer questions like mine.

Mis: I tried your trick and it performed as advertised. Not sure how I’ll use it but I have a habit of filing these things away (see Jeanny’s tip above) and eventually applying them.

Helmut: Thanks for this and countless other detailed explanations. I tried following your example but I fail to grasp the concept of a material Shade selection — I have never used it, barely noticed it because I never used any of the Material Properties. Lacking experience with that, I can’t relate it to my question about Polygon selection. I asked the question mostly out of curiosity. It has always struck me as counter-intuitive to assign the Polygon selection number before selecting the polygons. If it were the other way around it would be very useful.

I’ll take some more time with your suggestion — I’m just missing some basic knowledge.

Which brings me back to Frank. 3D is hard to learn in general, even harder to use when seeking a specific result but you don’t know what tool, what settings, what sequence of steps. We all get stuck. Without this forum, we are likely to stay stuck. Without people like Jeanny, Helmut, Mis, and, especially, Frank, we are unlikely get much done in Cheetah 3D.

Lots of things going on in the greater world right now, so who knows what Frank’s doing. The real mystery was how he managed to contribute so much, so often, so instantaneously. No doubt he found something in greater need of his time and expertise.

Very true, I never denied this

 

[misoversaturated]

It has always struck me as counter-intuitive to assign the Polygon selection number before selecting the polygons. If it were the other way around it would be very useful.

There is probably a misunderstanding.
Every polygon selection is a closed space with no connection to the others.
You are always acting inside one of those different spaces, probably selection #0.
When you select something in there and ask for a possibility to chose a new selection number while keeping the just selected polygons and so make them appear in this new selection space this is just a misconception disregarding the boundary (think of changing to a new object instead of a new polygon selection number, same logic).
Once you click on a different selection number you leave the current selection behind and enter the new one (which is empty upon first entry).
So there is no way to get a selection made in one selection number space into another (hence the workaround I suggested).
Every possibility for selections to cross those boundaries will greatly complicate the system which is apparently already not easy to understand in its current simple form (though it would be very useful for certain tasks).

There is a certain logic to it and asking to break it means really asking for a totally different system.
(This is not meant to criticize your request but to explain why it works as it does.)

 

[Helmut]

* Also, bear in mind that a polygon can be a component of multiple polygon selections. I have set in the example 3 selections, #0, #2, #3 and #4, each indicated by a coloured ball stuck on a spline. The spline is only there to make this a bit legible.
* Note that some of the polys show a single ball, two balls or three balls.

* As misoversaturated indicates, poly selections are closed and somewhat disconnected constructs. As much in 3D modelling, it is a matter of your choice, your skill and your aims how complicatedly the applied parameters parse the mesh.

 

[Swizl]

I'm always screwing up my selection sets, so I don't even bother with trying to edit them. This is one thing that I wish was more like C4d where the selection set was tag based. You can have a bunch of different selection set tags on one object.

 

[KurtF]

If you could Name the selection set, assign and deassign members of the sets, and edit them like any other file on your system, that would be ideal. Current methodology is a bit unwieldy.

 

[Hasdrubal]

I never used selection sets in Cheetah because they are too rudimentary for me. Sometimes I just split up the model (to reassemble it later) or you do it with material tags as Helmut explained.

I still use some temporary materials in Modo even if there is a very useful selection set workflow in place, because working on a subdiv model means sometimes that you destroy those sets (partly because I'm used to such a workflow from my lightwave days. no need to split up, though). In the sets you can add, delete, replace, substract in point, edge and polygon mode. You can overwrite them, add to your actual selection or substract from it or substract the actual selection from a set. You can have as many such sets as you want, they get copied with the mesh, you can use them through a special menu or via stats and of course you can give them any name you like. Any poly, edge or vertex can be part of as much such sets as one likes.

Of course it's great, and I do use it all the time. It can be a huge time saver, especially in situations like "oh, now that I made this complex selection I see that I should have done that beforehand ..." which is already possible with Cheetah's selection sets. But not those different sets you can use to nudge part of your mesh till everything is in place only to find out at a later stage that you have to nudge a little bit more.

I don't know how complex it would be for Martin to enhance the existing code along such lines (already partial would be good). But even if it was just a day's work, I'm not entirely sure if it's worth it because only experienced modelers would use it (and somehow I got the impression that only part of Cheetah's user even use subdiv), and probably not even all of them. You only need such things if a model has a certain complexity.

On the other hand, Cheetah is still missing some very basic things for today's 3d apps (sss for example). The modeler-part in itself is update-worthy and on and on. I still think that Cheetah needs in the long-run something special that (most) other apps don't have, something that's available only as a paid plugin or much more complicated, a specialty that makes it worthwile to use it even for professionals as an additional tool, so there will be enough sales even in the future to keep this app afloat against Blender and Indie licenses ...