When I lent my services to a collegue who was working on a film about 12 years ago, I was introduced to the world of cnc. I remember watching this huge machining centre milling out a slab of mdf and turning it into a fantastic set of gears. I knew that it would have taken me hours to achieve the same thing with traditional power tools. I decided then that I would invest in a cnc router for my own business Oxenham Design. At that time I could turn on a computer, but even to check email seemed like a crazy set of operations. I persevered and learned every piece of relevant software I could get my hands on. I am now fortunate enough to be using Vectric's ASPIRE software, and Techno cnc routers, which has helped us to create some amazing projects, both in part, or in full. I thought that this blog would be a great place to share "behind the scenes" adventures with the software, materials and equipment we use, as well as the projects we build.

Sunday 5 February 2012

Hexagon for FREEEEEEEEEE!!!

 



I got a sweet notice in my in-box today. It was a notice from Daz 3d letting everyone know that they will be giving away Hexagon 2.5 this month. What a deal!!! This piece of software is very moderately priced at $149, but again, this month it's FREE. We use Hexagon 2.5 almost daily in our production pipeline. I will be honest though, it can be a bit buggy. BUT, save often. There is no faster polymodeler on the planet then Hexagon, and believe me, I've tried ALL of them.
The note of interest is that they are also giving away Daz studio 4 and Bryce 7 as well. Bryce is a photo-real landscape modeller for movies and photos. Daz studio can be very handy when combined with inexpensive figures and characters that they sell as well. When we did the Yeti job, we used a $20 troll figure and easily posed him using Daz studio. We then exported that pose to Hexagon for slicing into Aspire.

Hexagon is just a modeler though. There is no animation, rigging or rendering available. But, as we just model for cnc'ing, all that other stuff would just clutter up the interface.

All said and done though, free is free is free! If you want to step up what you can create with your cnc, Hexagon works VERY well with Aspire. There is a HUGE forum, and everyone is just as helpful as the Vectric community. There are also a ton of tut's available. As all polymodelers (or SDS modelers) all work the exact same way, you can use tutorials from ANY other software (once you get a handle on the interface).

I would suggest EVERYONE give it a try at least, you can't go wrong!
Here's the link:


 http://www.daz3d.com/

8)
JO

2 comments:

  1. Awesome, thanks for the tip.
    Hopefully I can get it to work with my pc this time around.

    ReplyDelete