Welcome guest View Cart Member Services Login
  First|Prev|Next|Last
Page 15 of 23Page 10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20
 
Icon Advanced Selection Techniques
 

There are a few other ways to select polygons that can be very useful at times:

  • "Include Group..." can be used to add the selection in another group to the current group.
  • "Remove Group..." can be used to subtract the selection in another group from the current group (as was illustrated on Page 9).
  • "Include Material..." can be used to add the polygons in a particular material to the current group.

Since we have already seen how "Remove Group..." works, I will not cover it again here. "Include Group..." and "Include Material..." are very similar, the main difference being the source of the polygons to be added. For that reason, I will only cover "Include Material...":

  1. Re-open the Group Edit window and click "New Group" to create an empty group. Name the group "material_2" (or something else if you like). If you need a refresher on how to do this part, see Page 4.
  2. Click "Include Material...". A dialog will appear with a popup menu of all the materials assigned to the ball. Select the material you created on Page 13. In my case, the material is also named "material_2" (but the names do not have to be the same).
  3. Click "OK". You should now have the group "material_2" selected as your current group, and it will include all of the polygons assigned to the material named "material_2".
  4. For the purposes of this tutorial, once you are finished having fun observing this phenomenon, make sure material_2 is selected as the current group and click "Delete Group". Having this extra group around would mess up some of the following steps.
 
Tip: "Include Material..." can be very useful to reconstruct the group(s) you used to create the various material(s) on an object without having to maintain the groups themselves. Keep this in mind when we cover prop spawning. Group data does not carry forward to spawned props, but material data does.
 
The "Include Material..." dialog. A similar dialog appears for "Include Group...".
Group Tutorial Image
 
An excellent character-driven sci-fi story. I did the book cover illustration, "At the Window".

 
Amazon