PlyEdit: H - Hiding

Being able to hide faces, particularly when working with dense meshes, can greatly speed up the editing process. There are a hand-full of hiding operations, all accessed via the <H> key.

Fig 1 shows you what you get once you have hit the <H> key; a menu of further key commands down the bottom of the screen.

<LMB> - Hiding Inside a Box: Fig 2. Hiding With the Box
If you draw out a box with <H><LMB>, then all faces inside this box will be hidden (see left side Fig 2).

<RMB> - Hiding Outside a Box: If, however, you draw out a box with <H><RMB>, then all faces outside the box are hidden (see right side Fig 2).

<G> - Hiding Marked Faces: Fig 3. Hiding Marked Faces
You can hide all the green marked faces by typing <H><G> (see Fig 3).

<F> - Hiding Using Filling: Typing <H><F> is a shortcut version of the surface hiding sequence <G><F> <H><G>. Because it uses the marking mechanism to select the faces, any faces that happen to be already marked will also be hidden.

<S> - Swapping Hidden Faces: Type <H><S> to swap the visible and hidden faces.

<U> - Showing Hidden Faces: Type <H><U> to unhide all hidden faces.

<Home> or <H> - Hide Outside Focus: Aim the mouse pointer at some section of the mesh, then type <H><Home> or <H><H>, and everything except that part of the object is hidden. The camera will also focus in automatically on the remaining visible faces. Aim the mouse pointer at some background, then type <H><Home> or <H><H>, and all faces are made visible and the camera re-focuses on the entire mesh.

[edit] Voxels

Fig 4. Voxels

When you think you've finished editing a mesh, its a good idea to do a final check. Often defects can be hidden in the shadows, or behind other features, so they are hard to spot when viewing the mesh normally. The Voxels tool is a way to ensure you get to see every part of the mesh close-up enough to spot any final problems that need fixing. A voxel is the 3D equivalent of pixels in an image, so in this context it means that the mesh is divided up into a number of equal sized boxes or cells (see Fig 4), and the faces inside each one of these is examined in turn.

To start, type the <]> key. You will be prompted for a number of voxels, and then the number of X, Y and Z divisions is displayed that most closely matches the number of total voxels you entered. You have the option then to type in a different number of divisions before proceeding. The first voxel with any number of faces in it is then displayed, and you can spin the view around to check that everything is OK. If you have the Mesh Display mode set to A (i.e. auto) then there's a good chance that the mesh will automatically shade because only a small fraction of the total number of faces will be visible at any one time.

When you are "inside" a voxel, the editing functions work as they normally would. All that the voxel viewing tool is doing is hiding the other parts of the mesh, so you can use <H><U> if you want to see where the voxel is in relation to other parts of the mesh.

To move to the next voxel, type the <]> key again. At the top left of the window, a counter will display which voxel you are up to, and how many voxels in total there are. If you want to go back to a previous voxel, type <[>. If you want to exit from the voxel viewing mode, type <{> or <}>.

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