dast

PolyGnome could do this as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOAfiZrS9PA

Sorry, you've lost me there. The only difference at this point in time is that PolyDup can automatically detect how to orient the to-be-pasted geometry for a best fit, and it allows interactive rotation of the to-be-pasted geometry. Apart from that PolyGnome is identical, and has a whole library management. I do intend to extend PolyGnome to have auto-orient, interactive-rotation, and preview ... but I don't expect this to still happen before Q3 2020. I am really trying to picture your "merge the open ended selections in various combinations of new "closed" geometry" ... but it draws a blank. Care to elaborate what you mean?

Now THAT's some feedback. Thanks for bringing up these points, Dave. Some of the posted demonstration video show this already, but it sure is important to mention this. The geometry copied from one object is not limited to be pasted to the same object. It can be pasted onto any polygon object, of the current scene or any scene which is currently opened in Cinema 4D. You can thus copy geometry from object A in project B, switch to project C and paste the geometry onto object D ... When copying geometry it is "temporarily" stored into a selected slot. I mean "temporarily" as it will be overwritten with any new geometry you decide to copy and store into that same slot. At this point in time 5 slots are available. This plugin is meant to copy/paste geometry on the fly. It isn't meant to actually store the copied geometry into a library, which is what PolyGnome allows. However, I might provide a future update which allows a way to "export" the copied geometry towards PolyGnome's library. But nothing has yet been decided in this regard. Alternatively, it could be possible to provide a way to extend the number of available slots. But as any application allowing to copy/paste content to and from the clipboard is limited to a single item, I figured that having a way to copy/paste a few items would be enough ... without the need of having to provide a whole library management system. I might misunderstand your point, but PolyDup requires at least an open end in the copied geometry. Contrary to PolyGnome, PolyDup does not allow for welded or floating assets. With PolyDup the copied geometry is always welded when pasted. Replacing geometry will currently work, but only if the geometry matches in size. In future updates additional widgets might be provided to adjust the pasted geometry. Currently the plugin provides visual feedback if selected polygons do not match with selected geometry to be pasted. This is based on number of polygon stitches that are required to weld the geometry to be pasted with the existing mesh polygons. For now the plugin requires a matching number of stiches between mesh and pasted geometry. With this plugin I do not have the intention in duplicating the effort of PolyGnome, as such will not provide a way to build up libraries of assets. However, as mentioned earlier, I might provide a way to export copied geometry towards PolyGnome. Again, thanks for the feedback. Highly appreciated!

Plugin will be available for purchase when completed, from Tools & Pixels website. In the meantime I have picked up development of this plugin again. I have added a rotation widget, allowing to adjust the angle of the extract prior to pasting it into the destination mesh. I am thinking of also allowing to adjust position and scale with such widget. A new beta will be provided shortly ...

Hi, sorry for the late reply. The beta file has been removed as it was becoming obsolete. This topic has had over 1300 views, a handful of downloads ... and only a single person provided feedback. I thus need to realize that not many are interested in this plugin, and as a result of that I am heavily reducing development time in favor of other work.

You've got some replies in your thread over at the plugincafé. I propose to continue the discussion overthere.

Spend some time working out to visualize a preview of the copied polygons to be injected into the mesh. More changes to come ...

And there you have it: version 2.92 has been released to the customers. Main feature in this update is the possibility to have a non-square UV Canvas. While the square canvas (ratio 1:1) is useful to most users since applied textures are square as well, some require a specific workflow using non-square bitmap textures. Next to the default 1:1 ratio the UV Canvas can now be specified to be visualized as 16:9, useful for 1920x1080 textures, or 16:10 (1920x1200). Even custom values can be provided, say for those wanting a 3:2 ratio. Next to that some minor changes and a few bug fixes. And now ... it's about time I start working on 3.0

Here is a free plugin I made for selecting UV island borders: https://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/forums/topic/109930-uvisland-outliner

That was the whole point. Glad you liked it. Actually, the idea is kind of borrowed from the tagline "There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who can read binary, and those who can't."

I am surprised to see everyone with an MSA expected to get the updates for free. I too, "wished" this was the case. But it's obvious the S22 update is not part of the MSA deal.

I personally would have done a "replace ascii 0x67 to 0x6E", but that's just my feeling. And as far as your MSA goes ... well, we all know that R22 will be released on 1st September. Your MSA, just as mine, will have expired by the end of August. Too bad for us, but such is the deal. While I like the the improvements I see with this S22, I have mixed feelings. And not only because of the UV related features. There are quite some R21 bugs I have encountered and reported to MAXON (december '19). Having not seen them fixed with R21.207 I fear these will not get handled before R22 hit the shelves ... if at all.

Looking for feedback on the current state of the plugin. Originally I had planned to provide selection tools as part of the plugin. But since you can simply use the native live-selection, loop-selection and fill-selection to do all the selection tasks I don't really see the point in duplicating these features. Besides, if you also have the Dials plugin it's easy to create a setup where you have all necessary tools grouped into a dial, accessible by a single shortcut. An idea might be to provide an internal dial-like functionality to easily access the different extract slots, to paste from / copy to. Activating this dial via right mouse click. I am not sure if the concept is clear of using the CTRL key (CMD on mac) to activate the copy functionality? An alternative idea I had was to hover over the selected polygons and use the CTRL-C or CTRL-V keystrokes to copy or paste. Without the need of a mouse click. Next, I am not too happy about the identification of the extract slot. I wasn't sure people really wanted to spend time naming these extracts, as the whole purpose of the tool is to quickly perform a copy/paste of part of a mesh. Compare it with copy/paste a part of a sentence in a text editor to rearrange the wording ... or copying part of an image to in an image editor. You're not exactly naming the item you copy, also because you only have a single item in the clipboard. Here, with the possibility to have up to 5 items "in the clipboard", I thought it would make sense you could identify which of the slots of the clipboard you want to interact with. For now each slot is made up from the name of the object you are copying from, appended with the lowest point index of the part you are copying from. In most cases this would provide for unique names. Maybe a different color per slot might be easier to identify than using a name? I also had thought of taking a screenshot of the part of the mesh being copied, to be used as a thumbnail. But displaying 5 thumbnails would probably take up too much space in the attribute manager. And in the end, I am not even sure many users will want to use this tool for more than copy-pasting a single item in one session. As such, there is no need to identify things. Suggestions welcome ...

Probably not the smartest move to bring this out, while all attention is to the newly released S22, but here goes. NEW in beta 3: The original plugin allowed to copy and paste a single extract. With the latest version you have up to 5 slots to hold an extract. Select a slot in the Attribute Manager to use. If the slot is empty you obviously can only use it to copy an extract into. Once a slot is filled you can then use it to paste/inject into your mesh. The new version also allows to use selected edges around a hole in the mesh in order to paste the selected extract. You do not need to be in edge mode to be able to use edges, nor do you have to be in polygon mode to use polygons. Although it helps in visualizing which edges or polygons are selected if you are in one or the other mode. For now, I do not limit to use edges or polygons to a particular mode. Depending feedback I might provide this limitation if it is more appropriate. And as pictures tell more than many words, I have created a short video to demonstrate the process ...

I have just finalized beta 3 for R20 and R21, both Windows and macOS. Link available in the first post.

I have updated the plugin to provide an option (via cog wheel) to ignore the outer edges of an open-ended mesh as being detected as UV boundaries. In general you would want to turn all UV seams into edge selections. In case of open-ended mesh objects, the mesh boundaries would be detected as UV boundaries ... while these aren't actually UV seams. The new option will (by default) allow to ignore these boundaries. On the other hand you might want to turn all UV island boundaries into edges, no matter if these are UV seams or not. You can do so by unchecking the new option. This is the behaviour of the original version 1.0

I had provided a quick plugin which does select UV boundaries, inspired by the thread you had started about this topic. Isn't the plugin useful in your context? If it does miss some functionality, you can discuss your specific needs in this topic: https://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/forums/topic/109930-uvisland-outliner/

Inspired by the request from this thread: https://www.core4d.com/ipb/forums/topic/109564-selecting-uv-seams I have quickly created a plugin which does detect the UV island boundaries and turns them into edge selection. The plugin will process all selected polygon objects. UVisland Outliner v11.zip

This is something you might better ask to the MAXON developers, as only they know what the logic is behind their implementation. But from looking at your examples you can deduct that when multiple polygons are selected, the axis orientation of the object is used. At least when the orientation option you select in Modeling Axis is set to "Axis". When you only select a single polygon, then the selection Z axis usually is the normal of the polygon, and the selection Y axis usually tries to point into the plane of the original object's Y axis and the polygon's normal. Then from these two vectors (selection Z and Y axis) its X axis is calculated. I am not sure if this is how it's done, but that is how I interpret what happens in the video you provided.

Scaling can be enabled in the Attribute Manager. Option "Scale when pasting" (3rd checkbox). I know, the current options are a mess. As this plugin is still a work in progress, the Attribute Manager options are not yet nicely organized.

I have updated the plugin, fixing the few reported issues. In the meantime I have also created an R21 version of the plugin, and ported to macOS. New beta is available for download at the bottom of the first post of this thread. Looking forward to more feedback.

Good to know. I agree this is a welcome benefit of the native Cinema4D workflow. I had foreseen to provide some selection tools within the PolyDup tool (loop, fill, ...) but as these are already natively available I haven't been focusing on them just yet. And maybe I won't at all, as it seems a waste of time to implement what is already available. The console mentions "different point count is not yet implemented". As such, I haven't spend time trying to block this just yet. Implementation will be expanded in future beta(s) ... I have only been able to reproduce this when I use the shortcut key "c" while the mouse pointer is inside the viewport. If I use the mouse pointer to select the "make editable" icon then all is fine. I will provide a fix for this in a next beta. Thanks for taking the time to test and report. It is much appreciated!

Thanks for the feedback and questions. For your first point I would like to ask for some screenshot, as I am not exactly following what you mean. Concerning writing of the files I have no idea if this is a limitation of the demo version of C4D. It is also possible some windows settings prevent for writing in that particular location. It would be useful to find out what the cause is. And that is the reason I provide the demo for anyone to try out, providing me feedback in return in order to fix such issue if there is one. As shown and mentioned in the video, the plugin will try to rotate the pasted polygons as to orient them according to your target selection. With PolyGnome you had to manually provide the rotation before welding the asset into the destination mesh. With PolyDup the orientation is calculated.

First beta version of the plugin is available. Currently only for Cinema4D R20, running on Windows. Short "tutorial" showing the current state of the plugin: EDIT: The uploaded beta and link to the video have been removed here, and added at the bottom of the first post. Please provide feedback ...

Thanks for the interest. Ok, then we're on the same page 👍