Tiling - Hexagon tiles

[Grogyan]

I wonder if someone could help me, i'm trying to make a spread of hexagonal tiles, I have tried the dupliverts function, but the tiles don't match up flush against each other.

I used a triangle and subdivided it several times then used the dupliverts button to tile a hexagon on the vertices.
The hexagon was made by just using either a mesh circle or cylinder with 6 points.

Am I going nutty or have I missed something?

Thanks

[andylegate]

Not sure, but, and I AM sure this is the hard way to do it:

Once you get the first hex made, duplicate it. Then move it, connecting 2 of the verticies with the exact x, y coordinates of 2 of the original verticies. That would at least match up one side flush. Then repeat the process until you have what you want.

I'm sure what I just said is harder than something else, but I can't think of a something else right now.

[Nadnerb]

I would suggest creating the hexagonal tile, and then rotating copies about it's vertices.

HexRot.png (32.65 KiB) Viewed 4636 times

First, make your tile, then set the transform pivot to "cursor" (look on the bottom left of the image, the crosshair thing) then, in edit mode, move the cursor to one of the verts. (select the vert, [shift]+[s] > "Cursor-> Selection") Then, in object mode, select your hexagon, duplicate it, ([alt]+[d]) and rotate it 120 degrees. ([r] > [z] > 120) after this, you can select chunks of tiles and rotate them, etc..

[andylegate]

See? Easier way than I thought of.

[Grogyan]

Cool i'll try that.

I found out late last night that I could just make a huge subdivided triangle and select the faces to make individual hexagons, but that idea still left with another problem, making all 6 faces into 1

[Grogyan]

The triangle thing didn't work out, tried your idea Nadnerb, but found an even easier way, using an Array modifier.

Problem now is still the same as before, where I want to merge all 6 faces of the original hexagon, so that when I do tile them I can easily make out the individual tiles, in the big object.

[Grogyan]

Righteo, I have gone through just about every web page I could about merging faces, news is that Blender can't do it.

Good news, I found out that in April a new version of Blender will come out,

Bad news, from the looks of it, our plugin may need to change.

More bad news, the merging of faces isn't in the next release, nor will it likely to be in the next release of that.
That leaves me with,


A huge headache, using Nadnerb's method, or my method, and actually selecting individual faces to raise or lower them (extrude), and with the possibility of hundreds of hexagonal tiles, I will also get a headache with forcing my brain to not see all those optical illusions, ie is it a box, is it a hexagon, is that hexagon part of another?

[Nadnerb]

I'm not seeing your problem here... what is this "merging faces" you speak of? Why can't you just change the linked tile object to change them all at once?

hexIsle.png (51.25 KiB) Viewed 4563 times

I made this in about a minute. I can change all the tiles at once, and the top face is a 6 sided FGon. Is that what you wanted? In my little procedure, I told you to duplicate the object (ie, outside of edit mode) with alt+d, which makes all the duplicates linked. When you change one, you change them all. As for the FGon, just select a bunch of coplanar faces, press f, and say "Make FGon"

[Kato]

It would probably be WAY easier (and more efficient) to do this with textures, you guys know that right?

-Kato

[Grogyan]

Without giving too much away, think of Amateria for a moment, in several places there are extruded hexagonal tiles that are part of the scenery.

Textures wont work because what i'll be doing is similar and in 3d.

I admit I didn't play with the fgon too much as I didn't see an immediate effect.
Even in your example Nadnerb, when you look at the faces in edit mode and you need to make out every individual hexagon tile you can't, this is where face merging would be useful, by merging the 6 segments (or 3 segments if made into quads) into a single face, other wise your brain constantly tricks you to seeing the wrong tiles and seeing cubes.