Adds highlighted faces to the buffer.
Removes highlighted faces from the buffer.
Clears highlighted faces or the buffer.
Subdivides an edge of the surface. A new vertex is inserted at the edge midpoint. Each triangle adjacent to the edge is bisected into two triangles.
The following selection tools are available from a pulldown menu in the surface editor toolbar. Press and hold the button down for at least 1 second to display the menu. The most recently selected tool button will be displayed in the surface editor toolbar.
- Pick tool [I]:
A single triangle can be highlighted using a simple mouse click and unhighlighted using a Control-click. If the Shift key is held down, a group of neighboring triangles will be highlighted. If the Shift and Control keys are held down, a group of neighboring triangles will be unhighlighted.
- Magic wand [M]:
Allows you to to select a connected group of triangles. Unless the Shift key is held down, the highlight buffer will be cleared before new triangles are highlighted. Control-click causes all selected triangles to be unhighlighted. The behavior of the magic wand tool can be modified using the dialog Magic wand settings... which can be activated from the Surface/Edit menu. This dialog lets you define what triangles are considered to be a connected group. In particular, a crease angle smaller than 180 degrees can be chosen. In this case, only triangles with roughly the same direction as the clicked triangle, will be highlighted. Regardless of these settings, a connected group of highlighted triangles will always be unhighlighted if a highlighted triangle is Control-clicked.
- Draw tool [D]:
This tool allows you to highlight triangles by drawing a contour in the viewer window. Usually the left mouse button must be held down while the contour is drawn. However, you may hold down the Alt key and release the left mouse button. In this case straight line segments can be defined. Currently the tool selects all triangles inside the contour, i.e., hidden triangles are highlighted too. However, with the magic wand tool backward facing parts of the surface can be easily deselected again using a Control-click.
- Brush tool [B]:
This tool allows you to highlight triangles using your mouse like a paintbrush. Press the left mouse button and select the desired triangles. Hold down the Control key to deselect triangles. Right-click to bring up a brush configuration dialog which will allow you to specify the brush size and whether you want to select visible triangles only.
- Pick patches or triangle groups tool:
This tool allows you to select patches or triangle groups. Clicking on a triangle, will select all triangles in the same patch. Control-click to deselect the triangles.
Flips an edge of the surface. Only edges with two adjacent triangles can be flipped, but no boundary edges. Flipping the edge once again restores the original state.
Contracts an edge, i.e., moves one vertex of an edge onto the other. For non-boundary edges the operation will reduce the number of triangles by two. The vertex of the edge located more closely to the mouse position will be retained.
Allows you to pick a vertex of the surface and to translate it. At the picked vertex a point dragger will be shown. The dragger can then be picked and translated. Alternatively another point on the surface can be shift-clicked while the point dragger is shown. This moves the dragger to the new position.