Mesh Subset

Make subsets invisible

When this is checked, the new DAG nodes containing the subset mesh become invisible.

Choose Display > Visible to make them visible again.

Selection Mode

Defines how you select triangles on the mesh:

• Normal Angle – Click on an area of the mesh to select a connected range of triangles where the angle between a selected triangle's normal and the normal of the triangle you clicked is less than the set Max Angle to normal. Right-click to deselect. Continue clicking to add to or subtract from the selection.

• Brush – Drag on the mesh with the left mouse button to select triangles within the Pick Radius.

  

• Lasso – Click points on the mesh to define a selection area and then click Select. Select Visible Only to select only the front-facing triangles. Otherwise, both the front and back-facing triangles are selected.

  

1. Pick the mesh object.

2. Shift + click the Mesh Subset tool icon .

3. Select the mesh to subset.

4. Select the triangles to subset using the selection mode set under Selection Options in the Mesh Subset Control window.

   The selected triangles are highlighted in blue.

5. Modify the view to better position the model for additional region selection.

6. Repeat step 4 for additional regions.

7. Optionally, do one or more of the following:

   • Click the Grow Once button (to select one more row of triangles around the regions defined in step 4).

   • Click the Grow All button (to select all the triangles of all the components overlapped by the regions defined in step 4).

   • Click the Invert button to deselect the picked triangles and select the remainder of the mesh instead.

   • Click the Hide button to make the selected region temporarily invisible. The button is renamed Unhide and you can click it to show all regions that were made invisible.

     

8. After all required regions have been defined, do one of the following:

   • Click the Subset button to split off all selected regions and make them one new mesh object.
   • Click the Delete button to split off all selected regions and immediately delete them.

Once the mesh is subset into logical surfaces, each part can be assigned its own shader and material properties.

Note: Once the mesh is partitioned, the operation cannot be undone to fuse the separated triangles. The logical surfaces can be combined to create one surface later on (using the Mesh Merge tool ), but it will still have several components.