Hull Helper Overview

Hull Helper is a simple UI to speed up making hulls from complex models. It is mainly a tool to help prepare a model to be sent to the Maple 3D Convex Wrapper. If you don't have Convexity 1.17+ (not released at time of posting this page) you may find limited use for this tool as the Maple 3D Convex Wrapper is a bundled tool in Convexity 1.17+. If you do have the Convex Hull Wrapper, you may find that this Hull Helper speeds up the task of hulling by a few clicks and mouse movements.

Hull Helper does not make hulls! Instead, helps you prepare your model for the Convex Hull Wrapper!

Using Hull Helper

1. Select the mesh/meshes you want to turn into a hull.
2. Click the Prepare From Selection button. At this point, the tool makes a copy of your selection and hides the original objects, then combines your selection into a single Editable Poly; that poly is called Hull 00#; the new object is selected and put into Polygon sub-object mode.
3. Select contiguous faces that represent areas of the model that should be converted into a single convex part of your hull. For example, if your mesh is of a human, you could select each face of the head.
4. Click the Detach button in the UI. This detach is similar to the Detach in an Editable Poly (in fact it calls that function). But it does this specifically: the selected faces are detached into an Element sub-object and immediately hidden.
5. Continue the process of detaching each element until all pieces are done. Returning to the example of the human, you would make a hull for the chest, one for the torso, on for each upper leg, lower leg, etc.
6. When finished, unhide all the faces of your model.
7. Click the Advanced Hulling button to open the Maple 3D Convex Hull Wrapper. Choose the appropriate options for your model and create the hulls.
8. After you use the Convex Hull Wrapper to create hulls and are happy with the results... you can delete the mesh that Hull Helper created.
9. Select all the hulls that the Convex Hull Wrapper generated.
10. In WWMT, click the Add CM Sel button to assign the hulls to your model.

• If you have broken your mesh into Elements that are not correct, you can unhide the faces and merge elements by going into Vertex sub-object mode, selected the boundary vertices of those elements and clicking Weld in the modifier panel.