I also just got my upgrade today, and was just out on the beta grid checking out the output.
Just noticing a few aspects so far, doing some basic tests.
Hex is a pretty powerful modeler for the price however if you just plan to use it for sculpties
only then you may want to try to get a great deal on it.
One cool thing right off is that there is a Second Life prims tab easily visible right on the
main interface. The only drawback there is that you Must use those prims for your hex sculpties. Also in the documentation it says that you Cannot use the exporter with imported
meshes which limits the exporters usefullness to sculpts created in Hex.
Naturally I tried to anyway and in few words for now anyway it Is possible but there are a number of tweaks and uv map and sculpt map adjusts I had to do to clean it up.
So far I dont reccomend that method, to the casual user.
Another cool thing is that the sculpt map you export from Hex already has an alpha channel
so you dont have to worry about people grabbing your maps with screenshots.
However if you do any adjusts to the map itself in PS for example you will then have to
put your own on it.
There is a certain number of tools you can use safely with the hex sl prim, then there
are more available if you remap the prim and the directions for doing so are available
on the documentation page, it is a pretty easy process if you follow the directions only
about 3 steps.
One of the tests I do on exporters is to create a simple cube and see how clean it comes
out.
This is a cube made in hex which I just sized vertically to more resemble a cushion it came
out pretty good with just a little bit of roughness on the edges then I took the same map
and applied a gaussian blur of 2.0 and this is the comparison. The blur is one of the easiest
ways to get a smoothed effect as you then do not have to smooth it in the program.
You Can smooth it in there if you remap the prim however unless you do it just right you can fun into problems.
Under the "paint and uv" tab there are a few functions there that effect the geometry
such as inflate, soften and displacement which are pretty cool and are a bit similar to
the sculpt tools in blender but without quite as many options unless I missed something else in the toolset.
You can also import your existing sculptie tga's and do operations on them altho I reccomend that the lower the vertex count the better on the models that those tga's are made from. And you also need to apply a uv map in Hex or it to work. It also seems to shrink the overall size a bit.
Using Hex is definitely easier than blender or maya and it is great to have a built in exporter there are also quite a lot of tools that can be using including painting on your model to create a separate texture for the model.
This is my no means a comprehensive review in any way just a cursory look from my view
with a few pointers.
On the whole the SL export function works very well and is very easy. You will need to
learn the basics of getting around the program and finding out which tools you can use safely without borking your prim. But that is covered in the documentation.
