Maya - Cut a mesh while snapping to a curve
polycounter lvl 13
Hi Guys,
I am learning Maya while trying to recover some modelling skills after a few years of just coding. As a 3ds Max user I am looking for similar tools or workflows I was used to, but sometimes I miss the fundamentals and I cannot find any way fast enough to achieve what I want.
This time I am looking for a way to cut a mesh surface while snapping to a curve. In 3ds Max you can create a shape over the mesh, activate the vertex snap, use the cut tools to cut the mesh by snapping to the shape's vertices. It is fundamental when cutting round holes.
Grant Warwick shows clearly what I mean in his famous and incredibly well done video in Section 4 at about 29:50. Hard Surface Essentials
Is there any way to do the same in a recent version of Maya? The only way I found is to make a rough cut, then snap in X and Y every single vertex afterward, which is very far from ideal.
Any help is appreciated. Thank you very much
I am learning Maya while trying to recover some modelling skills after a few years of just coding. As a 3ds Max user I am looking for similar tools or workflows I was used to, but sometimes I miss the fundamentals and I cannot find any way fast enough to achieve what I want.
This time I am looking for a way to cut a mesh surface while snapping to a curve. In 3ds Max you can create a shape over the mesh, activate the vertex snap, use the cut tools to cut the mesh by snapping to the shape's vertices. It is fundamental when cutting round holes.
Grant Warwick shows clearly what I mean in his famous and incredibly well done video in Section 4 at about 29:50. Hard Surface Essentials
Is there any way to do the same in a recent version of Maya? The only way I found is to make a rough cut, then snap in X and Y every single vertex afterward, which is very far from ideal.
Any help is appreciated. Thank you very much
Replies
[ame]
it does the job, but it is not a lot better than snapping every vertex, because it must project a curve on an entire mesh, and it cannot work on sub-selections, let's say just a few edges or faces of a bigger object.
Furthermore it adds vertices only where there is already an edge, which means that if the original edges didn't line up with the final result, they need to be snapped anyway. This is true in Max too, but since with the cut tool one can insert vertices in faces, like the multi-cut tool in Maya, it doesn't need support edges perfectly laid out before the cut.
This is a valid solution anyway, any other? Possibly not involving booleans.
Thank you
*** EDIT ***
@Saf: I have just realized I specified the wrong time in the video, and your answer was spot on, please look at the updated time, about 29:50
Cheers
Maybe this script will help?
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/polygon-edges-to-curve
No worries, you've been helpful!
I am not looking to achieve a specific result, rather rebuild a workflow. The script looks nice, but I am also trying to appraise the modeling tools of Maya, I would like to avoid writing a plugin that does something that is already achievable with the standard toolset, but I simply didn't know!
Cheers
Using the old SplitPolygonTool (not the new one from the MTK, it won't let you do snapping), you can turn off "snap to edge" to allow points free on faces, but the start and end points must end up on an edge. From here, you can hold v to snap to vertices- even if they don't belong to the current mesh. You will need to clear history and delete or whatever the guide cylinder, such is life.
Curve projections are usually easier, but this doesn't penetrate the mesh and you can decide which verts to keep with no post tweaks or cleanup.
quick edit: it's tool options for the split tool, or ctrl-shift-rmb for the marking menu for it. You may need to download one, not all versions of maya included the file for it.
thanks for the reply. I have given a go to the old PolySplitTool, as you suggested. It is fiddly and difficult to manage, often it doesn't want to snap to the curve or doesn't like to close the cut, but it is the closest tool to what I am looking for. I'll keep using it for a bit, if it is not going to improve with practice, I might be end up writing my own cut tool, unless ADSK makes the new cut tool work with the snap system.
Cheers
For the specific issue you mentioned in your first post, give nightshade's script a shot :
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/nightshade-connect
thanks for the link to the tool. The reason why I am not considering external plugins at the minute is because I am learning Maya as is. I am going to work with it as a technical artist and I will be writing many tools for it myself. But before jumping on the code, I need to know exactly what Maya already does, and if there are specific practices and workflows that need to be respected to make the tool usage familiar to the artists. Since the Maya Help is quite fragmented and it is not simple to go through it from cover to cover, I am modelling some simple shapes while trying to find features on the go. According to my impression, latest versions have improved a lot, in particular after buying NEX (now the Modeling Toolkit), but there are still a lot of annoying little glitches, like the missing of the snap in the Multi-Cut tool or the lack of 2.5D snaps, that need to be performed individually on two axis rather than in one single step.
Cheers
most free stuff on CreativeCrash are not plugins but scripts, which means they use the built in functionality of Maya. They mostly offer a better UI than Maya, for specific tasks, and put like 10 (or 1000) commands into a single one.
You will learn a lot by using them, when they are written in MEL you can easily look into the code, specially when they are small and easy.
Learning a bit of MEL, and using scripts from other peoples, will make you very productive.