[MODO] topological symmetry - not working as expected

Tzur_H

I must be doing something wrong, I followed the documentation but still this isn't working properly.
I'm way off 0,0,0 and so I'm trying to get topological symmetry going. It works fine for component selections, but nothing else (tools, transforms)

Tzur_H

[bump] still can't get this to work.  any modo users know what's going on?

Bek

anything weird going on in your tool pipe?

Tzur_H

Bek said:

anything weird going on in your tool pipe?

all I have is action center auto and action axis auto, and then the tool I activate.

funny thing is, I don't get the geometry snapping to 0,0,0 now... but I still don't get real symmetry behavior going on. whenever I activate a tool, the gizmo is snapped to the custom symmetry line I assigned by default.  as you can see in the image with the move tool above, the move tool is snapped to the center, and not to one side of the symmetry selection.
but, if I center the mesh position on all axis, and use the default symmetry (non topological), it does work and I get mirrored behavior like it should be.

does it work for you when working off 0,0,0 using topology symmetry with a selection set to define the symmetry?

Bek

Yeah, it worked fine when I tried last night. I just tried again, and I got the same broken results as you with beveling, but I've figured it out: it is dependent on your items center point. So if you create a cube, offset it, slice it to use topo sym. and try to bevel, it's going to mess up because the item's center is still at world 0,0,0 while the geometry itself isn't.

So you just have to set the item's center to match where the geometry is.

Tzur_H

Bek said:

Yeah, it worked fine when I tried last night. I just tried again, and I got the same broken results as you with beveling, but I've figured it out: it is dependent on your items center point. So if you create a cube, offset it, slice it to use topo sym. and try to bevel, it's going to mess up because the item's center is still at world 0,0,0 while the geometry itself isn't.

So you just have to set the item's center to match where the geometry is.

thanks for this info Bek!
having to set the item center each time I offset the mesh.. that's so broken!  what do you use when you need symmetry?  instances?

Bek

Yep. Perhaps it won't be so bad if you get into the habit of moving the item rather than the polygons, but yeah not ideal. Although, I find mirror instances can be a bit weird at times too (sometimes item centers cause oddness, as well as the bug where mirror instances that get converted to a mesh and then copy/pasted (exported too) have all their faces flipped... i assume that has something to do with the mirror working by scaling to -100% in the mirror axis, perhaps there's a workaround there...)

Generally if I don't really need the mirrored pieces in the scene I just leave them out. This is more when working on a single prop. Everything that needs to be mirrored along the center line can just be added to a selection set, then I've got a script to triangulate+mirror it, and another to offset the mirrored side's UV's by +1.

For something like a level though, ideally you'd want to use instances inside modo and just export those directly to UE4 or whatever. Which seems to work fine, but maybe that makes a .fbx with many sub-objects or something, which might not be ideal. Haven't looked too deeply into that stuff.