Using the "cut" tool with accuracy. Is it possible?

Shuriken UK

I often find myself needing to use the cut tool when "connect" just doesnt "cut" it (sorry lol), and I need more flexible control over where Im going. However, there seems to be ONE major problem with "cut", and its that you can never really get full accuracy or precision with it. For example, say I had a "diamond" shaped dice, and I wanted to "cut" a line from the vertex at the tip, to the one at the base. It would work, and everything would be cool, until you look closer (or from a different angle) and realise that this "cut" I made is actually pretty crooked, and off to one side.

What I want, is a way to constrain the tool to a range of EXACT angles by holding down shift (like in Photoshop). The simplest example would be: exactly horizontal, diagonal and exactly vertical.

Is it possible to do this?

Thanks in advance!

C86G

You can use snapping with the cut tool AND you can realign with constraints etc.
"exactly horizontal, diagonal and exactly vertical" is what you get.

Sage

use a helper object and snap to that. if I need to cut something specific get a poly object or whatever you can use to snap to and then use cut. it sucks, but that's one way to do it. you can use the slice tool, it sucks but that's one way to do it. xsi and maya have more user friendly ways to do it than max. you can try the insert loop tool from the graphite tools and see if that helps.

to make the cut tool more precise use the snap options in max, sometimes they give you what you need, but they are lacking. I just try to ignore that and just do whatever I have to do.

sprunghunt

I Use quick slice with vertex snap turned on to do this

McGreed

Yeah, I use snap as well for this. I just wish that you could zoom in, click on the first vertex, zoom out/scroll viewport and then click the second vertex, because sometimes you just cant have both on the screen at the same time and visible. It's not a problem in XSI.

Kurt Russell Fan Club

The cut that you make is based on the camera angle. If you're cutting just over a single tri then it will always be exactly straight but if your cut goes over multiple faces then you can control the cut flow by positioning the camera. For the diamond die example if you look at the two faces straight on, with the die in the middle of the viewport, you'll get the straightest cut.