[maya] not boolean, but a mesh cut tool

bugo

Is there any mesh cut tool like Modo does for Maya? Has anyone scripted something like that without having to have the mesh capped like booleans need to?

I mainly need a tool that I can get a mesh or a curve, or anything, and cut through the mesh, I know maya has the curve thing, but it would be great if by one click from polys to polys I can have the cut, instead of having to convert edges to curves, etc.

Sometimes I think I should go to sketchup, do my first pass blcokout and come back to maya later. I just sometimes don't want to learn another application if I can do it in Maya, any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

passerby

interactive cut tool? maybe that is what you want?

bugo

hehe, not that. I was more looking into a projected mesh cut tool. A colleague at work was showing me this in modo, you can get a mesh, get this mesh to be projected into another one by an axis/camera and have it's edges cutted to the mesh projected.

malcolm

In Maya 2012 and above you can project any curve on to a mesh and then use that curve to cut the mesh. Both the curve projection and the cut have history so you can tweak the result in real time after the fact. Very handy, although it would have been nice if the workflow was a bit simpler, I haven't tried making a single button that does both, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

bugo

Exactly, as I said in the first post, I'm trying to see if there's anything easier then that.

malcolm

You can make it one click, but it projects to the front and back face, not that useful. If the surface has no geometry at the back then it works fine.

bugo

right. Also that if you put a curve on the middle of a plane that is not cutted, it wont work. It has to have some divisions crossing the curve so it can cut.

throttlekitty

How complicated does the new topology need to be? Would a shrinkwrap work for this?

bugo

anything crossing the projected curve should work