Maya - quick UV problem

FAT_CAP

So, I'm making the change from 3DS Max to Maya and have been brushing up on my ancient Maya knowledge in my downtime.

One thing I rely heavily on whilst UVing in Max is to select a bunch of faces, detach them, modify them by using relax, move, scale etc and then stitch everything together again at the end.

However, I can't figure out how to do this in Maya - selecting the verts of the UV and going to <CUT UV EDGES> splits every edge within the selection - the only way to have a similar workflow is to select the edges which border the selection and cut these but selecting teh faces and detaching/ cutting them is a much faster, more efficient way of going about it - is there a way?

Erafic

Well you could select all the faces, cut their uv-connection and then weld all the edges on the inside of the selection. I know you can select what's called shell border, but that's again essentially when the uv-piece has already been cut off from the other part.

MM

ctrl+click to convert selection to UVs, then to selection boundary and then to edges->contained edges.

or you can make a mel shortcut:

ConvertSelectionToUVs;
SelectPolygonSelectionBoundary;
ConvertSelectionToContainedEdges;

o2_is_alright

I usually do the flip trick. If you flip the selection twice it will detach from the shell and you can convert them to UVs and move them and do whatever you want. It's pretty quick and easy I think.

Deadly Nightshade

My UV editor has a "Tear off faces" -tool, along with lots of other features.

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/texturing/c/nightshade-uv-editor

You select your faces, click a button and those faces are "torn off" and converted to a UV shell selection.
Then hit the unfold button, select the shell borders and sew it together again.

FAT_CAP

Thanks for the responses guys

I ran through them all the suggestions this morning at work, testing their functionality on a few objects and characters. I ended up using a combination of your tips, and wrote up a little MEL script which I bound to the "D" key so that the detach function of 3DSMax's UV editor is replicated completely.

The code is below - just open the Hotkey Editor, paste this into the MEL code window and assign it to your hotkey of choice...

ConvertSelectionToContainedFaces;
polyFlipUV -flipType 0 -local on ;
polyFlipUV -flipType 0 -local on ;
ConvertSelectionToUVs;