Max and maya spline

Cathodeus

Hi,

I come from max (10 years xp) and need to learn maya.

I want to make metalic tube with spline. With max it's really easy to create both sharp angle and smooth angles with filet for exemple.

I don't know how to do sharp angles with a cv curve inside maya.

Any help ?

St.Sabath

Go to Create-->CV/EP Curve OPTIONSBOX,and then set to 1 linear for sharp angles,preferably snap to grid

Mark Dygert

Shoot yourself in the face... it will be less painful.

Cathodeus

@ Mark : Thanks for the advice but i don't own any gun ...

Cathodeus

Ok i was able to do the filet inside maya :-) But now i got another problem maya don't keep the same extrusion size everywhere ... (please take a look at the picture)

Any idea ?

Cathodeus

Nobody got an idea about this problem ?

Brygelsmack

I'd say it's just too tight and too many segments.

rube

the short version is maya extrude tools are pretty lacking. I've gotten better results sometimes by rebuilding the curve to have more points than seem necessary.

BARDLER

You could try to do a paint effects stroke and then convert to polygons which usually gives a better result. Its in the rendering menu set, under paint effects>curve utilities>attach brush to curve. Then to tweak it and turn it into polygons go to modify>convert>paint effects to polygons. You can do some really cool stuff with the modifies on the stroke before or after you convert it.

Cathodeus

I tried the paint effect method but the pipe is twist from start to end of the spline ... Even if the twisting option are set to 0 ... Maya is nightmarish when it come to spline edition.

Mark Dygert

Yep... it is...

I remember some of this stuff coming up a few years ago and MoP took it upon himself to try and straighten out some of the problems by writing a script, it might be helpful, there might be more floating around CreativeCrash.com
http://www.ldaustinart.com/paul/index.php?cat=scripts&type=maya

Personally, I'm just thankful we use max at work.

Cathodeus

I just downloaded the script but where can i find it in maya ? How can i launch it ? i tried to load it into the script editor and launch it but nothing happen ...

Toast

Maya works by loading scripts into memory as a procedure/command. So if you put the mel file into the scripts folder it is automatically loaded and saved by Maya.

Now when you want to "launch" it, you can't launch a script, you execute the procedure inside the script. Usually it's the same name of the script if the author wrote it properly.

ie: mayacantextrude.mel;

Inside the script might be:

global proc mayacantextrude() {

So to lanuch the script you just type: mayacantextrude

Edit: Maya's a rotten program because it has so much potential if it were in the right hands and I don't believe it is. It's like 85% there, all it needs is some good workflow attention and a few clever minds at Autodesk to fix a lot of existing SIMPLE outstanding problems like you are experiencing and it could be a rapid and wonderful tool use. Instead it's like MS with Windows, they don't know where to take it heading into the future and its stuck in some strange limbo land between a PC and a Mobile. Maya's the same, it used to have a clear position now no one is really sure where it's heading, it receives plugins, open source tech integrated into it and crippleware over the last few years under the guise of "New features" and like apart from the qt UI, innovation seems to have COMPLETELY stopped...Where next? Who knows? But I'm not holding my breath. Especially in the modelling department. One of the major new features to Maya 2012, or 2011 can't recall exactly, and this was advertised as a main feature, was a new "Slider HUD" for the already existing extrude thicken tool. That was it for modelling basically. Says it all.

throttlekitty

Most scripts come with an install guide, but the generic version of this has you place .mel files inside:
Users\[username]\Documents\Maya\Maya[version]\Scripts\