Maya - pushing Normals

Sinking

Sorry - I know there are tons of threads about it and I believe I have read most of them, however none truly worked for me.

From what I understand there are two ways to "push" normals in Maya, e.g. if I am making a Cage model for baking in XNormal.

1. use the sculpt function, select all vertices and "flood" with a set value.

-> this often leads to an inflated mesh and isn't helping with my hard-surface baking.

2. Use the scale widget and select normals. Chose your vertexes, then push outwards.

-> The problem is that I can only seem to push them along one of the axis at a time. I tried grabbing the center of the widget, but (different from e.g. the extrude function) I get no "center cube" to scale the normals evenly.

I come from XSI which had a very nice "push" modifier. It was supersimple to use and took about 5 seconds. In Maya I am fumbling around and the cages still aren't always how I want them. Since I use LT I can also not use scripts, in case anyone made something like a "push" modifier. I need to find a native solution.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

tharle

you want the transform component tool - that moved faces along their normal. also you can add a randomness to it so it's useful for creating variation.

passerby

ya transform components tool, and use it on a vertex selection

antweiler

Some Mayaversions ago they changed Move axis Normal to Normals average in the marking menu, but the option is still there, just look in the settings of the move tool. It only works on verts, but it supports softselection (other than transform components)

Bartalon

Transform Component comes in useful when making cages as well. It's about the same as Max's Push modifier if you use it on an entire element.

Sinking

I will check this out on the next bake. It's just that I found so many solutions I wasn't able to separate the good from the bad workflows. So I think it is okay to make a Polycount thread, at least that gives accurate and detailed descriptions everytime.

And who knows, maybe someone else can use these pieces of advice. Thanks a lot guys!

>>EDIT: Tried it and love it! Future cage-making will be a lot easier! It's also much more accurate than the push from the sculpt tool. Thanks god that issue is solved!<<