Help with Maya - making skewed gear rail.. thingy
polycounter lvl 11
Hello,
I suppose there is something along these lines inside "how you model them shapes" thread, but so far the search didnt come up with anything useful.. now onto the problem.
As you see i've managed to make slanted edge loops in the mesh, the problem is they were made manually, no problem if the number of loops is <5-10 but if you have 20+... gets time consuming.
I know i can make only one and then duplicate it but then i cant adjust the size/number of teeth needed on the gear rail, and that turns it into edge noodling and time gets wasted results are .. meh-ish and i think there must be a simpler solution to this, hope someone more experienced can help me with it.
The image below better illustrates what im trying to make. It's skewed gear rail part, (only slanted teeth on the rail):
And i swear there was a way to do this in maya 2012 by adding an edge loop and then selecting the "add edge loop modifier" and rotating it by x degrees so that it makes rail with slanted edge loops that i can extrude teeth, from, however i cant find the same thing in maya 2016??
Any help is greatly appreciated.
I suppose there is something along these lines inside "how you model them shapes" thread, but so far the search didnt come up with anything useful.. now onto the problem.
As you see i've managed to make slanted edge loops in the mesh, the problem is they were made manually, no problem if the number of loops is <5-10 but if you have 20+... gets time consuming.
I know i can make only one and then duplicate it but then i cant adjust the size/number of teeth needed on the gear rail, and that turns it into edge noodling and time gets wasted results are .. meh-ish and i think there must be a simpler solution to this, hope someone more experienced can help me with it.
The image below better illustrates what im trying to make. It's skewed gear rail part, (only slanted teeth on the rail):
And i swear there was a way to do this in maya 2012 by adding an edge loop and then selecting the "add edge loop modifier" and rotating it by x degrees so that it makes rail with slanted edge loops that i can extrude teeth, from, however i cant find the same thing in maya 2016??
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Replies
Start with your long cube set at whatever divisions you need, and hit up the "Shear" part of the transform node in the attribute editor.
Or just take one whole side of the cube and drag it down. You can use snapping if you need the bottom of the right side to be flush with the top of the left.
If you need more, detach and duplicate one section.
Build end caps, easy peasy.
Cube w/divisions, select all the faces you're going to extrude. Uncheck "keep together", pull them out, then scale inwards with the extrude manipulator.
And that gave me an idea, maybe there's a solution in using skew modifier or some other deformer combined with standard (non slanted
Gonna go and run some tests now
Below is a best approach i managed to come up with, keeping it relatively non-destructive while being able to zoom out and see if the gear teeth match the ones in image (eyeballing approach) .
I can think of another one right of the bat and maybe even more ways to do it that doesn't cost more/less depending on amount of teeth. But what is the end goal here? Do you need to be able to change amount of teeth on the fly and having the mesh update? Is it always in a rectangular straight layout like in your later screenshot?
The end goal is to figure out the workflow for use in the situations when i dont have exact measures and/or ortho images to use as guidelines.
In this situation i have photo reference ( not the one uploaded earlier ) which is unclear on how the profile of the gears looks so i have to eyeball the general look and feel of the part.
Yeah changing the number of teeth on the fly would be very useful, current approach can expand on the number of teeth but for instance increasing number of teeth between two fixed points is tedious ( hence the mention of somehow using "add divisions" in the process )
In this case its straight rectangular layout and come to think of it that would probably be enough since with some simple equations i would be able to make circular gear (wheel) figure out the circumference and the number of teeth, make straight rail with the length of circumference > add required number of teeth > merge or group > and then use bend deformer cranked up to make it circular.
And by all means, please share any approach you may think of, this started as a particular question but ill take any chance i can get to expand my knowledge