Maya Extract behaving oddly

aryarie

Hi all, I apologise in advance if this is a bit of a noobie question but I'm a bit lost right now.

I'm working through a tutorial building a well and I'm part way through making the bricks for the wall of the well. In the tutorial, the guy is selecting the faces of the wall then extracting them (with keep faces together turned off) and then extruding them to get this brick effect:



When I attempt to do the same thing, for some reason the faces still remain part of the cylinder, except for just one face which appears to have separated:



In the video all of the selected faces are separated, and even though I've followed along exactly I can't seem to get the same effect. I've looked at the Extract options and separate extracted faces is turned on so I have no idea why only one face is separated (all were selected before I performed the extract).

Any ideas as to where I've gone wrong?

aryarie

Going to provide a few more screenshots and show the outliner as I still can't get this to work.

These are the faces I've selected prior to the extract (this is the high_poly_well object):



Basically all the way around, nothing on the inside or underneath is selected.

Once I perform the extract, this is what happens:



Even though I have the extract option set to separate, all the faces remain part of the object, except for this one:



Really could use some help if anyone knows how to fix this...

aryarie

OK, I'm still not 100% sure on why this doesn't work correctly when doing the extract but I've been able to achieve what I wanted by setting the Keep Faces Together option in the preferences before doing the extract, rather than setting it during the extract in the little menu that comes up. Maybe this is a bug of some sort?

throttlekitty

aryarie said:

OK, I'm still not 100% sure on why this doesn't work correctly when doing the extract but I've been able to achieve what I wanted by setting the Keep Faces Together option in the preferences before doing the extract, rather than setting it during the extract in the little menu that comes up. Maybe this is a bug of some sort?

Are you sure the tutorial is using Extract and not Extrude? If that first screenshot is from a video tutorial, they're using Extrude.

aryarie

throttlekitty said:

aryarie said:

OK, I'm still not 100% sure on why this doesn't work correctly when doing the extract but I've been able to achieve what I wanted by setting the Keep Faces Together option in the preferences before doing the extract, rather than setting it during the extract in the little menu that comes up. Maybe this is a bug of some sort?

Are you sure the tutorial is using Extract and not Extrude? If that first screenshot is from a video tutorial, they're using Extrude.

They do the extrude after the extract, sorry for the confusion. I showed that part to illustrate that I wanted the faces as separated pieces for the future extrude.

Dumbanana

Just tried in Maya quickly. Switch to face selection, select all faces, then deselect just one (I think this helps Maya to not get confused as suddenly the mesh you are doing this to doesn't exist?).  

Now use Extract.  You should get a pop up that shows 'Keep Faces Together', you'll want to turn that to 'Off' If not you can probably find the option under the Channel Box/ Inputs.

Then select your mesh and go to 'Mesh -> Separate'  You should get a lot of individual faces under a single group.  With the group selected you can switch to Face mode and then select the Faces you want to extrude and extrude away!

I think the key point you might have been missing with regards to your tutorial was using the 'Separate' command.

Another way to approach it would be to select the faces of your base cylinder and then use the Extrude command, being sure to disable the 'Keep Faces Together' option within Extrude.

Hope that helps and makes sense.

throttlekitty

Ok yeah, I'm getting the same thing, also with that one face on its own. While doing the extract, you can bring in the Duplicate option (or find it in the channel box), which in this case creates a copy with just the extracted faces and no strays. If you then need each face to be their own object, you can run a Separate on that.

aryarie

@Dumbanana Thanks for the reply That does make sense, but I thought that the Extract command also did a separate anyway? If you go into the Extract options there is a check box for "Separate extracted faces", which is what I had turned on assuming that this would separate the faces from the original object. Does this work differently from doing Mesh->Separate after extraction?

@throttlekitty Didn't notice the Duplicate option so thanks for pointing that out I'll have to bear that in mind the next time I do something similar to this.