Maya's Extrude tool inconsistent on mesh from Quad Draw

Malodomini

This seems to happen whenever I extrude faces on a mesh created with quad draw. Some vertices get pushed way further than others. I have tried deleting user prefs, reinstalling Maya, unlocking normals, setting normals to face, deleting history. Nothing seems to prevent this, and it happens on every mesh created with quad draw. Any ideas on how to solve this?

Joopson

If I get weird behavior in Maya, I always delete history and freeze transformations. If it still fails, I export the mesh as an OBJ, and reimport it (though that's a rare occurrence).

jRocket

I have noticed that happening with the extrude tool sometimes, although I'm not sure if it has to do with the Quad Draw tool. What you are seeing probably shouldn't happen, so I'd try reporting it as a bug and hope they fix it-  http://download.autodesk.com/us/support/report_a_bug.html?SelProduct=Maya

throttlekitty

Definitely a bug, though I have yet to find a fix or a solid workaround, I've had limited luck with undo/nudge a vertex slightly/retry extrude.

onionhead_o

Joopson said:

If I get weird behavior in Maya, I always delete history and freeze transformations. If it still fails, I export the mesh as an OBJ, and reimport it (though that's a rare occurrence).

you must be very lucky then I run into this issue frequently. Maya face extrude seems to hate geo thats doesnt have uniform faces or organic surfaces. the local translate usually will be ok, but thickness is the buggy one.

Malodomini

Thanks for your input everyone. I did find a bit of a workaround which is not ideal, but it seems to do the trick:
Do an extrude with all settings at 0, select vertices of extruded faces, then translate the selected vertices along the normal vector using the move tool set to normal. Now this is just a solution for the thickness modifier, but that seems to be the one that is buggy.

I will definitely submit a bug report for this one. It does seem to be related to just the thickness modifier. Deleting history and freezing transformations are always the first things I try in situations like this, but that never changes anything. Exporting as an obj and reimporting doesn't solve the problem either. I've never had this problem with anything created through box modeling or from converting nurbs to polygons, no matter how organic or uneven their surfaces, so it seems like it must be somehow influenced by quad draw, where it happens every time. This happens in Maya 2017, 2018, and 2019. I haven't tried 2020 yet, as I usually wait a year to switch to a new release.

throttlekitty

Had this happen again last night actually It was a simple strip lofted from two curves. I don't think quad draw is the culprit, I used to think it was related to the winding of the geometry, like how edge extrusions used to behave way back when.

Malodomini

throttlekitty said:

Had this happen again last night actually It was a simple strip lofted from two curves. I don't think quad draw is the culprit, I used to think it was related to the winding of the geometry, like how edge extrusions used to behave way back when.

You're right. I did a test earlier today by smoothing a cube and moving some vertices around slightly, then doing an extrude on all faces - and sure enough it happened again. Mind you it never seems to happen when working with relatively hard-surface geometry.