Gah, my kindom for something resembling Max's hard edge system in Maya. This normal tweaking malarkey is really annoying.
Anyway, at the moment its refusing to make any edges hard on my polygon based character. No idea why this would be. Its evidently got something to do with the way my model is built because If I just make a basic primitive, I can make hard edges no problem. No one else here seems to know whats going on. Any clues would be greatly appreciated
Replies
However there is an easy fix (I actually had to tell this one to some Maya users at work!).
Select all the vertices of your model, and look in the Edit Polygons drop-down menu, then in the Normals sub-menu, I think it is. Then go to "Set Vertex Normal".
A new window should pop up. In it there should be a checkbox saying "Unlock Normals" - tick this box and click OK/Apply or whatever the button is. You should see your model's gouraud shading change a fair bit. Now you should be able to set proper soft/hard edges once again.
Hope that helps.
MoP
Particularly the UVW laying out utility. If anyones knows of a good tutorial, I'd be grateful
"There seems to be much about Maya thats infuriating and silly. "
Im chuckling at that comment after just having just read the normal map thread on this page aboout Max's Xform. Ah xform, now If that thing wasn't quirky I dunno what is! Theres things that are silly and infuriating about most 3D apps ( with the possible exception of XSI ) unfortunately, we just gotta make the best of what tools our employers throw at us. Luckily Maya does everything I need it to do pretty well and fast.
Anyway, if you're all feeling helpful, I'm having trouble getting my head around the UV Laying out tool. I'm slowly getting used to it, but any hot tips as to the best ways to work with it (if thats not too vague for you) would be handy.
What I usually do for arms and legs (or organic cylindrical vagueness), is select all the polygons in the limb, apply Planar Mapping (doesn't matter what direction).
Then select the row of edges you want to be the UV seam, and in the UV layout window, go to Cut UV's. Then select all the uv's you just mapped and cut, and go to "Map Edge Border" (i think it's called) - it'll look like a mess UNTIL you hit Relax UV's a few times. Then it should be all uniform, well laid out, with the seam where you placed it with the edge cut. Then just rotate and move the shell (element) to taste.
Whargoul had a really good set of tips for UV-mapping in Maya on the old forums, I don't know if you could get one of the administrators to find it?
Sorry I'm so vague, I don't have maya here, this is from memory... but Map Edge Border (for fairly regular shapes, like cylinders or boxes) is really handy, provided you've set up sensible edge cuts in the UV's beforehand. then just relax uv's and you're sorted. it's pretty damn fast!
MoP
One thing thats irking me at the moment is uv editor right-click hotbox menu. It seems to be very difficult to actually select anything in the menu seeing as when I try to move the mouse over it it disappears. It usually takes me 4-5 tries waving the mouse back and forth before I actually get it to stay there. Surely theres some way to avoid this?
You can get round this by right-clicking nearer the top of the screen - it seems to create the menus "properly" when they go downwards. If you right click too close to the bottom of the screen to fit the whole menu on, it will create it upwards and cause the problem you're experiencing, i think.
Are you using Relax UV's as well as Map UV border? You should just have to Cut an edge row to place a seam on the UV segment, then Map UV border, then Relax the whole lot a couple of times and it should be pretty much perfect. Unless the leg is a really weird shape, I guess.
Make sure the segment you're trying to map isn't attached (via shared UV verts/edges) to any other part of the mesh.
MoP
I've tried all of the suggestions above
unlock
and it doesn't harden.
what is your angle set to?