Maya hard edges not working...

Steve Schulze

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

MoP

Yeah, this sometimes happens in Maya, it's infuriating and silly.
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

Vailias

does the edit polygons->normals->soften/harden not work?

Daz

If unlock vertex normals doesn't work as MoP suggested, send me the model and I'll take a look.

Steve Schulze

Yeah that seems to have worked, thanks MoP. There seems to be much about Maya thats infuriating and silly.

Particularly the UVW laying out utility. If anyones knows of a good tutorial, I'd be grateful

Daz

Theres got to be something in your workflow that screws up normals thats for sure. Interestingly, I used to have the same problem when I started using Maya, but now I dont. But eventually I changed my workflow thinking from a Max one to a Maya one.

"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.

Steve Schulze

Bah, this program is giving me the irrits. I need someone to sit here with me and explain how everything works. Then explain it again when I do it wrong.

Daz

Well, give us some specifics and I'll try to help as best I can. As with learning any new piece of software, it's probably alot easier than you think, to do the thing you think you cant do very easily. Er, if that made sense....

Jeff Parrott

Try Edit Polygons>Normals>Set To Face. Then Edit Polygons>Normals>Soften/Harden and select the faces you want to be soft, type in 180 and hit apply. Then select the edges you want to be hard and type in 0 and hit apply. If you ever have any questions feel free to AIM me. I'd be more than happy to troubleshoot anything.

Steve Schulze

Thanks Jeffro, but I actually ran into some weird Maya bug. See Mops response.

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.

MoP

Learn that it is not like Max's tools!
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

Steve Schulze

Hm. Is Map UV Border the tool I'm supposed to use? I've tried that a few times and it seems to be giving me a lot of distortion. Admitedly the leg I'm working on is a bit curvy so perhaps I should break it up a bit more. I'll continue experimenting. That'll be a great tip once I work out how to use it properly. Thanks

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?

MoP

Ha, yeah, that's annoying - it likes to create the sub-menus about 10 pixels away from the main menu, so when you move the mouse from the initial menu to a sub-menu, you move over the viewport and the menus disappear...

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

Jeff Parrott

Well, I end up using cylindrical, and auto mapping about 95% of the time. MoP's method is really great. I just don't trust that crazy relax UVs tool. Just get used to lining up the interactive manipulator to move the projection into place.

Steve Schulze

Yeah, got it going now. I was just trying to get it to work around a shape that wasn't quite cylindrical enough. Works fine when I break it up more and then do a little tweaking afterwards. Thanks Mop.

malcolm

Just in case no one mentioned this if you are importing your model into Maya from Max you will get locked vertex normals and you don't actually have to select the vertices you can just select the whole model to unlock them. Also if you import from Max you will get an unwanted extra uv set that you will have to deal with, which is not that intuitive to get rid off. I made a button on the shelf for planer map with the camera option set so I just select the faces I want to map and middle mouse click a viewport to highlight it and then click my planer map button, I also use the cylindrical mapping for all the character stuff and then relax the uv's. Maya has got a wicked set of uv tools like move and sew, why don't you read the Maya help file as it describes what each one does and then experiment on some geometry, the tools should be the same as Max except for I don't think they have that soft selection junk where there is a fall of for moving uv's around.

democrazy

I have this problem can some one help me with?
I've tried all of the suggestions above
unlock
and it doesn't harden.

democrazy

Can you by anychance help me?

claydough

democrazy wrote: »

Can you by anychance help me?

what is your angle set to?