High Poly modeling workflow - Maya

Phobos

Hey guys. I've been wondering about a few ways to speed up my high poly workflow in Maya. What sort of plug-ins do you use? What customs shelves have you made that might be useful? I've looked at Byron Poly Tools but I beleive you have to purchase a copy, which I can't do at the moment. Is it possible to acheive a solid chamfer in maya without a 3rd party plug in?

malcolm

I built all my high poly seamless models with smooth proxy and no plugins. You need maya7 though if you don't want to use all that 3rd party junk like byron and cps tools. What is your definition of a solid chamfer?

thomasp

check out open maya toolbox (OMT). that seems like the only worthwhile modelling script package out there these days.

forget byron's. it's a plugin that's not really kept up to date anymore. and with maya, your plugin has to be compiled to a specific release to work at all.
also, i've never encountered many crashes with maya - until i sat down on a box that had byron's tools installed. the crash-per-minute ratio skyrocketed - hilarious.

solid chamfer is a max bevel operation that keeps your original edges in place.

Phobos

I'll give OMT a try. I'm also going to sit down and work with smooth proxy and see what I can create.

Do you use any custom shelve buttons or scripts you've created to speed things up at all?

Thanks for the help guys

thomasp

shelf-buttons, yes - i do have shortcuts to certain viewport-layouts and a few other menu popus, command triggers, switches etc.
i found marking menu's much better to put commonly used modelling/etc functionality in. unfortunately, at least in all the maya versons i have access to, it' not context sensitive by default. there's a script on highend3d though that makes that possible, it then becomes similar to using the quad-menu in max.