Maya to Max
polycounter lvl 11
Learning max this week for a job and it feels like I am in a modeling program from 1999. Bitchiness aside, I can find very many helpful tutorials out there, so can anyone answer any of these questions?
Would be much appreciated!
Would be much appreciated!
Replies
1. Dunno if there's a way to make open edges show in bold. Never looked myself though so it might be possible. Use "Border" select mode (3rd icon along in Editable Poly, or hotkey is "3") - that will only select open edges.
2. Depends what you mean by "stitch this up" ... I'd probably use "Cap", just select the border (as described above) and hit the Cap button in the EPoly rollout on the right.
Bridge should work for that though, just select the 2 edges on each side and hit Bridge.
3. Edge extruding is dead easy, with the move/rotate/scale tool active just hold down SHIFT and drag to pull out a new edge or set of edges from your current selection. If you want to do this along the edges' local axis, set the coordinate drop-down (top centre of the main toolbar) to Local (it defaults to "view" I think).
You'll find that drop-down very handy, it can cover a much wider range of pivot point selections and possibilities than Maya can manage.
4. Depends what you're trying to snap to grid. Maya's snapping is generally better than Max's, but you should still be able to do it fairly easily - the main difference is that if you want to snap a vert/edge exactly to the grid, you have to have that option checked in the Snap settings too, then click and drag FROM the starting point (when it highlights the vert/edge with the cyan gizmo thing), and it should snap correctly.
You might wanna check out Digital Raster's "Switcher" plugin for Max, it's not hugely expensive, and gives you Maya-style viewport controls and Maya-style snapping, which may help you somewhat.
Oh, and what is it with Maya users always wanting to see backfaces on everything? Surely that's just confusing ... from what I've seen most Max users work with backface culling on, and Maya users work with backface culling off, never worked out why.
Yeah I don't quite get why you guys want backfacing off... just dont get it at all....
Give max a little time and you'll start to like it more. Frankly, I only use a couple tools when I model. I shift drag edges to extrude edges. I target weld vertices. I collapse vertices. I cut polygons. I chamfer edges. And I cap borders. oh yea, and extrude. Thats pretty much all I use for any given model. Setting up a couple hot keys for yourself is usually smart for most efficiency.
Switching programs always awkward regardless of whether its to a better prog or a worse one. You'll get the hang of it though.
I don't understand what you want to snap to? Whatever it is you'll need to turn them both on. For example Do you want to snap a vert to the grid? You'll need both Vert and Grid turned on. Sometimes you might want to turn on pivot also depending on what you have selected and where you're trying to move it to (see I can be vague also
I found it handy to turn on the Snaps floating menu and dock it at the top just under the menu bar.
I never really understood why Maya users are so hot on seeing the back faces on a model. What mystical purpose does it have?
Right now I am just trying to translate how I modeled in other packages in Max and so far so good, with some minor problems.
I'm finding the same problems with Max as I did with Maya when I went over to that is that for the one thing I want it to do it feels like its 2-3 steps too much when it could just be one button. For example, I want to cut an edge loop, why do I need to select ever edge? one edge, press a button, bam loop! is what I am used to.
Anyway, I have to learn it or I quit the game, so have a few more minor questions...
1. Unselect object color - where can I change this, the color menu is kind of broad.
edit:
2. Also if anyone can explain to me how the RoadKill UV tool is supposed to work in max that would be great. In maya I'd just select my edged press a button then go into the uv editor to arrange, but I get the pop up in max when I drag the script in, press a button and nothing happens.
3. Wait a second here! So Shift and drag will extrude an edge, but not a poly? Instead it clones part of the mesh where is the logic in this?!
3. Shift in Max is "copy" - ideally it'd do Extrude on faces too, but it doesn't, it just copies them. I'd recommend assigning a hotkey to Extrude, or putting it in your right-click menu.
2. Don't bother with Roadkill. What version of Max are you using? The UV tools have been great since Max 8 and up ... the Relax function (set to Face mode, 1.0 strength, 100 iterations) is considerably nicer than Maya's Unfold or Relax.
1. Depends what you mean by this. Whenever you create an object, it assigns a random wireframe colour by default, so all your objects will look different. You can turn this off by clicking on the colour swatch next to the renaming box and un-checking the "assign random colors" box. Then it'll just make all objects one colour.
Then what I do is just set it to show selected wireframes in black/white.
If you're looking in the Customize Colors menu, try checking out the "Geometry" or "Object" fields. Can't remember offhand, I don't have Max open at the moment.
Also for your "cut edge loop" thing, there's probably a script (check out www.scriptspot.com ) which will do a 1-click edge loop add, or it'd be easy to write one yourself - just turn on the Maxscript Macro Recorder and copy/paste the output of doing a "select edge ring" then "connect" into a new Macroscript (check out the Maxscript Help for how to do this if you don't know). Then you can assign that to a hotkey or button or whatever.
Personally I just have a keyboard shortcut for Connect ( "c" ) and a keyboard shortcut for Select Edge Ring ( "r" ) so I just select one edge, then hit "R" "C" ... takes no time at all. But like I said, if you really want it to be one hotkey/button/right-click menu item, it'd be really easy to script.
Yeah I tried the Polyboost demo once, and it's probably more of the fact that I just dont know how to use it, but a lot of it kind of felt gimmicky. There's some really good tools though for character art that would be nice, but not worth the $$$ for me yet.
Thanks again, I'm on my way with this thing and feels a little smoother then a couple days ago.
Edit: Hey one other quick question; when translating points I can only seem to get one or two axises is there anyway for a free transform(same with objects too now that I think of it)
Thanks!
Try turning the reference co-ordinate system from view to screen (in the bar at the top, roughly middle, a text drop down menu). If that is what you want you can also go to customize > preferences > gizmos tab > center box handle move in scree space. Hopefully thats what you were looking for
anyway things that may help you the other way,
being able to rotate axis- one of mayas big faults is not having enough control over you obj, and sub obj axis rotation. if you use "insert" key in maya alot which i do then the nearest max has is the axis control pulldown in the bar, the screen setting is usefull for replicaing alot of mayas insert majic, but you need to postion the view to do it (make sense?)
be carefull with maxes edge extrude tool it can leave dodgy geometry (quick merge, i mean weld will do the trick most of the time)
I have an object, or a line of verts, I need to snap that line to a grid line, but it just wont, it snaps the cursor to the grid but the line of verts or object is always off.
This is so sad, but does anyone have a tutorial, is there special hotkeys I am not hitting, like how hard is it to get some shit to snap to a line?
/end rant.
In the "Snaps" tab, turn on Vertex and Grid Points, leave everything else un-checked.
In the "Options" tab, make sure Use Axis Constraints is turned off. Otherwise it will limit movement to only one or two axes.
Turn on 3D snap (the magnet icon with 3 next to it).
With your verts selected (or edges, faces, doesn't matter), move your mouse over the vert you want to snap to a grid point, until you see the cyan "crosshair" over the vert (you can control the "power" of the snap detection in the settings, see the Snap Preview Radius setting). Then just click and drag it to any grid point.
It should snap the vert that was highlighted to the grid point that was highlighted. All the rest of your selection will follow relative to that.
May sound like a lot of steps but it remembers your settings and generally I find I only ever snap to verts or grid, so just assign a hotkey to toggle snapping on or off, and then you don't need to do anything other than turn on snapping, do your snap, and turn it off again.
The biggest thing I am finding is kind of the unfriendly ways of it all compared to what I am used to. like you need to literally click the one of the verts to get it to snap to the line, where as if I have an entre row of them selected I think I should be able to click anywhere.
Also the grid in max is a bit odd as I see hides lines the farther away I am, which I find a bit annoying because it means I have to soom way in to get it where I want it, or else to snaps far off in the distance.
Like for instance, I have it set to .1m for every line with lines every 10, but to get it to snap to the .1 I need to be in there close or else I am snapping every 10....
which probably means I should use something bigger, but I dunno, doesn't seem like it should be this difficult, click something, snap to it, pretty basic, but I just cant get the hang of it as it'll do something different if I click 2 pixels away from a vert rather then right on it or soemthing.
Going to try to use this thing for the dom war, should make it 2x more interesting, lol.
Your viewport should now have a yellow slider running down the far right-hand-side ... drag the top/bottom sliders to increase or decrease the near and far clipping ranges. If stuff is clipping out close to the viewport then you must be modelling REALLY small...
As for the snapping thing with a row of verts, if you think about it, it kinda makes sense, because you can snap ANY of those verts to a grid point and the rest will follow relative - so snapping the first vert to grid might have a different result to snapping a vert in the middle of your row to the grid, if the verts aren't spaced evenly anyway. I agree that it can get a bit fiddly though.
I don't use snaps much, I tend to type stuff in manually if I need an exact value (in the Transform Type-In window, hit F12 to open that). That's one thing I value over Maya's transforming methods - it's a pain in the ass to try and figure out a vert's precise location in space, or the average midpoint of a selection. I know it's do-able, but it's not straightforward without writing a script in Maya...
When "Chamfering" an edge with an object that has uvs, is there a way for it to keep the mapping in check? The perserve uvs click seems to work when adding edbes, but not chamfering.
Problems arise if you chamfer along a UV seam, since it tries to create the UVs between the two faces on either side of the chamfer, and if they're not connected then you end up with a huge strange-shaped chamfer UVs. Your initial polys' UVs should still be intact though.
The fastest way to fix up the chamfered UVs in this case is just to planar map the new faces created by the chamfer, Relax them to get a reasonable shape, then use Stitch Selected in the UV editor to attach the chamfered UVs to either side of the original set.
Edit: Alright, can you explain stick to me? So far I have been using weld and cant seem to figure what stick is doing, try to stich the edge, but to what? my selection?
There are options for it, you will probably want to edit those since the defaults aren't usually the best. Set the Bias to 1.0 instead of 0.5, and it'll keep the selected edge the same size and shape, and try to match the stitched part as closely as possible.
It will not move the selected edge's UV shell, it will move the shared edge's UV shell, and rotate/scale that shell to try and match up.
Anyway, vertices... how do I make them bigger? Thought it was under customize somewhere but lost it... maybe a hotkey, I can't remember.
Customize>Preferences(yeah I don't know how I missed that) >Viewports