maya 8.5: cutting one object with another?

rooster

I'm not talking about the straight up boolean functions, as they all cause chunks to get cut out of the geometry or modify the shape of the objects. all I want are edges cut into the geometry wherever the two objects intersect

am I missing a tool or is there some script I can use?

MoP

Heh I think some of our artists at work asked about this too. As far as I know there's no standard Maya tool to do this (beyond boolean), and judging by a rudimentary search of Google and Highend3d I couldn't find anything which does that.
Vaguely thinking about writing one, but it'd be a while before I got anything stable, I think.

rooster

cheers mop, kinda what I thought
i do miss max sometimes, i suppose silo probably has something..

Michael Knubben

Am I missing something, or would any way of implementing this not basically be a boolean? I've used the booleans in Silo a few times to achieve this, and it works alright but almost always requires some cleanup. What I do is copy the parts from both meshes where they intersect and run a boolean on those. I'm pretty sure there's a method that doesn't delete any geometry, and only cuts the edges.
Another way is to use surface snapping or just eyeballing it and cutting into the meshes where they intersect (and instead of tweaking the resulting cuts, sliding them along edges so they don't deform the silhouette)

rooster

in maya theres no basic boolean cut its just subtract one object from the other, or combine them to an airtight mesh. Im thinking ill stick it in silo to cut it. bit of a pain but meh..
i don't want to eyeball it and move verts since its going to have uvs I want to keep preserved. (I know theres a preserve uvs tool in a maya update pack but it starts to become more fuss than its worth)

Toast

rooster wrote: »

in maya theres no basic boolean cut its just subtract one object from the other

What if you duplicate the "cutter" mesh and use the difference command?

MoP wrote: »

Heh I think some of our artists at work asked about this too. As far as I know there's no standard Maya tool to do this (beyond boolean), and judging by a rudimentary search of Google and Highend3d I couldn't find anything which does that.
Vaguely thinking about writing one, but it'd be a while before I got anything stable, I think.

This would be interesting....using it to cut in roads on a ground mesh would be a great thing!

Funky Bunnies

Toast wrote: »

What if you duplicate the "cutter" mesh and use the difference command?

actually I guess that's true. You could do that or a boolean difference on one and an intersection on the duplicates, then either boolean union them together and clean up or delete the inner faces and combine. That's still a major pain, though. Better off jumping to another app real quick unless it's a relatively simple case, I reckon.

Cool idea for a script, I hope someone writes one eventually