Maya/MEL Spherical selection shape?

calvin1649

All,
I have converted a displaced sphere to geometry (it's a globe with raised continents).

I now wish to select and delete the "ocean" part. I have tried a Boolean subtraction with a smaller sphere with no success. In fact I've been trying every mesh rebuild, history delete, whatever to make this Boolean happen.

So now I am resigned to selecting the faces and deleting them.

So if I make a sphere, size and position it so in encompasses the flat ocean, can I some how tell Maya to select and delete all the vertices of my globe that fall inside this sphere?

Thanks!!!!

Allert

As long as the globe is one closed mesh, the boolean subtraction should work. Are you sure there's no holes in the mesh or anything? Sometimes using displacement-to-poly conversion leads to a messy tesselation, which could mess up the actual boolean operation, but I'm not entirely sure if thats the case at your end, since you did a 'mesh rebuild'. Anyway, good luck !

EDIT: Ok, I tried it myself, and i got the same issue you're having. What i ended up doing for the boolean to work, was that i had to reduce the polys *twice*, with maya's default reduce tool (it wouldn't work with just one reduce-pass) , and after that, the subtraction with the smaller sphere would work just fine, but I'm not sure if you would want to reduce it so much... Anyway, thats my findings

Whargoul

PolySelectConstraint will do it - vertex mode, all, geometry, distance, point, give it the center, min& max ranges, boom done.

calvin1649

Thanks for all your replies!
Allert, reducing twice was the trick...why it worked...I have no idea.
Whargoul, thanks for the tip. I used that to delete the inner face of my boolean. I only wanted the outside face.
I have not used Maya in 9 years. This has been lots of fun getting back up to speed. Geeze, I started with Wavefront Advanced Visualiser, Dynamation (Mel sorta "sprouted" from this, you could write stuff for it in it's script language), Kynamation, Composer (I miss composer), then I switched over to the TDI Explore where IPR came from, oh and MetaBalls, I got out of the biz about a year after Maya came in.
What an awsome product it is though!

Thanks agian!