Maya Cut Faces Tool Snapping

m4dcow

I use the cut faces tool quite a bit for adding control edges in cases where I have to deal with diagonal lines or silhouettes that I don't want to alter by selecting edge loops and moving them. I always find myself going back and rounding off the cut face coordinates by hand to make sure certain edges are uniform (OCD I know).

I was wondering if there is a way to snap to grid points when doing the cut faces tool in interactive mode. Angle snapping works fine for me (holding shift). I have tried turning on grid snapping, using the grid snap toggle but no dice.

I would be fine with some sort of script that would snap the values after creation, but I am not sure how I would access recent polycut construction history nodes to change this.

Any suggestions for how I could accomplish this would be appreciated.

Grimm_Wrecking

edit: case of stupid on my part

if you hold x while holding shift it should still snap both at angle and to grid, but you have to do it in an orthographic view

also, you can do this while snapping to vert, v...


But why not just use insert edge loop set to equal edge distance?

m4dcow

I use the cut face tool in orthographic views most of the time, I tried holding x to toggle grid, v to snap to verts, some places I've seen mention snapping will on work if you click near an edge. None of them seem to work for me, I even try holding shift and x in different orders to see if that may have been the problem.

Sometimes my topology is messy (tris) and I'll just cut the loop in and clean it up later. The add loops tool also doesn't really have snapping ability from what I have tried and sometimes I would like a consistent basis rather than a "weight" which will equate to different offsets based on edge length.

haikai

Unless I'm understanding your problem wrong, the Cut Faces Tool should be able to do what you're looking for. Instead of the Interactive option, use one of the directional cutting planes. These cutting planes, even though Maya gives them a particular directional orientation to start with, can be rotated to orient in any direction you want, and you can snap this plane to any grid point, vertex, etc., by dragging the manipulator from the center while holding your snap key. You can limit the cut to specific faces by selecting them prior to entering the tool.

This is a lot slower than the Interactive Cut, but if you're really OCD then this will give you a lot more power and control because you can type in specific rotation values (as well as a bunch of other options in the channel box).

CheeseOnToast

The add loops tool also doesn't really have snapping ability from what I have tried and sometimes I would like a consistent basis rather than a "weight" which will equate to different offsets based on edge length.

You can change some of this behaviour in the tool options. Just change it from "relative distance from edge" to "equal distance from edge" to get a new loop that's equally distant from the edge you want to support.

m4dcow

@haikai You are right, but I guess I want the best of both worlds with the interactive mode and snapping to grid or verts.

@CheeseOnToast I do use the "equal distance from edge" setting I just wish I could snap based on some sort of grid or unit.

For example if I insert an edge loop on some part of a model using "equal distance" and then I want to insert another loop in a different location but have that same offset, the weighting value is of no use to me because it is relative to the size of the edge it was created on. IE I could insert edge loops in 2 different locations each with a weighting of 0.2 but the actual world space differences of these offsets would be different depending on the size of an edge.

Like I said before, I use cut faces in special sort of cases, and I can achieve what I want in the end. I was just curious if snapping could work on these sorts of operations (with interactive mode ).