CGTalk - Moving a vertex without changing the look of the surface

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H3ro

07-04-2007, 10:54 PM

Hallo.

I am working on a small script which basically executes the polySplit command over and over again on a surface between random edges. My problem is that right now I only get a straight line for each of the polySplits, which are kind of boring. So I want to add a few extra vertex's to each of the splits. This in itself is no problem, but trying to move the extra vertes with MEL is. I want to move them, but not changing the look of the surface. So that say my object is a box, I want the vertex to just move in X and Y(side of the box), Z and Y(side of the box) and Z and X(top of the box)

Is this even possible? I cant think of any command that does this, or any way of accomplishing it. Any ideas would be great

Thanks in advance

rtngkllr

07-06-2007, 06:16 PM

This idea is extremely problematic in maya. Maya is weak when it comes to snapping to a surface. You will notice that they have some functionality within Maya Live. The concept would be to copy your object, make it live, and try to use that surface for snapping. You will find it is not exactly what you are looking for.

Nex has an interesting tool that allows you to slide components along the surface (for instance you can move a vertex along the topology of the mesh it belongs to). It does a fair job, but as you can imagine, your shape still loses volume as you move things around.

As anything is possible, I could imagine a tool that is written with the Maya API that does a number of surface intersection tests to add resolution along a split while trying to maintain topolgy (I am thinking of the more difficult case of non-planar topology). Since you cannot perform intersection tests with mel out of the box, I imagine any mel tool attempting this would be bloated, hacky, and slow.

Sorry to be a buzzkill.

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