Maya Troubles

[brassmonkeyboy]

Hey Guys...I need some help.

I'm trying to learn Maya.

I'm trying to model a symmetrical head using SubD Emulation in Maya Complete 4.5.
I have two smoothed cubes and have the output mesh set to the input mesh of the other. When I extrude faces trying to follow a tutorial, each face extrudes as a separate bump. I delete the faces of the cage cube (simulating a control cage for SubD modeling) that are between the bumps, and the faces join together.

When they join together, however, there's a star-shaped gap. I think it's because of the smooth I put on the separate polygons, but the tutorial (from maya 4 fundamentals) doesn't have anything about merging or stitching or anything. Besides, I've tried it and the polygons just don't meet in them middle.

What am I doing wrong?

[Black_Robe]

try extruding it but dont delete the faces,instead just select all the vertices of the extrudes and set your merge vertex value to about 0.001 then merge them.Im not sure but it might work. ask Mannix....

[kryss187]

what i did instead of mirroring is duplicating and under options checked instance. Only problem is, that you can't hide the other half very easy. So, I found myself editing the right half and when I was done mirrored and attached.

Since you have maya 4.5 then use sub-d's.

create a poly cube then convert it to sub-d.
modify ->convert->poly to subd

Then duplicate as an instance and -1 on the X.

The change to poly proxy mode.
Subdiv Survaces->poly proxy mode

And viola, you have poly tools and sub-d tools.

You could also set it up to use smooth proxy which is new to maya 4.5.

make a poly cube then select smooth proxy under edit poly.

then under outputs in the channel box choose polySmoothface1 and change subdivisions to 2.

next, unreference the smoothmesh layer and open connection editor. load the proxy mesh into the left and smooth mesh into the right and link 'translate' then select smooth mesh and duplicate like above and translate to correct spot. then add duplicate smooth to smooth layer and put back to reference. next, continue with tutorial.

[brassmonkeyboy]

A guy in the Alias|Wavefront forum found my problem. I didn't have "Keep Polygon Faces Together" checked in Hotbox->Polygon->tools. It's fixed now, and it only took me 3 weeks to figure this out...

BOOYA GRANDMA!