Splitting up a model

# 1 22-10-2004 , 03:49 AM

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Join Date: May 2004

Location: Utah, USA

Posts: 369

It seems like it should be such a basic and easy thing but I can't find out how to do this. I have a single piece model of a dinosaur (who doesn't these days) and I want to seperate it into various pieces. I know how to use the "cut face" tool but I want to be able to select a group of faces then turn them into a seperate model. Example: I want to select the faces around his eye then extract that as a seperate model. I tried using Extract (with the "seperate extracted faces" off) then "Seperate" but the best I got was a bunch of faces that looked very faceted plus, They were disconnected from each other!! I tried selecting a bunch of edges to form a border around the area using extract and/or seperate (I tried so many things, I can't remember all of them) anyway, the bottom like is that I can't figure out how to take a single piece model and cut the mesh into seperate model pieces.

You can see the dinosaur I'm talking about on the cover page of my site: www.morphicmotion.com

Thanks for any help you can give. By the way, it's a polygon model and I'm using Maya 6. Thank for any help you can give me.

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# 2 22-10-2004 , 04:58 AM

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Join Date: Dec 2003

Location: USA

Posts: 50

You could extract the faces then group them, and then just move the pivot point to the middle of the grouped faces. Uhm, really I don't know why you would want it in a bunch of peices. If it was nurbs you could just add isoparms and use the cut curve tool to detach it. You could always go polys>subdiv>nurbs, make your cuts>polys, group patches of polys. Never accually tried to do such I thing I guess. Another way would be to duplicate the dino, go into faces selection mode, cut the edge of the arm or leg or whatever, then delete all the faces you don't need. Repeat for each part.

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