Using profile curves, cutting planes, and booleans...

# 1 17-12-2009 , 05:42 PM

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Using profile curves, cutting planes, and booleans...

Here is a couple of short videos I made for another user describing how to use profile curves, to make cutting planes which can be used with the polygon boolean operation to cut up a polygon pipe.

Booleans are very powerful and get a much undeserved bad reputation. I use them all the time. I come from a nurbs / hard surface background and in surfacing applications like Rhino, and professional design applications like Studio tools booleans are a staple part of creating shapes.

===========================

The first video is about 15 minutes and covers the creation of the top section and the second video is only 5 minutes and shows how to create the bottom section for a perfectly fitted completed part.

I hope you find this helpful.

I am not sure how much bandwidth I have remaining on screencast.com so if I run out and you cannot run the video I will put another copy of both on YouTube.com later today.

Here is what we make:

Here is the link to part 1 - the top section

https://www.screencast.com/t/YWVjODU5ZDk

Here is the link to part 2 - the bottom section

https://www.screencast.com/t/NzIxODEyY2

I don't put a lot of time into editing these and the narration is just done in a single take, so forgive me if I stutter or have occasional points of brain lock.

Please feel free to drop a comment to let me know if you find this stuff useful.

Cheers!

Can't find any other free sites that let me post a video longer then 10 minutes and too lazy to split the first part up so if I run out of bandwidth on screencast.com, it refreshes on the 3rd of the month.

Let me know if there is a free video stream hosting site that allow more then 10 minutes.

Thanks.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 18-12-2009 at 10:08 AM.

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# 2 17-12-2009 , 06:16 PM

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You are going to have to change your user name to onetake, another nice little tut..............thanks dave

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# 3 17-12-2009 , 08:31 PM

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I wrote a script that allowed you to draw a curve then cookie cut it out of a surface using boolians, boolians are great IF you know what you doing

"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle

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# 4 18-12-2009 , 10:37 AM

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Moved to the basics forum so maybe more users will get help from this, thanks user added image

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# 5 18-12-2009 , 10:47 AM

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odd, everyone hates booleans, well a lot of people..
The worst problem i have ever had with booleans other then my lack of planning before using them and having a hell of a mess in a mesh. was Back when i was using Maya 7, If i saved a file before using boolean operations, then they would make the mesh disappear when completed. I don't know if i have that same problem in 2008, i haven't had a need for them yet.

Far as the video , Good video Ctbram I am sure alot of people here will find it usefull, as Boolean operations are....hard to grasp for some people.

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# 6 18-12-2009 , 11:31 AM

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Could there not be a forum just for stuff like this. this will just get swamped with all the newbie questions......dave

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# 7 18-12-2009 , 05:29 PM

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Thanks,

I am at 77% of my bandwidth limit for my free screencast account I am searching for another site to host my videos that does not impose 10 minute time limits.

My bandwidth for screencast.com resets every month on the 3rd. but hopefully I will have an alternate site before I reach my limit.

In the future, if I can't find a free site without time limits I will probably break the videos into 10 minute parts and use Youtube.com.

Once again I hope folks find these videos helpful, please drop a comment if you'd like to see me do something in particular or if you'd like to make a suggestion on how i can make these videos better.

Cheers

Not sure if these are worthy of the free video section but you are welcome to put them there if you like. They are fairly small in size and free to download from the screencast.com.

I was going to put them in the public contribution section but that area does not seem to allow for video uploads.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 18-12-2009 at 05:32 PM.

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# 8 19-12-2009 , 07:21 AM

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very, very neat! I love it. It solved my main problem with the standard help files in Maya. I always got that twisting when bridging and no explanation how to fix it. This was great!

Just one question, I see you guys clicking on the option name i the attribute window and it turns grey. I can not click on the name, just in the box and enter values. Is that a vista thing or what? I am on win-XP.

Also if you could jank up the sound volume I would rate this 10 out of 10!

Last edited by Olorin; 19-12-2009 at 07:59 AM.

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# 9 19-12-2009 , 10:54 AM

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Thanks for the complement. I sure feel good that you found this helpful and I will work on normalizing the sound on future ones. Thank you for the feedback. I would like to try to make more of these for the SimplyMaya community.

You are correct, you see me select and highlight the tool attribute name "bridge offset" in the channel box, then move the the cursor back into the work area, then pressing and holding the MIDDLE-mouse-button I drag left and right to twirl the "bridge offset" value down and up respectively. When you do this correctly you should see a set of arrows pointing to the left-and-right to indicate you can twirl the value of the selected attribute name.

You should be able to do this with any of the parameters for tool nodes in the channel box. For instance watch when I add bevels and adjust the "offset" and "number of segments" attribute values. Sometimes I select the value box and type a value in, sometimes I select the name of the attribute and twirl the value.

Also note that there is a little symbol that looks like a pie with a slice taken out of it above the channel box. If you unlock this by clicking two times on the symbol to the left that looks like the move manipulator you can adjust the rate that the values change to get finer control when you drag twirl values (you can also select edit>settings>slow from the menu in the channel box).

It should work fine in XP. Up until recently all my systems were XP.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 19-12-2009 at 11:22 AM.

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# 10 19-12-2009 , 11:12 AM

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Oh and sspikedudley - I will put these kinds of video tutorial posts in the Maya Basics section instead of WIP in the future. I was just used to posting in that section.

Perhaps these should all get moved to this section as well? All of these are small video tutorials.

Exploring methods of putting holes in cylinders...
https://srv01.simply3dworld.com/showt...threadid=33378

Modeling and Rigging a Three Piston Actuator...
https://srv01.simply3dworld.com/showt...threadid=33394

Modeling The Humble Bottle Cap...
https://srv01.simply3dworld.com/showt...threadid=33431

It would be nice of there was a user contribution section for video tuts though.
As Dave mentioned eventually this will just get buried.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 19-12-2009 at 11:23 AM.

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# 11 19-12-2009 , 12:04 PM

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I came over from lightwave, one of the best things about Newtek is there support, nearly ever tool has a video showing how to use it, Now im not suggesting that one person would do this but if we here create a forum with all the tools of maya listed and a tutorial for them would not this be a good selling point to join here.......dave

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# 12 19-12-2009 , 12:16 PM

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Originally posted by ctbram

You are correct, you see me select and highlight the tool attribute name "bridge offset" in the channel box, then move the the cursor back into the work area, then pressing and holding the MIDDLE-mouse-button I drag left and right to twirl the "bridge offset" value down and up respectively. When you do this correctly you should see a set of arrows pointing to the left-and-right to indicate you can twirl the value of the selected attribute name.

You should be able to do this with any of the parameters for tool nodes in the channel box.

Originally Posted by

I try and I try, but it just does nothing it just unselects the tool for me. Pehaps it does not work with a two button mouse and pressing the scroll-wheel? Or can this feature be turned of somehwere? I may have hit some crazy key combo by mistake and deactivated it...

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# 13 19-12-2009 , 05:04 PM

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Hi guys,

If you would like to see a user contribution section I suggest you get in contact with the admins or ask gster to create you a sticky in this section for your tutorials to be posted in, I agree that they do help the community I just thought they might get lost or overlooked in the WIP forum.

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# 14 19-12-2009 , 05:50 PM

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olorin,

are you sure you have your middle mouse button configured properly? Some installers like the logitech one sets this up as some kind of special scroll function.

M mouse has a scroll wheel and I had to go into the logitech mouse setup and change the action on press to generic button.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

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