I am new to 3D modelling and Maya, I have a background in traditional drafting and programmes like Photoshop/Illustrator etc.
In Maya I am finding myself lost looking at meshes, often I need to make a mark on a mesh, like an arbitrary vertical or horizontal line just to see if it coincides with another element or is proportional to something else etc etc.
I have not found anything in Maya that I can achieve this need with. I thought of using the pencil tool but that only draws on the viewport, so if the camera moves, its no longer useful.
One thing I tried is to draw marks like straight lines with the curve tool, then place it in a display layer and lock it via “R” or “T”, like THIS. But even this becomes useless when I start to work on my actual model by entering component mode the line cannot be seen anymore
Is there proper feature in Maya for this sort of task?
if not, I am confident I can make do with curves but is there a way in Maya to control the thickness of a specific curve and also have it be visible at all times?
I am open to solution in Mel/Python scripts too.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Maya doesn’t really have a whole lot of drawing aids, or even any of the CAD style “oversnaps” that Max has (like centre of a edge as you’ve already found). There are always a ton of hacky ways to achieve a similar thing but they are often ugly or tempramental. It would be nice to have some kind of unified system built in. The closest thing they have for arbitrary position or plane alignment is the construction plane and locators, neither of which will really satisfy your itch here.
However, at least you can control the draw thickness of curves very easily. Just select one and then open/view the shape in the Attribute Editor and you should see Thickness at the bottom, which controls the on-screen pixel thickness the curve is drawn in.
The only other thing I sometimes use is templating. Create another mesh and set it to template, where you will see it’s wireframe edges, but can’t select or edit it. If you need to snap to it you can turn on overrides (in the attribute editor) and set it to reference (you can also set it to wireframe here if that’s more useful). You can do the same via layers too.
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Yes, this is what I wanted to rule out before looking for third party solutions or coming up with my own. Nothing hurts more than hacking at things, only to realise the real pros had already seen to a well tread path!
I will look into construction planes and locators, if they even cover 30% of these needs, I will be happy.
However, at least you can control the draw thickness of curves very easily. Just select one and then open/view the shape in the Attribute Editor and you should see Thickness at the bottom, which controls the on-screen pixel thickness the curve is drawn in.
This is and the following to it, are very uselfull, cheers mate.
