topic Re: Precise Cut Placement? in Maya Modeling Forum

Precise Cut Placement?

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 00:12:16 GMT

Hi again! Now I want to cut a door into the front of my ship for an interior bay, but of course the top and bottom of that door must align with the floor/ceiling height inside. I know what those heights are, but what I don't know is how to use the knife tool to place a cut at an exact height.

Anyone know how I can do that? Or of a better way of doing it?

I've attached an orthographic view of the front of the ship. What I'm going for would be a square polygon cut into the diamond shape in the center:

Re: Precise Cut Placement?

sean.heasley — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 15:23:51 GMT

Hi @Anonymous and welcome to the community!

Have you tried using the Multi Cut Tool?

You can select any edge/vertex and place cuts throughout the model to make the door shape at the height you would like!

Please let me know if this helps or if you need any more assistance!

If one or more of these posts helped answer your question, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.

Kudos are greatly appreciated. Everyone likes a thumbs up!

Re: Precise Cut Placement?

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 16:49:53 GMT

I am using the multi cut tool but I don't see any way of placing the cut at any exact height.

How exactly would I do that with multicut?

Re: Precise Cut Placement?

sean.heasley — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 19:16:27 GMT

Hi @Anonymous

There isn't a way to make it cut at a specific height like 5ft for example. That said, you could create an edge with the tool and then snap the vertices to the same places as the ceiling/floor by going into the wireframe mode so you can see them and then moving the vertices to the correct point.

If you want, I could create a video of myself doing it if you can attach the scene file here !

Re: Precise Cut Placement?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 02:32:28 GMT

Ugh. There's never a way to make anything do anything at any specific coordinate and I do NOT understand how people make 3D modeling work like that. I suppose it's designed more for the artistically inclined?

Ok, but fair warning, at this point the interior and exterior are separate objects. Later any space connecting directly to an exterior via a door or window will be made part of the "exterior" object, and the rest or the interior will remain sepparate. I plan to make a video game with this so it needs to be navigable by a player in a 3D environment in real time but also not be wasting resources rendering any interior spaces that can't be seen from outside... when the player is outside. And vice versa?

Also the corners of the doorway should actually intersect the edges of the front facing diamond shape it's being cut in and however those vertices are moved should not deform the original shape. I tried using Slide Edge for something like this once but it kept the length of the edge the same as I slid it along a surface and since the length of the edge did not conform to the narrowing length surface it was being slid along that completely changed the original shape and ruined the model. So. I'm skeptical.

Anyway, the specific heights of the floor and ceiling I'm aiming for, I believe, are +/-1.2y

I will also link all other threads where you requested an upload of the scene file here for your reference.

Should I just make one thread for this model and update it as issues arise? Sorry I just thought of that.

Re: Precise Cut Placement?

sean.heasley — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 18:57:31 GMT

Hi @Anonymous

Thanks for attaching the scene file!

Since you have an idea of where the door and floor is, you shouldn't need a specific number or math to line this up properly. What you can simply do is toggle the snap to point setting and snap the exterior edge to the interior so their heights match.

Also, one of the reasons you may be having difficulty with this project and understanding how people go about it in 3D, is that generally a model like this would not have an interior included or if it would it would be much larger and done in multiple pieces that snap together instead of using one large base model.

That said, I'd highly recommend looking up some references images of a submarine and or tutorials so you can have a better idea of how to push forward with this project!

Re: Precise Cut Placement?

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 06:28:23 GMT

Snapping would certainly work, but the interior and exterior are actually separate objects and one is not actually inside the other (as that would make it pretty hard to see the one through the other) they're actually next to eachother (for ease of access as I work on both) so I don't know how I could reference one to the other for snapping.

That said, I... wasn't using math in this case, I just happen to know the exact height because I know exactly what height I... put that floor at. And since I know that off the top of my head just having a way to designate "I want this cut at a height of 1.2" seems a lot simpler and faster than setting up a reference from one object to another object so a tool being used on object a will snap to the height of object b. Like why? I know it's at 1.2. Just make it 1.2.

I... will look up a youtube tutorial on interobject reference snapping of the multicut tool. But that sounds super specific and usually the more specific something gets the harder it gets to find a video that shows you exactly how to do one particular thing. Which is why I ask questions here, I have very, specific needs. I could troll youtube tutorials for DAYS and not find anything to answer my particular question. And in many cases, I already have.

What I meant about not understanding how people do 3D was simply that: I want a specific feature in a specific place, no amount of relative/snap/etc. tools will ever be as direct as just placing that feature at the exact spot I want it. So I don't understand how people model without having a means of, for example, making a cut at a specific height on the Y axis, or any other thing.

I mean, I'm not as new at modeling as everyone seems to think. Here are some weapon models I made for Fallout 3, two from reference images of real world, and one original concept, they're actually pretty complex models (if you ask me), and pretty accurate to the reference images:

MK17

M60

Original Concept, Laser

So. If everyone could stop showing me video tutorials on basic Extrusion when I asked an extremely specific question about how to mirror the angle of a face. Like, I couldn't even make as much as I have without extruding, why would anyone think that's the answer to my question? Mirror Angle is literally the title of that thread and the extrude video someone gave me as an answer didn't even say the words "mirror" or "angle" let alone "here is how you mirror a specific angle" So???

I appreciate that people are trying to help I just don't get how people aren't getting what I'm asking.

Part of the problem is that I learned on blender. I switched to Maya because booleans do NOT work on blender and I'm making things complex enough that I NEED booleans. But blender has a myriad of ways to do exactly the things I'm asking about in Maya. For example. If I wanted to drag a single vertex exactly +5 units along the x axis in blender, I could select the vertex with the move tool, click the x axis of the move tool and drag slightly in the positive direction, then just. Type. 5. And it would know I want to move it on this axis in this direction that many units and do it immediately. I don't see any way of doing that in Maya. Except to open the component editor select the vertex, manually add 5 to whatever its x coordinate is and then manually type that in to the x coordinate. Do you see how convoluted that is compared to, click, drag, 5? So. I'm very annoyed with hearing an answer like, there is no way of placing a cut along 1.2y

That's not a criticism of you. I'm complaining about the program NOT you.

I do get what you mean by assembling an interrior out of modular pieces that snap together. What originally got me into 3D modeling was modding fallout and I noticed that's how interior environments were made in that game.

The reason I'm doing it this particular way is that I've played games before where I went inside a building and "Wow, the interior of this building is very blatantly obviously three times bigger than the exterior" Which would be great if it was a Doctor Who game but it was not. And I dont' want that happening here. I want the interior to actually be true to the exterior size and shape. This ship is so small that it will be pretty obvious if the interior rooms were all square even though the exterior has steeply angled walls, you should have the same angled wall inside that you do outside.

Later I'll be making more and bigger ships so peices of this that are generic enough will probably be saved separately, then duplicated and put together modularly. Just this particular model is so small that there's like two rooms in it that won't share a wall with the exterior of the ship so it has to be pretty specific to capture that, and this precludes modularity to a certain extent. And when this is all in game, the entire interior of the ship will not be present in scenes of the exterior. Like I said, interior spaces that connect directly to the exterior through a door or window will be included in the exterior model so that you can actually see them through any open doors/windows. It'd be a problem if a door opened and you just saw a hollow interior of a ship, or rather, saw through the backfaces and saw nothingness inside. Right? But the non contiguous interor spaces will be exported and loaded separately in game. It's just all together in one scene file while I'm building it.

Also, this is not a thing that exists in reality so there won't be any reference images to look up. It's a spaceship not a submarine. SOrry for the vent?

Re: Precise Cut Placement?

sean.heasley — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 16:58:34 GMT

Hi @Anonymous

I understand how frustrating this may be for you and I think the reason there's a struggle with trying to help you achieve this type of cut is that it doesn't exist in Maya.

Like you said, Blender has tools that allow you to move units a specific amount of distance like 5cm for example. While Maya doesn't have this Maya does have the grid settings and generally when it comes to environment modeling we utilize the grid to make our lives simpler.

For example, I personally have the grid set up so each square is 1ft so an average door will be about 6ft high so I simply snap the edge to the 6th square etc.

As for your comments on booleans, while Maya does handle booleans better than Blender booleans are still a very messy tool and can cause a lot of issues with your geometry unless you're using a 3rd party script and/or you dont need to worry about clean geometry.

In terms of what I said about lining up with the interior model you have. What you could do is use one of the view panels like the front panel so you can have the exterior of the ship and the interior lined up side by side. That way you can easily see the ceiling or floor and then make the door match accordingly.

This might be a lot to take in and I know it can be difficult to explain over text but I hope this information is helpful to you. If you would like, on Monday we could have a Team Viewer session where I can share my screen with you and talk with you so I can better explain what steps you can take to work with this model !

Re: Precise Cut Placement?

sean.heasley — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 18:25:46 GMT

Hi @Anonymous

Just wanted to check in to see how things were going. Would you like to set up a Team Viewer session?

If your issue is resolved, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.