Maya's Quad Draw In Max

[Crimson_Guard]

I would like for 3Ds Max to get a quad draw and live surface exactly the same as Maya, so I can uninstall Maya. The only reason I use Maya is for retopology. That's literally it. I would like to do my retopology in Max instead.

I'm fully aware 3Ds Max has a retopology tool that's vastly inferior to Maya's. I was thoroughly unimpressed by it, and every other retopology tool on the entire internet.

Also, a more comprehensive matcap/cartoon material system would be wonderful. I'd love to do cartoony renders without needing the now awful Vray, the terrible Arnold, or a trial of Zbrush.

Thank you.

[teratron]

I'm all for improving the freeform tools, but can you be more specific about Quad Draw's advantages over them?

I don't know much about it, but from what I can see the nicest thing is easy access to soft select and constraining to borders. In Max you should be able to do this with a border select, convert to verts, and then hit "use selected verts". 

For soft select, the brushes have a radius of effect which is similar though not exactly the same. You can also make vertex selection with soft select and use selected verts.

Definitely more steps than the Maya version, but doable at least.

Using the Flipped Normals vid as ref.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpDWta5O3n8

[Crimson_Guard]

Nice of Autodesk to bother emailing to notify me of the comment....

You don't need to start with a plane, Maya's quad draw feature has quick extrusion of more than just one edge, the soft select thing you mentioned, a really comprehensive relax tool, a point-by-point vertex mode that I really like, to help get into hard to reach spots, it's much, much faster than Max's joke of a retopology method, it's never crashed on me once, where as Max's is prone to crashing (probably just a Max problem in general), click down some points, then hold shift, click and drag for multi-face creation magic, auto-weld, and my all time favorite: an overlay so you can see your work at all times, even it it's sunk under the model you're working on.

There's no contest. Maya beats Max like Max owes Maya's boss money.

[teratron]

@Crimson_Guard 
"You don't need to start with a plane" - Yeah this is pretty dumb, and I can't seem to make the "new object" button available as a hotkey from outside an already existing editable poly object.
"quick extrusion of more than just one edge" - With Extend you can Cntrl+Shift to drag an edge loop, otherwise you have to make an edge selection and shift drag then conform the new edges afaik.
"a really comprehensive relax tool" - I think if the current relax conform brush worked with the soft select stuff we talked about it would be pretty comparable, one trick is to make sure to turn up conform on it as it defaults super low.
"a point-by-point vertex mode" - Try the step build out (hover over it to see all hot keys and features), sounds like what you are asking for, it also kind of autowelds/snaps verts with Cntrl/Shift click.
"click and drag for multi-face creation" - The closest thing I know of is the strips feature but you constantly have to chance the min distance/zoom in and out with that.
"an overlay so you can see your work at all times" Max has overlay settings in the Viewports options.

[teratron]

One other thing I would recommend is getting TyFlow (Beta versions are free for commercial use). I use the  tyConform modifier allot, you can use all the poly modeling tools and it will procedurally conform whatever you do to a target mesh with lots of good settings and adjustment features.

[Crimson_Guard]

Oh, I was totally unaware of the overlay viewport option. Huh.
You know, that really should be much easier to find.... I still think Maya's is better, though, because you don't have to turn on some special viewport option, and the overlay is global, which means you don't have to also turn on edged faces to see the full topology highlighted.

It's sad that 'industry standard' 3D Studio Max requires a plugin to function at Maya's level, considering they're both Autodesk products. If Autodesk gave a rat's ass about us, we'd already have those features, and then some.

Thanks for the tip. I'll have to look into using TyFlow. Still would like to see quad draw and live surface as they exist in Maya come over to Max, though.

[Kranos_Orphydian]

very interesting topic. I will probably make a complete illustrated idea about this...only if I would know more about manual retopology