Extrude bug that had been there since the days of the dinosaurs

[Anonymous]

I logged this bug in 98. Let hope that this time, after 18 years, Autodesk will finally fix it. 😉

Assuming you are working Y up.

Create a one degree line from 0,0,0  0,0,5  5,0,5

It should give you an L. Let's call it Path1

Create another one degree line from 0,0,0  5,0,0  5,0,-5

That should give you another L. Path2

Create another one degree line from 0,0,0  0,5,0  5,5,0

That should give you a third L. Path3

Create a forth one: 0,0,0  0,1,0 1,1,0  1,0,0  0,0,0

That should give you a square. Let's call it Profile.

Extrude (tube, fixed path) the Profil on Path1 then repeat on Path2 and Path3. Surprise surprise, the second and third extrudes are all distorted.

Extrude only works properly when you extrude on the Z axis.

Another thing, if you extrude let's say a window profile on a rectangular line, the beginning/end corner will not properly close at a 45 degree angle. PowerAnimator used to do this! So I suggest that the Maya team ask the StudioTools the Extrude code and plug it into Maya. And while you are at it, why don't you asked them the code for the curve toolbox, so that we can properly make tangent line on circles and all the cool stuff I used to make in PowerAnimator. 🙂

Cheers!

[cornelh]

@Anonymous

Thank you for reporting this issue to Autodesk, as I think Maya was in the hands of diff. company back in '98 so I'm not sure how much got transferred over.  I will check the Bug repository to see if has been reported, if so I will give you an update, if it is not in our database, I will add this.  Hopefully this will get more attention from the Maya Development team for future updates.   Again thank you for reporting this (once again)  Cheers, and best of luck in your projects. 

[Anonymous]

Hi!

It's been logged already. By me actually. I found the bug report page and I logged all four of my issues. Thanks! 🙂

But that extrude one is a major problem for me. I'm going french architecture from the 1900 and there are a lot of corniche, ridges, eaves that requires extrusions. I found out that it sometimes doesn't work no matter how I try.

Your help is appreciated and it's nice to see that Autodesk reads the forums.

Cheers,

Robert

[RickFalck]

Are you using the offset parameters for extruding in windows etc?

[_sebastian_f]

@Anonymous for the first problem: try freezing the transforms of your curves before you extrude. what i see on your pic  doesn´t happen for me!

for the window profile i can only offer a workaround if you didn´t find it already. place your start/end of the curve not in a corner to make it work.

[Anonymous]

Freezing transformation doesn't help for me. I still get the distortion. I like your workaround but the tool should not behave like that. Thanks! 🙂

[Anonymous]

@cornelh  Maya was the result of the merger of Alias and Wavefront. Alias' PowerAnimator, Maya's ancestor, is now called Studio Tools and it is still developed by Autodesk. I started 3D on PowerAnimator in 95. At the time is was only NURBS modelling but it was so fast and efficient! Especially for the snap modes and horizontal and vertical constraints. Much more powerful than Maya, even today. I used to write huge bug reports to Alias/Wavefront when I was beta-testing Maya. 

[cornelh]

@Anonymous

Thanks for the history information, I vaguely had heard or read this at some point.  Yet I must say I was still in High School when you where having fun with the predecessors to Maya!  It's great to have people like you in the community that have shared and helped with their knowledge to keep this amazing software going as it is.  I do know that the focus from CAD to Animation package eliminated many of the old nurbs tools and I really don't have a clue if the original architecture is even the same on either Maya and Alias Studio (way over my head on that one) Hopefully your logged bugs will be getting addressed soon and will be on a future release. Again this is all dependent upon priorities, amount of cases affected, etc... Thank you for your patience and understanding.  

Cheers,

[Anonymous]

The code from PowerAnimator could not be directly transferred to Maya as PA was written in C and Maya in C++, or something like that. So everything was written from scratch. A good improvement about Maya though: undo! Yep, in PA, there was no undo. You made a mistake? Start again! It go implemented eventually.

Thanks for the nice comments. I could write a book about thing to make Maya better. After 19 years of usage, you get to know the software. 🙂