Thickening mesh

[Anonymous]

Hi, does anybody have a better method for adding thickness to a mesh in Maya 2016?

I've tried Extruding in Local Translate Z but I'm getting a lot of intersecting polys, especially at areas where edges are tightly bunched together (e.g. for defining hard edges). I suppose this is to be expected when extruding locally, due to the orientation of the normals.

Uniformly scaling the extrusion in World works somewhat, but there's just too much rearranging work afterwards. Anyone?

[Anonymous]

can you provide a picture of the mesh?  I think you've already thought of the solutions i was going to suggest, but still if i could at least see it, MAYBE i can help.

thanks,

  Jerry

[Anonymous]

Hey Jerry,

I recreated the situation with a similar mesh. The first image is the original mesh, and the second shows the result of using extrude in local translate z. You will see intersecting geometry around the areas where edgeflow is tight.

So far, my workaround is to duplicate the mesh, reverse normals and Transform Component along Z-axis. There'll still be intersecting geometry after the Transform, but at least it's visually easier to fix. I used Average Vertices to "relax" the intersecting verts, then bridge the two meshes together. Not a very efficient workflow though, so I'm hoping you have better suggestions!

Cheers

[Anonymous]

Hey Mr. Lockwood!

   So that's a pretty creative work-around.  I hadn't thought of that myself.  As for thickening your mesh another way, I've attached pics of what I would do.  Now i have to apologize if you've already thought of this, as I'm still learning Maya's jargon.   But after extruding, i clicked the locator on the transform node.  I was able to extrude and scale the faces with little to no interpenetration, and while keeping these same bits of geo selected was able to reposition them with little effort.  I hope this helps, and again, sorry if you tried this already.

Jerry

[Anonymous]

Hey Jerry, thanks for the suggestion. I believe you used the toggle which switches the gizmo into World Space. I was able to get a pretty decent thicken by doing some initial translations in World Space, followed by a uniform scale.

I find that extruding in local space still yields a more accurate thicken (as it extrudes according to each individual face's normal), especially on meshes that are generally non-planar. But yeah, it runs into problems with tight clusters of faces of varying normal angles (e.g. when two adjacent faces are at a right angle).

Thanks again. I'll update this post if I make any new discoveries.