Hidden Tri's

[R-Tillery]

Got A question,, In Max, all the Primitives or object you make are always in triangles, there just hidden and you have to check show editable mesh or something like that. So my question is,, Is Maya set up like Max,, Like a cube has 6 sides till you hit the triangulate tag then it shows 12 polys.. Are the tri’s hidden till you hit the button? :confused:

[mhcannon]

May be two separate issues. Since all items are triangulated (known as tesselation) at render (without changing the files actual mesh) you may consider this to be a hidden tri mesh, but you wouldn't edit it. You can however view it to see how the render will be tesselated. To view this, select the object, then in the attribute editor expand the Mesh Component Display flag. There check the Display Triangle option.

To actually covert the mesh to tris, you would use the triangulate option under the Polygons menu.

Hope this make sense.

[R-Tillery]

So it's Yes then?,, all both app's have hidden tri's in the objects? it just shows up after you hit the triangulate button.?

[Pony]

yes any app can and does have hiden tri's. if its showing 4 sides or more to a poly face, there are 2 or more tri's there. the triangle is the absalute simplest form of a surface as you can have. So eveyrthing geo in 3d is bilt on them. Just like 1's and 0's are the simplest form of information.

PS, good to see ya around R-Tillery

[R-Tillery]

Hey hey Pony,, Yea my mod keeps me busy as hell which brings me back to This awesome site, For some reason I always thought that Maya planer mapped every thing in quads till they got triangulated I have a lot of team Members that use Max and when we use the FBX exporter it sends every thing in Tri’s when their in quads because of Max’s editable mesh functions and the fbx is a pain to work with because of the vertex separation it causes when exporting and the UV’s issues. My kingdom for a better exporter. ;)

[Pony]

well I would think if max is anything like maya in this.. that if you cut tri's out of any quads how you want just befor you export.. the UV's will get the update just fine.. and it would stop the seprations.. just a idea.

If I remember right mike normaly worked only with tri's anyway to keep form having that paroblem.. really have no idea though . memeory so vage.. he would know though what to do about it..

[n8man]

Hi there!

Somewhat related: I was getting ready to export to .dts (for Torque) and part of the instructions are to hit Polygon > Triangulate from the header menu... but I don't have that option! Is there a way to may the Polygon menu appear in the header? I found a way to assign a hotkey to that feature, but that's bunk.

Thanks,
n8

[R-Tillery]

There is a edit polygons tab and Polygons tab,, what one are you clicking? It should be in the Polygons tab about 12 rows down?;)

[n8man]

Hey, thanks for paying attention to old posts! It wasn't using a tab, or shelf (or whatever they're called). I'm following instructions on exporting from my local college and I'm using a fresh install of Maya 7.0 unlimited. Within their instructions (and I have screen shots) the header menu reads: File, Edit, Modify, Create, Display, Window, Edit Curves, Surfaces, Edit NURBS, Polygons, Edit Polygons, etc. However, in my clean install, the Header Menu reads File, Edit, Modify, Create, Display, Window, Animate, Deform, Skeleton, Skin, Constrain, Character, Help. So, maybe since I'm new the confusion is stemming from something that all you veterans take for granted. I'm still in the dark.

Update: I figured it out, dinking around. I had to change the Menu Set to "Modeling". I knew it was a n00b mistake.

Thanks for paying attention!

n8