View Ports
 

Hi, i started yesterday with maya, i know lightwave fairly well but at the uni i am going to they use maya so i am learning that. I am currently modeling a dragon and i want it to be smooth looking, so i found smooth proxy, But i was wandering if there is a way to toggle between the smooth poly look and the box poly look, or as i was messin with proxy poly i managed to view both before box and smooth polys at once, so i thought if i use 2 prespective views and move them apart from eachother, then when i edit the box poly i can see the effect on the smooth poly, but for some reason the 2 prespective windows act together, so if i rotate around the object on the top view it does on the bottom, is there anyway to make these independant to each other? or toggle between the smooth without using ctrl+z (on lightwave i cud easily toggle using the tab button, is there a simular shortcut in maya?)



This bit has nothing to do with view ports just wandered what a few shortcuts were :) and if u know them i would greatly apreciate it if you told them me :)

Extrude, Bevel, knife (to cut polys in half or in any angle i wish), merge points, merge polys.

Also in lightwave you can select polygons in a clockwise or anticlockwise way and press 'create poly' and it will make a polygon usin the points is there a simular thing in maya? (i dont just want to cap the end because if there is an opening of 8 points i might want to make 2 polygons of 4 points instead of caping which would make 1 polygon of 8 points i think.

Sorry about that massive essay :P

Thanks, Matt

View Ports

You can use expressions to drive view ports just like anything else. Try this. Create a new prepective view, and open your channel box. Click on the translate X channel and then right click and select "create Expression".

This will open the expression editor and paste this in there and hit edit:

translateX = persp.translateX;
translateY = persp.translateY;
translateZ = persp.translateZ;
rotateX = persp.rotateX;
rotateY = persp.rotateY;
rotateZ = persp.rotateZ;

You will not be able to drive the new persp view, but when you change the original, the second will follow. Then you can do something like set the expression to read:

translateX = persp.translateX + 100;

This will make the views similar, but offest 100 in X.

Smoth Proxy

You can make mel buttons with the name of the display layers but typing the following in the command line and dragging the text to your shelf.

layerEditorLayerButtonVisibilityChange layer1;

layer1 would be replaced by the name of your layer. It will toggle the layers on and off.

Hope this helps.