finding/highlighting intersections?
 

hi @ all, i'm new to the forum/maya.

question: is there a function to highlight pieces of geometry that pass through each other?

like a function that tells maya something among the lines of "highlight the faces on this geometry that are currently intersecting someone else's faces".

also, what is the term for this "intersection of geometry" issue? (so i can come up with better google/forum search queries)

thank you

/lex

There are many types of these irregularities... I've encountered mostly 'Non-Manifold Geometry'.

Try the cleanup option under mash.
If the result isn't satisfactory(It usually isn't, at least for me) google MEL cleanup scripts. there should be quite a lot.

Welcome to SM :attn:

Hope this helps,
Benny

Benny, I believe that Lex is referring to seing where two seperate meshes intersect, not one mesh with non-manifold geometry.

Lex - I don't know of any functions right off that do what you're looking for. In theory, you could use 'Mesh->Booleans->Intersection' to give you some idea of which parts of two meshes are intersecting, but that's a little more cumbersome than what it sounds like you want - and there's a couple of downsides to using that method, as well (like having to worry about non-manifold geometry).
As for the term you're looking for, I think I'd be looking for something with 'intersecting geometry'. So you weren't too far off.

thanks guys. from what i've gotten so far, most of the scripts are in the vein of removing/cleaning up weird stuff in meshes as opposed to selecting components.

but maybe i can do something with booleans now that you mention it. boolean->intersection will result in a warning "cannot perform operation" if both arguments to the function are not intersecting. i might somehow manage to write some code to evaluate the result each time during a sequence of boolean operations between each pair of objects in the scene, storing the mesh's name in case the boolean succeeds.

however, the most i'd get out of that would be the knowledge of which meshes are intersecting. i'd still have to manually select each face from each mesh in order to scale it or move it.

plus that's a bunch of boolean/undo operations. sounds like a pretty inefficient hack and even dangerous if maya happens to crash while a boolean->intersection is in progress, haha.

anyway, some serious "intersecting geometry" googling is in order for me.

cheers

/lex

if you go to your preferences check.., highlight edges.

it might help some

mirek :)

Try this:
http://www.henrykorol.com/Scripts/SubdToggle/index.html
That's a good script I ones used for converting polygons to subdivs:

When your geometry includes these problematic sections you cannot convert to subdivs.
This script selects these sections and allows you to either fix them automatically (which works really well) or manually.

Benny

hes need a way to find intersecting geo...

check the maya sdk docs. they might have a script example to find points where 2 geometries intersect.

thank you all for the suggestions.

bennyk: i'll give it a try. that should come in handy when dealing with the non-manifold thingamajig.

vladimirjp: i'm checking the docs right now. the documentation seems pretty clear/friendly so far. cool.

/lex