Need to create a tail: Maya Modeling & Animation
 

Hello all,

I am going through the learning Maya modeling and animation book and I am stuck. I am on page 65, if that matters, where I am supposed to select the right half of the body and delete it. I understand what the book is trying to get me to do and I can do it with the supplied scene from the disk, but not with my model. With my model, I can't seem to isolate just the one side to delete it. How can I do this?

Also, I am having trouble figuring out how best to extrude the tail. I think that using a curve to extrude the faces would be the best, but I get the same result when I try to extrude the faces individually: The faces crisscross each other every time I try to extrude them. It's frustrating. I think I need to line up the vertices on the same plane somehow. Any suggestions for either of my issues would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

You may need to use splitpolygon tool to cut certain faces to make it even down the middle.

If you don't want symmetry you don't need to have it... it just makes it easier to model and takes up 1/2 the texture space (just mirror everything over)

Unfortunately, I am unclear as to what the split poylgon tool has to do with my dillema. I must be ignorant about other features of this tool or how to use it. I have always used the tool to essentially add more faces through verticies. My problem is that I need to align these vertices on the same plane somehow or come up with another solution.

I apologize if I misunderstood your post, or I misrepresented my issue. If so, could you please elaborate on your suggestion? Thanks.

I guess you ahve to align all the edge vertices on your middle axis? If that's your problem, select all of them, (you might want to do this in the front view and turn x-ray on to make sure you don't accidentaly select other ones) now go to the scale tool and and scale towards the center in x direction. If you check your help line it gives you numerical information. Scale until it shows 0 or something very close to it. Now with your vertices selected hold down the x key to activate grid snapping switch to the move tool and pull them toward the center axis.
They should now all be nice and alligned, and you model ready for mirroring.

I hope it helped

Didn't work.
 

I'm sorry, but I tried your suggestion and it didn't work. It doesnt snap the verticies into a plane. Any other thoughts? I've attached a picture of the file, maybe it will help explain what I'm talking about. Thanks again for everyones help so far.

The problem is that the middle vertices are not aligned with the external vertices of the 4 faces I am trying to extrude.

I don't really know. I don't think I know enough to help you. The only thing I could think of is don't extrude the tail but model a seperate piece of geometry and use boleans to attach it.
Maybe there is some senior member out there who knows the answer to this one. I can ensure you I know how you feel, being stuck in maya with thousands of buttons and nothing works.:headbang:

good luck anyway