There is no way to check for for continuity in Maya. You can estimate G3 by eye but judging rate of change of curvature without comb plots and other continuity tools is impossible.
G2 curvature is easier to achieve by simply building the poly cage on top of a nurbs surface. But then when you cut the surface to create a seam you have to once again just play it by feel when placing the supporting edges on either side of the seam as the overall surface curvature will change when you cut it. I always have to re-snap the verts to the nurbs surface and then manually make small adjustments to maintain Tangency (and once again this is all very much by eye).
G1 is trivial and is the only form of continuity that does not require any additional tools to verify and so all you can really say with certainty of any two surfaces that meet at an edge in maya is they are always at least G1.
You can get a very good approximation of G2 and using a chrome environmental shader you can get a similar visual check as with a chrome shader in an actual surfacing application. But once again there is no zebra shader or comb plot with Maya so it's all touchy feely.
NOTE: The above applies to trying to capture Nurbs surface continuity when converting to polygons. Maya does have crude and I mean very crude Nurbs tools to create fillets and rounds and sew surfaces with G2 continuity.
Thank you
. I'm going to try that. Bleck some of those limitations make me wish I used a different software for modeling, but I can't find any plugins or anything that truly build upon the base tools in a technical manner. Maya can be an incredibly annoying program to model in. I picked it up due to its popularity over other packages here, but I wish I had something with tools that provide better accuracy from a technical standpoint combined with the ability to import to maya without a huge amount of artifact issues. Alias is cost prohibitive unfortunately.
Edit: edited version noted, I will take a look at those
Last edited by tkev; 23-12-2011 at 05:00 AM.