A perfect circle in a poly world...

# 1 01-12-2008 , 10:57 AM

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Can someone tell me if I'm losing my mind or not? I've been road-testing Maya 2009 and did some simple modeling tests last night, specifically modeling a perfectly circular hole (or extrude) in a poly mesh. Smooth Preview (or Smooth with 2 divisions) both show the hole as slightly elongated. I swear I remember in past versions the hole shapes being more circular but maybe it's always been this way and I've just never noticed. Here's the simple test if anyone would like to play along and let me know the results.

1) Create a cube or plane with some divisions

2) Split across a couple or faces following the attached image (basically creating an "x").

3) Now, poly split the shape of a circle (use snapping)...it should be an octaganal shape like in the image.

4) Now, either delete the face and smooth or extrude the face down a few times (1st extrude slightly moved down, 2nd extrude, down farther, 3rd extrude, slightly down like the first one) and smooth.

Confirm that this is or isn't perfectly circular and what version of Maya you're using.

On an off note, I CAN tweak verts to make things close to perfectly circular. I'm just curious if something changed between versions that requires tweaking. Or If I'm seeing some kind of camera distortion...or if I need new spectacles...or if I'm just going completely daft.

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# 2 01-12-2008 , 05:32 PM

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Looks pretty good to me:

Maya 09:

Oh, and the selected ring in the center of the smooth hole, is a nurbs circle, for comparison.

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# 3 01-12-2008 , 05:35 PM

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thinking too much dude.., go to the beach for a while.., a little imperfection is fine.., it will always be there.., everywhere.., not just maya.., and for the record.., looks like a circle to me

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# 4 02-12-2008 , 03:36 AM

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Actually, yours looks more circular that what I'm getting. Check it out. This is with snapping divisions set to 3 which is what I remember always using. Maybe I need more divisions to better match the center verts. I can always scale them out to get something close to a perfect circle...I just remember doing it all in one step. Weird.

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# 5 02-12-2008 , 07:10 AM

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have you tried dialing up advanced tessellation.., say to 8 or 9.

that MIGHT help.

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# 6 02-12-2008 , 11:53 AM

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Considering that's a NURBS attribute and this is a polygon mesh, that makes no sense. In any event, I can use the circle as a guide and scale in the verts to make things more circular. I simply wanted to test if the oblong shape was something I just noticed or if it was that way with past versions.

I'm pretty much done with the overall 2009 testing and am heading back to 2008. Unfortunately, in my case, I'm experiencing too many instability issues on my old XP box. with the way 2009 caches RAM. For example, doing the simple examples above drove my CPU processes up to 97% percent, freezing up everything...this happened three times in a row and apparently from what I've read at CGtalk is a common issue. There are some new features I like but nothing that would prevent me from getting any work done so....well, there you have it.

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# 7 02-12-2008 , 08:57 PM

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Yeah I'm with you on that one.

I'm experiencing too many issues with it. Every time I open a model in Maya, either from a previous version, or another format (mostly obj files) Maya hits a fatal error.

O'well :hug:

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# 8 02-12-2008 , 11:13 PM

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I ended up deleting my user prefs tonight as 2009 started 'not recognizing' mentalray and actually crashed when I tried manually loading the plugin...nice. I'll give it a little more play but at this point, I'd be more than a little nervous starting a large project with it. We'll see. There are a few modeling tests I did before that would cause it to crash so I'll continue and see if it's still acting squirrely or if deleting the user prefs solved any issues I was having.

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# 9 03-12-2008 , 02:01 AM

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Strange, not had a problem at all with it, still can go back and forth between 09 and 08 (for plug ins etc) with no probs, no crashs importing, modeling texturing dynamics run fine, or anything.

Maybe its become really picky with comp specs?

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# 10 03-12-2008 , 06:01 AM

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Not sure but I'm still having issues with it even after deleting the prefs. Sometimes it seems fine, then when I start getting comfortable using it, something unexpected happens...last night it was drawing a closed curve within another closed curve. As soon as I'd draw the second CV of the inner closed curve, the entire thing would freeze. This happened several times in a row before finally working. A few days ago, the app made the mouse cursor flicker non-stop. Memory leaks as well. Very bizarre. I've never had these kinds of issues with any prior version of Maya so it is indeed a bit perplexing.

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# 11 03-12-2008 , 10:19 AM

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actually, I think the fact that you're getting a distorted circle may have more to do with the fact that you polygon 'circle' cutout isn't circular to begin with - in the second set of pictures, the vertices on the cardinal directions (up/down/right/left) are farther out than the ones on the 45 degree divisions (leastways, what I can see from this shot).

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# 12 03-12-2008 , 10:33 AM

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You're correct. I just thought I remembered snapping and splitting a hole this way to form a perfect circle but I can see why it isn't. You should also be able to, instead of splitting the octagon shape, select the central vertax and 'chamfer vertex' it then scale it out for a hole shape—at least this is how it works in Max—but while maya creates the appropriate amount of vertices, the shape is square, so you end up grabbing all the middle vertices and uniformly scaling them out into the octagonal shape. Like I said, not a big deal. I know how to "get 'er done'...was just wondering if I was remembering something wrongly or not.

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