Anyone here possibly make a virtual mirror script?

[joojaa]

Yes yes yes It works exacltly like your virtual mirror as long as the mirroplane position is intact (i mean the script vcan easily be accomodated for a moving mirrorplane but not if the plene hats non planar)! Aloso in teh vide theres nowhere a place where they unplanarice the pirrorplane, Now taht gets hardboiled for teh calculator to do since surrendy the OTHER side sint a mirrored copy anymore casuing the linkage to crash!

The script is however nowhere nearly prduction ready. Im working on a way to fetch teh mirrirplane of a poly. in as easy way as possuble (also looking for a way to sooothe the non connected edge properly,and a cleanupscript companion but ista on my todoolist andd just dropped down in prioritty due to other contracts that came rolling in)

Se i have a working script for this but its not releaseble and only works on x y z planes was hoping to epand taht a bit but...

NOT everything is doable exactly like you want in mel atough if you wish i could do it via the api for you.

My hourly rate is 300$ for stuff like this!

[kjaft]

My hourly rate is 300$ for stuff like this!

In reply to:

Jesus christ... well i was asking for...300 dollars not joking? hmm i was asking this for the maya cg community, i see people ask for it all the time, but they never ask the right places. hmm wow...300 dollars for seriously? my boss who owns his own vfx house does not make close to that....well i dont see you taking the time to go out and do it through API on your own time, my friend said thats the best way anyway...shame cause maya could really benifit from this. so i guess im just going to ask sebastian from byrons poly tools. since im outta people to ask now.

[joojaa]

Very standard rate... se it includes pay for investment as well as taxes and stuff, and the possibility i would need to update it reccompile it, or release the code etc. etc. (you se if i woulld work for you my total tax rate would be about 50%, or initialy 60% but id get moeny back later offcourse), im not suggesting you pay tough.

Besides its not uncommon for a expeert to make more money than his boss from where i come form.

Ps. by the way its quite far fetched to say that keeping the seam is the point. THe point is to se how the final mirrored object looks like.
Vhy do you need it to BE exactly the same i mean it can easily be done 90% of the way without much hustle. I mean whou would work for less than that? I mean i can easily get half this doing anything esle too. Its better than having no tool.

Also its even quite easy if you can live with a fake seam, and ensure planarity of the seam too. Then just dice it when your ready. I mean ITS faar better tthan nothing! ofcourse my advice on this forum is free. I mean i can shouw you on your way but i cat realy work for free, life isnt charity you know.

[kjaft]

umm...i could barley make out any of the bottom half of your last post. i mean if you could make a mel script to keep the seam from opening on the y axis, please do. the verts on the y axis should only move in Y, Z, thast all it needs and, for the other side to update as you model. thats all i was wanting, cause then it would be virtual mirrored.

[joojaa]

As i said you dont realy need a script fo that as i said earlier just make a instance of the object move its pivot to the planeof pivot and scale by 1 -1 1.then group and manipulate the group whenever you move teh object does the exact same thing. But im woekinn on the arbitraty mirror sccript for an hour or so today (because i need to wait for the food to cook anyway.)

[sebastianthiel]

Although I didn`t read the whole post, it seems that your main interest lies in some sort of "mirrorMoving" components.

This is really easy to achive.

But a reall mirror will also work if you change the objects history - and that is where all the trouble starts.

To my mind, it would be really tricky, and even if you make it somehow, it would probably be quite slow - even if you use the API.

If you ask me, Maya is not, by architecture, a good modeller.
Have a look at Max. Its much faster when it comes to changing the topology, just because it doesn`t keep all the history, and probably because it is more eficient internally.

If you change the topology of Maya Meshes via the API, there is so much overhead !

The only good way to have a virtual mirror is to implement your own meshShape in Maya, whose architecture was made to ensure speed in all cases, and which can be accessed more directly ( sure, because you implemented everything yourself ).

This does also mean that the default Maya Mesh Tools like extrude won`t work on this new meshShape, so everything had to be redone.

I am going to do that for BPT 2.0, if I do that.

Finally, I would really suggest that Alias does that Mirror thing, because they have have the best access to they meshes, and to they engine of course.

But will they do ?
Look at their Smooth Proxy thing - its basically a script, which it not as good as CPS ... .

So, are they able to do that ?

To my mind, Alias is not interested in making Maya a better modeler at all, so the chances that they will ever do that, are bad, at least.

Regards,
Sebastian

[joojaa]

Not entirely true but in essence that was what i was trying to say. Its easy to have a mirrored instance taht keeps up with its parent. Its however a bit tricky to foce this into 1 object without sacraficing some usability.

but i was wondering about this and came up with a solution that would work with the api. Its a bit of a roundabout so bear with me. As allways i seem to s emany implementations to thsi so myus olution is rather CANCEPTUAL.

Ok so having a slaved mirror object no problem can be done now.

Merging them, slight problem you could keep the histroy intact wch could work quite well directly in mayas context.

NOW the only problem is this:

When you make the object one whole you need to manipulate the history child that compromises the shape in firstplace. Now to do this youd need to have 2 copies of the object visible. However if there was a way to go around this a bit would be helpfull... Not only in mirror case mind you (make parts not specific tools is my motto, for future use somewhere else).

Method 1: What if we devised a node taht allows you to manipulate vertices of a future node and feed them back to its ancestor, and when it arrives back have it not cycle?

Method 2: Draw a custom component mode taht is actualy the ancestors points...

just for contemplation.

PS. for the original asker do you need some smoothing or subdivision previewing on the object as well as mirroring?

[kjaft]

No jajaa, im really only interested in how wings3d keeps the 'seam' down the middle intact. it never breaks apart, just so useful when modeling. when i am modeling in wings3d, i usually go toggle proxy on to see what it looks like smoothed, i rarley work in a smooth mode. but just the seam down the middle is whats so great about virtual mirror, the verts down the Y axis only move in y and z so you dont have to worry about breaking apart your model.

[kjaft]

yah i know what you mean about just instancing a duplicate in -1 0 0 but that just updates both meshes. i still have my model come apart down the middle. it just got old a long long time ago, having to go back each time your done modeling in that area moving the verts back so there is a seam down the Y axis, its just really annoying and i wish alias would implement it like sebastian said.

[joojaa]

Its doable i just came up with a different approach during luch. Heres where i am currently (sorry this was piror to me sloving the problem of mid seam). Still having one additional problem about how to solve the flipped ormal of thge opposite side.

However ill leave the api excersise to someone else (se theres no way i could do api work without billing someone). Selecting a seam at some specified plane is rather easy to do (after all thtas what the marquee does.)

mirror.mov (14.5 megs), still hshowing the seam problem. se the indexes change. No unovercomable step for a api worker however.

oops typo in link

[kjaft]

that looks really promising jojaa, so are you going to be able to make it so the seam does not break? so it only moves in Y Z? goign to bed now, look forward to your latest upate on were you're at.

[joojaa]

Oh deary deary me... it was a bit simpler than i remebered it was. But to be honest it carries a bit of extra overhead i wished to avoid, oh well. Anyway doing thi sin api makes it sanppier (if it can be made without api it can be mede with the api).

Anyway now conversion to mel!

[kjaft]

so it was not as hard as you imagined? cant wait to test it out.

[joojaa]

No, its directly sortoff implemented in maya 6 now that i finaly had time to take a closer look at its new tools but its not that hard even in maya 5.

Interestingly its implemented in the exact same way too except they have made it cutting in the same run! Fact that they implemented it in mel isnt realy what i was thinking they ought to do! Altough they had slightly niftier matrix translation that i realy didnt think of. (and now im butting my head at the wall).

Anyway i suppose it could be mede into a more easily placeable script.

[campbell]

i wrote a script that keeps seam vertices locked to the mirror plane (during manipulation, not just some post action). it is messy however, falling back on nasties such as scene selection and scriptJobs.

i bet you'll cook up something tidy to deal with this joojaa, so ill wait to see how you handle it before i let my rabid beast out.

[joojaa]

If you want to know what im doing take a look at what the maya 6 misrros sliceplane does my solution is virtualy the same (slightly more work since i want to be able to manpulate on both sides or the mesh). Altouyugh to be hones it coudl use edges as joining surfaces in a pich too probably without braking (in preliminary tests yes seems so).

Altough its rather easy to lock those channels!

[campbell]

im dealing with the mirror plane vertices, with little regard to the mirroring itself. locking channels, if you are referring to locking vertex transform channels doesnt work as you might expect using vanilla attribute locking, and using connections or expressions (as i am), requires a little extra to deal with topological/history modifications (hence scriptJobs monitoring mesh changes). it really does call for an api approach, but that shouldnt stop a mel solution, albeit a bit convoluted. really, you should be able to have an arbitrary mesh that you choose a mirror plane for, and be able to make tweaks across that plane that will be reflected, whether or not they match in exact reflected topology (and if they dont hit across the plane, the tweaks arent made, unless youve got some extra interpolation going on). how are you intending to deal with locking the vertices on their mirror plane? (the idea being that you cant interactively tweak them off it, so the 'merge' holds, and the smoothed result of the mesh remain 'seamless').

[joojaa]

I Am not. I will oershoot the shape cut it and use the cut as a the lockingmechanism.

[campbell]

mmm, potentially sounds fair. a few questions, but might as well wait for your result and let it answer them!

[kjaft]

Jooja, did you ever finish that script? its been a while since i last saw you post. so i figured i would ask if you ever got it done.