Help With Hard Edges + Round Objects

[jtburns]

Hi
I'm relevantly new to maya and the modeling proses, however I have picked it up fast. But there is a problem that I keep running into when making complex models, when I want a hard edge on part of a mesh and the rest I want to be rounded and smooth. Now I have tryed a lot of things on my own to try and remedy this problem but most didn't work or gave me poly faces with more or less then 4 sides. I also search the forums and didn't find anything about this problem... ( maybe I just suck at searching forums thou so if it has been asked before... sorry)

( this is an image of the project im working on atm were i have encountered this problem )

The main problem is when I go to use the insert edge loop tool... when I use this tool it make a full loop around the mesh as it should but the problem is that I don't want the whole mesh creased, just the one part. So I tried the split poly tool and that works some but if you don't want to just end the edge and end up with more then a quad or less then a quad, then that does not work ether. I also tried just moving the ploy's after inserting an edge and that was not vary time effective and did not render a smooth round face. There hast to be a better way...

should I just model the armor as a separate object and if so will that animate properly?

So I'm stumped..... and I could really really really use some advice about how the pros get buy this problem...

I have only a formal teaching with polys atm so if the answer involves nurbs please enplane how to do it, I would also like to be able to import them into Zbrush when I get good enough with the program some time down the road.

[saginthebag]

It's a little hard to see because the wireframe is on but I think I might know how to solve your problem.

Select the edge and under the polygons menu go to Normals>Soften Edge.

I hope that fixes it.

[loganb]

yeah one of Maya'sminor annoyances is that all new edges created by poly operations are hard by default.

I have hard/soft edges assigned to 2 hot Keys because of this

[joojaa]

QUOTE(loganb @ 10/02/08, 08:10 PM) [snapback]292720[/snapback]
yeah one of Maya'sminor annoyances is that all new edges created by poly operations are hard by default.

Well you can put the soft hard tolerance for the tools and obviously you can put a soften harden thats last in chain even if some tool does not have this.

Jtburns22 you have a good touch but unfortunately your loops are still way too box modeling ones you'll get better results if you move to do a bit bolder loop patterns. This helps when you need to do a specific shape as opposed to one thats easy to do with the computer and off course it helps in the animation phase too.