"hidden edges" in Maya?

[ralp99]

• so I am from the Max camp, see. I need to bone up on the lowpoly modeling in Maya too though, so I have been trying my best to adapt my methods - only sometimes things don't always come so smoothly. Here's my issue, a seemingly basic one.. you make a simple poly cube right, and go to display/poly options/show triangles. So you see "dotted lines' representing the "hidden edges" making up the full faces, aside from the otherwise SELECTABLE edges that make up the face. Now in max, when you make these hidden edges visible, you can select and manipulate them as you would a normal, visible edge. Not so in Maya - apparently you must first select the appropriate face(s), triangulate, and THEN detach and etc. to do the dirty work?

Perhaps a little whiny, but it seems a lot of xtra work to me. Is there some easier method I am missing if I just want to select the actual 3-sided polygons that are being shown (and as I said, their hidden edges) - if not in the main prog, than some script to do this or something? I have been doing my research and so far, no luck.

Thanks for reading..

-r
http://www.slipthru.com

[joojaa]

Yeah thats because max works with triangles and maya works with true polygons so a five sided face is truly five sided, not just a triangulated face where the edges are hidden...

edity edit

hmm sorry why do you need to detach? besides its much easier to use poly split instead of triangulate functions for thiskind of work.. also checkout drawsplit itll make your workflow even faster (while youre at it gat the games dev poverpack too, and the other poly scripts that make loops etc)!

[fsx]

Joojaa, max has got true polys from version 4 and up.
instead of editable mesh, you use editable poly, very much like maya.

to the topicstarter:
coming from max, you must have used editable poly right? the same workflow applies to maya, you actually dont NEED the hidden edges anymore. if maya triangulates a poly wrong, just add an edge in the right direction with the 'split polygon' tool.
if you are coming directly from the editable mesh method (as it sounds) read up on the difference between meshes and polys.

i promise you you'll never want to go back to normal meshes.