Move Vertice A Given Distance Along Its Normal

[bmosborn]

Hello,
I am having some trouble with a procedure I thought would be straight forward. I would like to poke a polygon face, then select the new central vertice and move it a user defined distance in the direction of its normal. Because the faces associated with the new vertex were created from the poke they should share the same normal as the single original face which was poked. This should save me from having to average the face normals that are returned with something like polyNormalPerVertex -q -xyz. Instead I would only need to query the normals of one of the vertex faces (any will work) and then move the vertice along that normal. I have started in this way (this is after the poking which is all working fine).

//convert selected vertice to its faces
string $mySelection[] = ls -sl;
string $vFaces[] = polyListComponentConversion -fv -tf ($mySelection[0]);

//cheat here b/c all faces have the same normal; so call one face's normals
string $faceNorm[] = polyInfo -faceNormals ($vFaces[0]);
print ($faceNorm);

// Result: FACE_NORMAL 3: 0.000000 0.000000 -1.000000

But am struggling with where to go from here. I am having trouble knowing what to do with the face normal I have queried - I think it may need to be unitized? It doesn't seem right that its all 0,s and 1's.

Does anyone have experience with this or can anyone recommend a good place to start - since I think I may be going at it the wrong way...
thanks

[ewerybody]

hey hello! I have quite some experience with normals stuff.

first: what do you mean with "poke"?
you mean you insert a hole? or what?

have a script example or a screenshot?

btw: here is a handy wrapper for the stoopit maya polyInfo-command:

CODE
global proc vector[] getFaceNormals(string $faces[])
{
     if (!size($faces))
         $faces = polyListComponentConversion("-tf");

     vector $vectors[];
     int $sizeVectors = 0;
     string $polyInfoShit[] = polyInfo -fn $faces;
     string $parts[];
     for ($line in $polyInfoShit)
     {
         $parts = stringToStringArray($line, " ");
         $vectors[$sizeVectors++] = <>;
     }
     return $vectors;
}

see, if you use polyListComponentConversion you don't need to get the selection if you don't use it at all. In your case:
CODE
string $vFaces[] = polyListComponentConversion -fv -tf;
would do very fine.

[bmosborn]

by poke I mean to select a face and:
[codebox]polyPoke -ws 1 -ltx 0 -lty 0 -ltz 0 -ch 1;[/codebox]

or something like it. if you did it to one face of a cube it would triangulate the face into 4 faces - giving you one new vertice in the middle of the face. What I am trying to do is move that one new vertice in the direction of its normal. And since all of that vertice's faces share the same normal I should be able to just query one of the vertice face's normals and then move the vertice in that direction. but I have a few problems after that. One is that I think I need to unitize the normals because they are coming out 0's and 1's only and Im not sure what to do with that. Thanks for the wrapper. I will play with it a bit.

[visualfx]

you could take a look at the moveVertexAlongDirection command. it may be of some use to you.

[ewerybody]

or select the vertex change to normal mode and let the user slide it..

CODE
manipMoveContext -edit -mode 3 Move;

[bmosborn]

HA!
moveVertexAlongDirection -n;
who knew!?
thank you