Turn Silhouette into Curve?

[molemansd7]

I was just playing around with an idea for creating control curves. I thought it would be neat to take an orthographic silhouette of an object (polygonal), and turn its outline into a curve. Sadly, I haven't been able to find a process to go about this. I was hopine someone here may have some thoughts or ideas on how to make this happen. Thanks!

-mole

[joojaa]

backface cull the object. then find all open edges and turn those into curves and attach.

[molemansd7]

Sounds promising, but I'm still a bit confused. Are you just referring to backface culling in the display settings? Any direction with commands or other info would be helpful. I'm not too familiar wit hte geometry side of things. Thanks!

[highend3djojan-]

a doubt here - Hw can v find the open edges using MEL wen backface cull is on?

[joojaa]

Are you just referring to backface culling in the display settings?

No i mean you to do the actual backface culling. After that theres a conversion option in maya selection cosntraints to do that.

PS: this is actually quite close  how your image also gets drawn

[joojaa]

Oh by the way if you dont mind loosing the scale then this is pretty easy (assuming you dont run on a maya 2008, 2009 mac or 64 bit version)

[molemansd7]

Thanks so much for the response. Its neat investigating this new side of Maya. I'm an animator by trade, so I don't usually ever venture into the modeling stuff. I had no idea that this polySelectConstraints command existed. It's pretty handly.

I basically have the script functioning the way I'd like it to, but I had a quick question I was hoping you could help me out with. In the polySelectConstraint command, there is a '-stateString' flag you can query. I was wanting to do that so I could reset the settings back to what the user had prior to running this script in case they had anything unique setup. But, I can't figure out a way to make the returned string executable in the command. That query returns a string of the necessary MEL command, but how can I use that info to reset the settings?

Example:
polySelectConstraint -q -stateString;

// Result: polySelectConstraint -type 1 -where 1 -nonmanifold 0 ... ; //

[joojaa]

$restoreState = polySelectConstraint -q -stateString;
eval $restoreState;

Anyway you can also use the vector renderer to do this.

[molemansd7]

Awesome! I wouldn't have thought to run the eval command on this guy. I haven't ever had to use it in the scripts I've made up to this point. Thanks so much.

I haven't really looked into rendering stuff either. I'll start picking through the vector rendering stuff and see what it can offer. If you'd be willing, would could you give any more info on that approach? If not, I may be able to piece my way through. Thanks again for you time, effort and knowledge. Its VERY much appreciated.

[joojaa]

I haven't ever had to use it in the scripts I've made up to this point.

good theres not much use for it either. If your using it then 95% of all cases its wrong. But yes it has its uses, as long as you dont loop over lots of evals.