Forum: Autodesk Maya
Posted By: gfk
Post Time: 01 January 2018 at 01:04 AM
Text:
I'm trying to extrude a pipe from a curve using extrude and nurbsTessellate, like the helper in bonus tools. A problem is that I often end up with a mesh with inverted normals. Every thread about this is just somebody saying "just flip the mesh normals", which isn't much help since I want this to work automatically as the curve deforms.
I tried orienting the profile curve to the normal of the start of the curve (using a pointOnCurveInfo and an aim constraint), but that only half-works and still flips if I move CVs around.
Does anyone know how the extrude node decides which direction to point normals, or another generic way to fix this? It's definitely related to the orientation of the profile curve (if it's flipped, rotating the profile curve always fixes it), but I'm not sure what the other piece is.
Posted By: gfk
Post Time: 01 January 2018 at 01:04 AM
Text:
I'm trying to extrude a pipe from a curve using extrude and nurbsTessellate, like the helper in bonus tools. A problem is that I often end up with a mesh with inverted normals. Every thread about this is just somebody saying "just flip the mesh normals", which isn't much help since I want this to work automatically as the curve deforms.
I tried orienting the profile curve to the normal of the start of the curve (using a pointOnCurveInfo and an aim constraint), but that only half-works and still flips if I move CVs around.
Does anyone know how the extrude node decides which direction to point normals, or another generic way to fix this? It's definitely related to the orientation of the profile curve (if it's flipped, rotating the profile curve always fixes it), but I'm not sure what the other piece is.