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Extruding edges?


DaJuice

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Hey guys,

I'm trying to do some poly-modeling as opposed to box-modeling, and I have a little issue that's slowing down my workflow.

Everytime I extrude a new edge it will reverse the normal of the extruded poly. It's getting really annoying, and I don't see how this feature could be constructive.

Is there any way to have it keep the normal of the original poly?

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hmm.... from what I recall (ie, not having Houdini in front of me) polyextruding edges will extrude them facing the wrong way. Whether this is a bug or not, I'm not too sure of.

However, I normally just append a reverse SOP and right click (tab, reverse, right click). Since the newly created polys are selected anyway, then its quick to reverse them.

You could even assign this to a hotkey and it will be a simple matter to reverse the polys.

Cheers

Marc

:ph34r:

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Hi DaJuice,

Can you give us an example of when this is happening? In other words, on what kind of geometry are you trying to extrude an edge? How do you pick the edge, that sort of thing? If I take a grid and PolyExtrude the edge out (on the grid's plane) then the new polygon has the right normal...

Thanks.

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  • 2 years later...

Hi altbighead,

The problem is that PolyExtrude uses the order of the edge you specified (of course you didn't do this on purpose) to determine the orientation of the resulting face. For example in the Group field if you had p0-1 will give you a poly with the normal in the opposite direction of the one you get when you specify p1-0 (this is the same edge). However, with the current edge selector, you don't have a choice, so you're stuck, and you have to resolve to the techniques explained here.

The good news is that future versions of PolyExtrude have an 'Orient Edges' option which will make PolyExtrude look at the neighbouring polys to pick an orientation. Hopefully that will just work the way you intend it.

Hope that helps.

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well that's good to hear cause my problem was with all of them facing one direction except for one primitive facing the opposite whenever i wanted to use edge loops..(i.e. go make a poly tube, do a polyextrude and do a loop select of the tops edges, right-click to confirm).. i see why it's doing it and know i can just rotate those edge numbers, but man is that frustrating...

edit:

i just realized that if you want to do edge loop selecting with the polyextrude, you can select your first edge and then reverse the direction of the loop ® and finally make your loop (l).. This seems to put your normals all facing in the same direction..

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how do you get started if not by using a primitive?  draw a curve then extrude that to form a poly, then take it from there? i gret wierd results..

18259[/snapback]

Hi mark,

I just tried it and it seems to be okay -- what kind of weird results do you get? There is a distinction between extruding an open polygon and extruding the edges on that polygon... could that be the issue? The way you can tell which one you're using is in the Group field of the PolyExtrude SOP, if it is blank or just contains numbers, then you're extruding primitives, if it contains strings like "p0-1 p23-45", then you're extruding edges.

Hope that helps.

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hi BoboFancy thanks for the reply - i can see my question wasnt exactly the best. i think what threw me off was that extruding one edge does not extrude other attached ones.. so you need to extrude a couple and then fuse the points. its modelling at a low level which is the idea i guess :)

thanks for your info :)

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