Bending Verts in Maya

[Goldensly]

I'm having trouble figuring out how to do a bend function in maya. Basically taking a 10x40 unit straight plane and bending it so its a 90 corner. I'm trying to do this without having to push and pull verts.

[dabu]

try extrude along a path

[Goldensly]

I'm specifically trying to find a way to bend without doing that, to save time when tweaking course ideas I'm trying out.

[Goldensly]

I got the answer I was looking for from a friend. Thanks for the help :)

[Hans Schrijvers]

So...how does it work?

[Goldensly]

ah hehe, guess I should have posted that. So the tool I was looking for to bend the geometry after it was already made was the non-uniform bend tool. I had tried to use this tool before I made this post but I wasn't using it the right way apparently.
(Visual Demo at the bottom)

To use the tool you select either a full piece of geometry or select the verts you want to bend. In my case I selected verts because I made straight away track and wanted to make it curve at the end. After you made your selection you to go the Animation Tool Set from the Drop Down Menu. Then its Create Deformers > Non-Linear > Bend. After you select the tool a line guide will appear. It's very important that you line this up with selection you want to bend. After you've set the guide, select the object you are bending (if you made a vert selection, you dont have to reselect the verts just select the object.) and in the INPUTS box on the right there will be a bend option. The bend tool will only affect the geometry or verts you selected. So if you selected the last 5 rows of verts for your selection, only those rows will be affected by tool. Select Bend and then tweak the curvature setting to get the angle of curve that you want.(I recommend selecting and middle mouse dragging the option to get an understand of what numbers mean which angles because its not a 1:1 ratio with the angle you want. Ex: 1.5 gave me the 90 degree turn I wanted.) After you've set the curvature you'll notice that both sides of your selection bend. If you only wanted one side of the selection bent and not both, that's where Low Bound and High Bound settings come in. Think of this as a strength control. In my case I lowered the Low Bound because I only wanted one side to bend not both. What it did was shorten the guide for that side taking away the bend from the side I didn't want. I don't know how consistent it is as Low Bound = Left Side of my selection, High Bound = Right Side of selection, but that's the way it was in my case. If you do your bend's in wireframe then you'll have a better understanding of the low bound, high bound funtions, if you aren't already working it in wireframe. Also, once you delete the history from this object, the tool will disappear so if you still wanted to tweak more with it, you'll have to reapply it.

I would like to note that Shon did go over this in my class when he came in to demo. But I couldn't remember how to do it from the demo he did since he covered a variety of things. And it didn't help I couldn't find the post that Xeon said he made with the notes from Daisuke.

So yup, thats what I was looking for :)

[Goldensly]

cont

[Goldensly]

cont

[Goldensly]

cont

[Goldensly]

end

[Hans Schrijvers]

Uh, yes, actually I knew about that already. I guess the problem that I thought you were describing was how to make the bend to be exactly 90 degrees. Usually when I use the bend deformer, getting an exact 90 degree bend without any further vertex tweaking isn't that straightforward.

Thanks though for the elaborate tutorial.

[Goldensly]

heh np, I figured I'd do the tutorial for anyone who didn't :)

[SpiralFace]

The bend deformer is a fantastic deformer for modeling.

In fact, many of the non-linear deformers work out quite well for uniform manipulation.