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Maya Hotkeys: PolyCrease / Select only Hard edges · Apr 2, 8:29pm

Maya 7 added a feature called polyCrease, an extension of smooth proxy. It allows you to control the amount of crease on an edge from the proxy cage to the smoothed model. However the default implementation in maya is somewhat lack luster.

Currently you select an edge apply the tool and middle mouse drag to set the hardness – not bad but quite tedious after awhile. This workflow can be improved quite drasitcally with some simple hotkeys:

The mel command for polyCrease is:
“polyCrease -value [double];” – where [double] is a value between 0.0 and 1.0.

I’ve got three hotkeys set one to 0.0(off) one to .5 (semi creased) and one to 100 (full) 1.0 doesn’t seem to create a truely harsh crease so I just jacked the value up and it works like a charm.

However to take real advantage of this it’s nice to be able to quickly select all the hard edges on the cage which is where polySelectConstraint comes in handy. This allows you to put constraints on the subobject selection you make.

For example the mel: “polySelectConstraint -m 3 -t 0×8000 -sm 1;” Filters your current selection to only hard edges and limits you from selecting any edge that isn’t hard. To remove all the filters on edge hardness use: “polySelectConstraint -sm 0;” and the filter will be removed from your current/future selections.

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