Maya Plugin Power: Miscellaneous Tools Stitching with Seamour
[FIGURE 3] Turning the Maya Tool Shelf on in the Maya user interface. [FIGURE 4] The Seamour icons with their functions listed below them.
- We need to create a curve based on some of the edges of the polygonal cloth object. Select the polygonal edges of the mesh right down the center of the cloth, as shown in Figure 5. To do this, select the wireframe mesh and press the F10 key. Drag a selection box around the middle edges. If you accidentally select unneeded edges, which is fairly easy to do, you can deselect them by holding the Ctrl key down and drawing a selection box around the offending edges. Selected edges can be hard to see, as they are usually the Maya default light orange color.
- The exaggerated edges selected and shown in Figure 5 must be made into a curve. This can be accomplished by clicking on the Create Curve from Selected Edges tool in the Seamour tool shelf (see Figure 4). The Outliner now lists a new curve node labeled edgeCurve, as shown in Figure 6.
- For this example, we will create orthogonal stitching. These stitches are created by following the edge curve. This may be better viewed with smooth shading on and hardware texturing off. Select the edgeCurve node in the Outliner window and click on the Create Seam with Orthogonal Stitches icon in the Seamour tool shelf (this icon can be referenced in Figure 4). The direct results of this action are shown in Figure 7.
- A multitude of staple-shaped stitches have been replicated along the edge-Curve. They are currently too large and bulky for a realistic look. Let’s adjust them. In the Outliner window, select the seam1 node that has been created. Load the Attribute Editor for the seam1 node.
- Under the Yarn tab in the seam1 Attribute window, toggle the Relative Yarn scale box to off. This may make the seams jump in scale to unusable proportions. Set the Yarn Profile scale value to 0.025. This allows us to scale the profile of the yarn as we see fit. Also make sure that the Extrude Yarn toggle box is checked.
- These stitches look quite large. Let’s make them smaller. Under the Template tab in the seam1 Attribute window, change the Template Scale value to 0.15. The template is a staple-shaped curve that is generated by Seamour to give form to the individual stitches. Figure 8 shows how changing the Template Scale value alters the seams.
[FIGURE 7] Oversized seams now appear on the edgeCurve. [FIGURE 8] The seams start to take shape by scaling the template value down to size.
[FIGURE 5] An exaggerated view of the edges needed to be selected to generate the edgeCurve. [FIGURE 6] The dark line represents the edgeCurve generated and is listed in the Outliner.
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