Maya 'Global Scale Widget' Problem

[mrmonkah]

Hey again peeps,

Im following a video tutorial and there are 1 or 2 things that im just not getting! My first concern is the move/scale/rotate widget. I know that in order to move/scale/rotate in the global axis i have to press the little circle just to the outside of the widget. Sometimes this works great and my widget jumps to the middle of the verts, edges or faces im wanting to transform.

HOWEVER, hlaf of the time my widget jumps away, making it impossible to see what im actually trying to transform. As in the image.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v630/ ... widget.jpg

As you can see, ive already made one edge extrusion towards the middle using the global setting on the widget, but when i come to make my second extrusion towards the centre and click the little circle on the widget it jumps to the bottom of the geometry and THEN scales everything towards IT making all kinds of strange looking geometry.

Any help? As ive said, it seems to happen about 50% of the time, a little odd in my eyes!

Secondly, in the video tut i am watching, when the guy deletes a face (For any reason) and then selects the edges, extrudes them to the nearest edge (to fill in the gap) and merges the verts together.....He has a thick blue line indication 'open' geometry which then turns pale once the verts are merged. Obviously a great help so you can see which verts still need merging. Any idea how to turn this effect on?

Thanks in advance,

Dan

[Warby]

i don't understand the pivot problem enough to say something helpful

but the EFFECT is to be found under "display ---> polygon components ---> border edges or maybe he uses the append polygon tool they highlight border edges aswell

[mrmonkah]

Hey, thanks for the advice so far.......... as for the widget problem, if you take a look at the pic again, you can see that the widget is FAR from the centre of the edges selected. 'Normally' the widget would be centred on those edges to have a global and/or equal effect on all the edges.

[hessi]

click in this yellow circle thingy. this is some kind of lock for the action pivot.

if you lock the pivot each time the pivot will be at the same place for the action you want to apply. rotate tool got its own pivot, such as move and scale do.

just click the yellow circle to set it back to the defaults

edit: sometimes especially while using the extrude tool my pivots start to fuck up. delete the history of your model and it should work

[mrmonkah]

Yo hessi,

Ever the savior! Clicking the yellow circle simply reverts to the local co-ordinates and doesn't achieve the desired transform! Deleting the history i think is the best bet, though i am yet to try out this!

Thus far ive used simple work arounds that take perhaps 3 times as long as the simplistic 'global' co-ords that appear on the video tuts.

Alas, all is not lost, just that things take longer. Boo hoo!

D