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Slide On Surface Of Mesh:

The Slide on Surface Of Mesh section was built exclusively for retopologizing or shifting vertices around a mesh for better edge flow. All the custom Brushes are built to work with the sliding features. This means if you have an object enabled as a slide object, you can move, smooth, or use Poly Build on top of it. You can also Model on top of this using the Advanced Modeling Tool. However, any modeling functions do not automatically snap to the loaded Mesh. You must move or smooth the vertices in order for them to snap.

HOW TO USE:

There are two main ways to use this feature. You can either load an object to use as a mesh to slide on, or slide on the current mesh you are editing. By default, you will see text that says "Load Object, or slide on itself". This will tell you what state the tool is in. If you see this text, and you click the checkbox called "Enable Brush Sliding", you will slide on the current mesh you are editing.

SELF SLIDING:

Self sliding will allow you to slide on the current mesh you are editing. It works by using the current vertex volume as the mesh to slide upon. This means that after you do a tweak to the mesh, the next time you slide, the mesh will use the updated points to slide upon.

Example:

Notice how "Enable Brush Sliding" is checked and the text reads "Load Object, or slide on itself". By using the Grab Brush and Moving and Smoothing, you will see the points stay on the surface volume. After each time you relase the mouse, the mesh will update the volume it uses for the next time you tweak.

When you are done, just uncheck "Enable Brush Sliding" and you will go back to the normal use of the brushes.

SLIDING ON ANOTHER OBJECT:

The main use of this functionality is the ability to use another higher polygon object to retopologize on or slide on. The tool was optimized to handle a fairly large amount of polygons as the loaded object. However, I would recommend using the least amount of polygons as possible for the most amount of interactivity. For the most part, you should only require an amount of polygons that holds the shapes you are trying to hit. There is no need to bring in a multi million polygon object with pore details in order to retopologize.

LOADING A SLIDE OBJECT:

There are two different ways to load an object as the slide object. The first is to select the mesh and click the "load button". This will most likely bring up a prompt asking you if you want to delete any history on the object. This is recommended. If you click yes, you will see the mesh turn a transparent color with a spec value on it. There are two sliders in the Slide section that allow you to control how transparent the object is and how specular the object is. This is a personal preffernce which may help you to see this object better when sliding.

The above gif shows the first way to load an object. After you click "Load Selected", the "Enable Brush Sliding" checkbox will automatically become enabled. You can switch between sliding on the mesh and not sliding on the mesh by clicking the checkbox on or off without having to unload the object.

The second way to load an object is to click on the "List" button. This will bring up a list of all the polygon objects in the Maya scene to allow you to choose by name which mesh you want to use as the slide object.

UNLOAD SLIDE OBJECT:

When you are done sliding on the object, you will want to unload the object so it returns back to normal with the ability to select it again. This is done by clicking on the "Unload Object" button. Notice how you dont need anything selected. The "Enable Brush Sliding" checkbox will also become unchecked automatically.

SLIDING ANOTHER MESH ON THE SLIDE MESH:

Once you have a mesh loaded, you will see the name of the mesh shown where "Load Object, or slide on itself" was. You can now use any other object in the scene to slide on the Mesh.

In the above example, I used the lower polygon mesh to slide on top of the higher polygon mesh. I am using the Grab Brush and moving and smoothing the mesh on top of the slide mesh. Its that simple!

There are two different ways the vertices can react when moved. By default, the vertices will use the Vertex Normal. This is checked already. You also have the option to use the Camera Normal. If you check this radio button, instead of the vertices projecting along thier own normal, the tool will use the camera's view to do the projection. This can give precision where the other mode might fail.

BREAKING THE SLIDING:

Because the sliding works on the vertex normals, you can get vertices that fly out of control dependent on how the vertex normals lie and how big the radius is. This is a common problem which happens by constantly updating vertex normals while projecting. Here is an example of what can happen.

In this example, the radius is affecting too many verts that all point in different directions. At times you might be alright moving such large amounts at a time while updating all the vertex normals, but typically this does not work so well. In order to not get this effect, lower the radius of the brush and try to move or tweak vertices whose vertex normals are not radically different. You can see that the nostrals cause the biggest problem because of how much the vertex normals change with the surrounding vertices. This is also where switching to "Camera Normal" can help.

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