Login or Sign Up (Free)
Lost your Password?

Note: As of Maya 2014, NEX has been officially integrated into Maya and is now branded as the Modeling Toolkit (MTK).
New FeaturesOverviewCustomer SuccessesFAQGet NEX

NEX is a unique plug-in for Maya that includes a set of tools designed to increase the speed, accurracy, and efficiency of your workflow. Frequent actions like of manipulating components within Maya become more natural due to the unique integration of all the NEX selection and transformation tools. Arduous jobs like resurfacing meshes can actually be fun using the NEX Quad Draw tool. Common polygon modeling tasks like Splitting faces, Connecting edges, or beveling have been reworked with maximum efficiency and interactivity in mind. Best of all, NEX does all this without leaving any custom nodes in your scene, or introducing any scene plug-in depdendencies.

Increasing Integration

Switching between tools takes extra time, and generally takes the artist out of their flow. The idea behind NEX is to keep tool switching to an absolute minimum. Functions that are commonly used together, such as pick selection, marquee selection, Loop/Ring selection, translation along normals, soft modifications, raycast selection, Extrude, and even sliding can all be done within one tool.

Increasing Interactivity

Guesswork leads only to mistakes and frustration, so the concept of previewing is used liberally throughout NEX. Just about all of the features within NEX allow you to see what will happen before you actually make it happen.

We've found that really focusing on these two categories can result in a much, much speedier workflow.




Quad Draw Tutorial Part 1 of 3
  
Basic overview video illustrating Quad Draw features and hotkeys

Quad Draw Tutorial Part 2 of 3
  
This video will take you through the process of preparing your mesh for resurfacing by toggling see-through and freeze. Also will show you how to enable surface slide within the NEX menu that will allow for Quad Draw and the transform tools to slide along the reference mesh. As a reminder, you can also use the built in duplicate instance option to get a basic mirror function within Quad Draw.

Quad Draw Tutorial Part 3 of 3
  
Quickly fill in big gaps by using the built in insert-edge-loop function that automatically snaps to the reference mesh. Use the transform tools to slide your resurfaced mesh with soft-selection. Extrude edges along the reference mesh with slide to quickly draw new quad faces.

Partial Feature List:

  • Quad Draw
  • Creating polygons has never been more fun. With Quad Draw you can interactively create your polygon surface on the grid or import a reference mesh and rebuild its topology to make an animation ready mesh in minutes.
  • Preselection Highlighting
  • Components highlight as you hover your cursor over them, so you'll know exactly what you'll be selecting before you click. The highlights also find the closest component to your cursor so that you don't have to be meticulous about creating component selections. Highlighting is integrated throughout the entire NEX toolset, including the interactive Extrude, Bevel, Target Weld, Tweak, Transform, Pivot Adjustment, Soft Selections, and Quad Draw.
  • Fully Integrated Ring / Loop selection
  • Quickly select a full or partial loop/ring of any component type (vertex, edge, or face) within any mode (select, move, rotate, or scale) simply by double-clicking.
  • Other selection features
  • Raycast Selection, Component Selection Preservation, Select Similar, and a fully integrated Soft Selection tool are just a few of the other selection features.
  • Slide Components
  • Slide any component type (edge, vertex, face) along the surface of the current mesh or along a different object's mesh using any transform tool (move, rotate, or scale). You can also use the quick Ctrl+Shift+Middle-click-drag to slide along the active axis. On high resolution meshes, combine the NEX Soft Selection option with Slide for even greater power.
  • Custom Coordinate Space
  • Move, Rotate, or Scale your components along any direction or position. Want to move faces along another face normal? Within the NEX Custom Pivot mode, Ctrl-Click to define your Custom Coordinate Space.
  • Vertex Locking
  • Lock vertices from being transformed. This is especially useful when dealing with symmetry, where the center row of verts sometimes need to stay put.
  • Tweak
  • Within any transform tool, you can quickly tweak highlighted components along any axis using the middle-mouse-button.
  • Integrated completely within Maya
  • Very versatile options dialog -- change every default option and behavior of NEX.
  • Other Misc features
  • Safe Frame, fully customized Tab Key, Target Weld, interactive and 'g' hotkey repeatable mesh editing tools, Custom Hotbox Marking Menu, plus many, many more...

 

spacer.png, 0 kB
Subscribe to me on YouTube