Basic Extrude Issue

[CJI]

This is something that has been frustrating me for a while so i thought i would ask and see how others deal with this and see if i am just missing something. Its amazing how silly little things like this can still trip you up sometimes!

 

Say you start with a plane which you subdivide and do all sorts of changes to. Then you decide you want some depth so you have to extrude the polys. But because you want both sides you want to retain the starting polys to maintain the geometry and close the shape.

 

Essentially this is like capping the ends but i cant just cap them as the geometry is more complex and i need to keep that geometry. For example holes in a mesh.

 

The way i have been doing it is to duplicate the entire mesh as an element moving along an axis. Flip the normals, and then bridge the borders. This works adequately for a flat shape but as soon as it becomes crved in any way there is no way to do this with any accuracy. I was hoping there was a better way to achieve this. I will post an example to explain.

[Nic H]

shell?

[CJI]

See! there you go. I knew it was staring me in the face. Apologies for the rather simple question i've been using Maya for ages and i am still bending my head around the Max workflow. I keep forgetting that simple things like this exist.

 

Thanks for that Nic.