I need to get a surface to bulge towards its center but keep its edges fixed. I thought I could use the border selection, make it soft, and invert it but I didn’t know how to get from the border selection to the vertices, and besides, since it was a poly all its interior verts vanished. I thought that I found the solution in the relax modifier but it’s not working the way the help file suggests - i can’t even get negative values even though they have them in the examples.

anyone have any ideas? imagine a piece of cloth, or stretchy fabric that’s glued or pinned around its edges to another surface but is allowed to dangle and swell in its interior...help? thanks!

first off to get the vert selection from your border, hold down Ctrl then click on the vertex sub object selection in the command panel.

more importantly if you want you object to bulge in the middle your going to have to add more detail into the centre polygon, otherwise it will never bulge. Try using the cut or connect tools. Alternatively you could add a quadify mesh modifier, then another edit poly modifier then start pushing and pulling verts.

Quad Core Xeon X5355 - 8GB DDR2 - nVidia Quadro FX 4600 - 3Ds Max 2010

thanks for those tips! very useful

can you think of a way to do what I want without manually selecting vertices? Imagine a very uneven pie crust - as in not perfectly, or even close to circular - and i need it to be pinned at the edges but swell in the center....

Soft Selection, Vertices, and set the Edge Distance? You will, as noted above, need sufficient detail on that surface to be able to do this.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

I did something like that just recently for the subway entrances in a near-futuristic city.

what I did was select two or 3 polygons in the general shape of my bulge (two or three because I needed the bulge to be elongated, but if you want it circular select 1, 4, or any square number)and then simply moves the polygons upwards. I applied relax to make the shape a little curvier. Then I selected all of the vertices in the bulge and applied mesh smooth.

since your surface is uneven, you could also use the align function in edit poly to ensure all of the vertices in the bulge are even before applying relax.

hope this helps, remember to experiment to find the best technique for you.

3ds Max Design 2012/Maya 2012
Intel Core i7 3.07 GHz, 8gb RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6950
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 x64

thanks everyone! I will give it a go when I have a moment. About the last poster’s suggestion, so I select those inner plolygons but with a soft selection fall off? actually that might work...I wonder about insetting from the edge and taking the interior polygon.....anyways, there’s alot to play with. about the relax modifier, is there a reason mine doesn’t allow negative values?

Emperor Toe 27 November 2009 04:04 AM

quadify mesh modifier

where can I find that - I’m using max 9 - I don’t see a quadify mesh modifier…

The Quadrify Mesh Modifier is new in Max 2010 so you won’t have it.

Note. This kind of confusion could be reduced if everyone would put their Max version (and brief system specs) in their sig…

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

is there a way to add detail to a poly without tesselating? is there a way to get a regular grid?