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The Interface Upon loading the plugin and activating the tool the Nex interface appears docked to the right of the screen as default and a new menu item is available at the top of the screen through which you can access all of Nex’s features and options. It’s all laid out in a very clear intuitive manner and obviously you have the option to forgo the menus and assign all of the new functions to hotkeys as and when you feel comfortable. 
In the Nex panel you will notice icons corresponding to object/vertex/edge/face and uv selection modes, similar to those seen in Mirai and wings3d but with the addition of a number below each icon. These are helpful because they offer additional information by showing the current number of selected components in the each mode. The default panel view takes up about the same amount of screen space as the channel box so I imagine most people will end up hiding it when they have setup hotkeys and marking menus to the features that they access most often. One thing I really like about the way Nex has been designed is that it fully utilizes the mouse buttons available to it meaning that you can perform many different tasks with fewer hotkeys and menu interactions by using different combinations of the left and middle mouse buttons and the control, alt and shift keys making for a more streamlined modeling environment. The Features
NEX SOFT SELECTION IN ACTION The Nex tool – This is basically a swiss army knife for modeling, it wraps up all of the features list below into one tool and lets the user access the different modes by combining different sticky keys with the left and middle mouse buttons. Raycast selection – Holding Tab whilst the Nex tool is active puts you into raycast selection mode which is an intelligent paint style method of selecting and deselecting components. It’s hard to get excited about this but the one thing I can say about it is that it works in a very intuitive manner and when combined with the enhancements made to the marquee select (holding space bar while dragging a selection box repositions it) you have everything you could reasonably want in this department. Tweak – The mainstay of a good modeling app is a solid tweak tool and with the addition of pre-selection highlighting Nex gives Maya’s modeling workflow a nitrous injection. It is active while in the move, rotate and scale tools and lets you very rapidly modify many components in your model without having to actually select the items you want to modify. I really can stress enough to people who haven’t experienced this in other apps how much this speeds up your interaction with the model you are working on. It really is a very elegant tool to work with especially when you realise that you can also extrude faces and bevel verts and edges using the “ctrl+shift” sticky key and the middle mouse button. Rings and Loops – The first enhancement I came across was the improved edge loop and ring selection which goes further than other solutions available (such as OMToolbox) by extending these selection tools to faces and vertices giving full and partial loop and ring selection to every component on you’re model. Slide – Sliding edges (which all real modeling apps have had for ages now) have also been included and extended in a similar fashion to the loop and ring selection, you can now slide any component selection (be it vertex, edge or face) along the surface of your mesh while preserving the form of the model. Sliding works with the scale and rotate manipulators as well as the standard move and is (to my knowledge) the most comprehensive implementation of a slide tool available in any package. Soft Selection – This feature, although already present to varying extents in recent versions of Maya, is a perfect example of dRaster’s ability to make a tool work exactly the way that you would want it to, it’s fast and easy to work with during modeling sessions and when combined with the slide and tweak tools it evolves into something far in advance of any other solution currently available inside of Maya. “Quad – Draw” – This is the part of Nex that really got me excited when I first saw it because it directly confronts a task that I find myself spending a lot of time on, that of retopologizing high resolution, sculpted meshes for animation and game optimization. Quad-draw allows you to select a reference object from the current scene (this would typically be the high res mesh), this object then behaves as a canvas for quad-draw allowing you to model directly on the surface of the reference object by laying down strips of quads, any new faces, edges or verts you create will be snapped to the surface of the high res object. This is pretty much the same work flow as I have been using in the Silo 2 beta for the past year so it’s nice to have similar options available within Maya. There are many other features and enhancements within the Nex suite, some of which include target welding, custom pivots, vertex locking and auto texture updating but these didn’t find their into my workflow as immediately as the ones mentioned above. For more information and a full feature list visit the Nex page on the dRaster site.
QUAD-DRAW BEING USED TO RETOPOLOGIZE A MUDBOX SCULPT The Reality I was very impressed with Nex as a whole, it offers an awful lot to modellers for reasonable price and most of the tools behaved exactly how I would like them to with the occasional exception such as the soft selection not being available when Quad-Draw is active, I would also like surface snapping to reference objects to be available all of the time not just when using Quad-Draw. There are also a few minor bugs and niggles here and there (Quad-draw can get a little confused when you have guide points placed down in close proximity to one another and not give the option to fill the face that you want) but for a 1.0 release it’s pretty solid and with all that dRaster have achieved in such a short space of time with Nex I can’t help but think that it will improve even further over the coming months. On the downside you currently only get one license when you purchase Nex, so users who don’t own Silo or an alternative will be limited to doing all of their modeling on one machine. Nex is the revolution for Maya modeling and holds a lot of promise going forward however one must remember that the modeling revolution has already happened outside of Maya therefore the deciding factor for many will be whether they want to spend all of their time in one package or whether specialised standalone apps are a viable option. Me?.... I’ll continue to use Silo 2.0 as my primary modeling tool but will enjoy using the advanced features that Nex offers as and when I require them The Future For the $148 that Nex costs all updates of NEX will be free up until v2.0 which is when dRaster intend to include their animation and texturing tools, at this point there will be a significantly discounted upgrade path for customers who own v1.x.
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