DSMayaTools

This is a Maya plug-in to which I intend to add any useful custom nodes or commands that I develop. Currently it only contains a single new command named closestVertex. This adds a command to Maya which allows you to obtain the closest vertex or face on a poly mesh to a given position in world space. I've found this handy in some skinning scripts.

There are binary builds for Maya 2013 / 15 / 16 included.

Installation

At the moment the installation is really simple. Simply copy

\install\<Maya Version>\plug-ins\DSMayaTools.mll

to one of your Maya plugin folders. These are usually something like the paths below

C:\Users\<User>\Documents\maya\<Maya Version>\plug-ins

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\<Maya Version>\bin\plug-ins

When you reload Maya load the plug-in by going to Windows >> Settings / Preferences >> Plug-in Manager and ticking load next the the DSMayaTools.mll entry.

closestVertex

Once you've loaded the plug-in you should have this command available.

To report the closest vertex on a given object use the following command.

closestVertex -face 0 -position <float x> <float y> <float z> <string object>

To report the closest face on a given object change the value of the face flag to 1.

closestVertex -face 1 -position <float x> <float y> <float z> <string object>

If you do not include the face flag the command will work in vertex mode.

Here are some examples in MEL and Python. With two objects selected (the second has to be a polygon object) this will give the closest vertex or face on the second object to the first.

//vertex mode
{
    string $sel[] = `ls -sl -l`;
    float $pos[] = `xform -q -ws -t $sel[0]`;
    
    int $ind = `closestVertex -p $pos[0] $pos[1] $pos[2] $sel[1]`;
    select -r ($sel[1] +".vtx[" +$ind +"]");
}

//face mode
{
    string $sel[] = `ls -sl -l`;
    float $pos[] = `xform -q -ws -t $sel[0]`;
    
    int $ind = `closestVertex -f 1 -p $pos[0] $pos[1] $pos[2] $sel[1]`;
    select -r ($sel[1] +".f[" +$ind +"]");
}

#vertex mode
sel = cmds.ls(sl = True, l = True)
pos = cmds.xform(sel[0], q = True, ws = True, t = True)
    
ind = cmds.closestVertex(sel[1], f = False, p = pos)
cmds.select(sel[1] +'.vtx[' +str(ind) +']', r = True)

#face mode
sel = cmds.ls(sl = True, l = True)
pos = cmds.xform(sel[0], q = True, ws = True, t = True)
    
ind = cmds.closestVertex(sel[1], f = True, p = pos)
cmds.select(sel[1] +'.f[' +str(ind) +']', r = True)

Building the Plug-in

Pre-requisites

You'll need a recent version of CMake installed and also the correct version of Visual Studio to match the Maya version you're interested in building the plug-in for. Obviously you'll need Maya and the Maya devkit installed too.

Build