Mesh Maker - The Modeling & Editing Collection

Being someone who had worked in 3D for over a decade, and I own Modo, Maya, i'm very pleased with this tool so far.

I still use my 3d tools , but when I make a mistake, I do not have to do, export , import... and I like the fact that I can make some basic buildings for mobile rather fast, faster than I do in Modo, and Modo is damn good... I make mistakes i'm human, so if I need to fix a pivot I always got annoyed that I had to export , and import out, well not anymore with Mesh Maker, I can just use one of the tools and fix it.. Same with double siding a mesh, I do this from time to time, I forget, so I don't have to export, and import anymore.

I like that I can edit my meshes in Unity now, I don't need to keep exporting and importing, which is a time killer and annoying. So I was watching this tool for a very long time, and Pro Builder, and I bought it on sale and wish I bought a long time ago. I ended up getting Mesh Maker, over all the other tools on the asset store, because of how active Alan has been. I do not own Pro Builder, nor any of the others so I can't not comment.. I use Snappy Tools, so I do not own Pro Grid either. so using Snappy tools with this tool is pretty damn awesome...

What I like about this tool to, is the Developer is so active, and always making new tools, which is important to me . I run a small indie company, so time is money, and making good games and having the right tool is so important.

I have many developer friends, that make comments to me, and say why do you buy these tools, Make it your self...Duh, I could, you could...But time is money...I would rather spend 20-100 bucks for a tool, that can do it, and I can spend my time else where... Plus I do add features of my own to tools on the asset store sometimes as well if they are missing. I hate asking developers for more tools, or features, they need to make a living to, but if they want to , then great if not, it's not that hard to add what else is needed since all of the heavy lifting is already there for the most part.


I still make many tools for our games, and future games that I do not see on the asset store or dislike the tool, so that happens a decent amount, but if there is a tool that works well, then why wouldn't you just buy it, I always tell them..

I did convert some of my developers friends after they see the amount of work I get done compared to them.... So I get the last laugh So thanks for this tool, and keep up the great work..If your on the fence about this tool and a 3D modeler, do not get cocky like I did... Trust me you will save time and alot of time.. and still get to export the models out and add what ever you want... I bet you will get them done way faster with this tool... and any mistakes you make as I stated which happens to even the best 3D modelers ..So do not get cocky.. and just buy this tool.!

Thanks Alan.. and nice to meet you.!

 

Alan has to be the most active developer of any product I've gotten, though there are some good developers. I have Particle Playground and that gent kept working on making it run mad more efficient, but you'll never find anyone add as many features likely as Alan, man sets standards on that.

The part I italicized made me lmao, as that was totally me! Wanting to prove, 'I can code that myself!' and later converting to, 'Yes, yes I can, and I can also waste endless amounts of development time doing that, or I can get an asset that has that already and develop only what I need, and spend the rest of the time on design. Wiser words rarely spoken, recon...lol >_<

 

Great to hear someone with so much experience in 3d work confirming what I thought. I like this and probuilder. They have both been great and have already helped in my game. This is cheaper but no less quality. I bought this first and do not regret it one bit. Hopefully Alan managed to sell enough copies this sale to show people how good it is.

 

Ya I was debating during most of the sale, and going over and over in my head, and finally said screw it...and took the chance, what made me take the chance, was some of your guys reviews, one was your Doc and as I said how active Alan seems to be, which is rare.. I see you on a fair amount of assets I bought and nearly replied the same way I do for most of mine so thanks for that as well.


Very few developers are so active , some are, and I won't name names.. I also tend to support developers that are very active and seem to really care about support..Support is a big deal to me, even though I had to fix many assets my self, I would rather get the support since it saves so much time and that is the point to me buying these assets..

Only thing I dislike, is DLL files.. I normally never ever, ever buy assets that have no source code..

He would sell more if he had source code. Many developers I know will never ever buy an asset that does this and this is my first one, I don't count Bolt since I bought before they changed it..Which I wasn't happy about... something to think about.

 

Glad you like it. I only post reviews on products I have been happy with. Either because of the product or customer service being great but in this case it's both. I have a fair few assets that have fallen by the way side and also some where the customer service is bad. I thought about leaving bad reviews for those but sometimes it's not their fault so I prefer to give the benefit of doubt. I agree about no dlls in most cases but can't think of any asset store pack that offers some of the same tools as meshmaker. If he added the code there would likely be more competition springing up and I get the impression they are not massive sellers and that too many of these tools would spread the income too thin for continued support if that makes sense. I may be wrong though as I have been regularly before which my wife can attest to

 

I just want to thank you. Unity would be so limited without Mesh Maker.

 

Just been scanning this thread for some info and came across this you posted. Could prove really useful for me at the moment. Thanks hike1.

 

Ya sadly its a double edge sword when it comes to having DLL's or not. Now if the developer decided to no longer developer his tools, I would expect the source code... But again like I said this is my first and prolly only time I will buy an asset with no source code .I think many assets have terrible interfaces, so sometimes I will redo the UI for tools I really like. I also like to add my own custom features to certain assets. Something I do alot actually... So with this tool , I will have to bug the developer something I hate doing


PS: Competition is good something I learned in business... So keep that in mind.. Something I learned by owning a few in my life. I have owned repair shops for automotive, and I would purposely have a store next to another repair shop...Some may think that is bad, well it's not.. We actually would do alot better monthly with another shop being next store.. Competition is good look at all the survival games...Most are like NOT another one... But most of them do well, because that is what people want.. Different kinds of those games, Minecraft is another, look at how many clones make money and do well.

Not saying to make a survival clone , make something better and different... with a survival theme maybe.

So don't be afraid if competition, competition can be your friend for your business. Something that has worked for me, and now my wife has has her own business and does well and there i a ton of competition.

 

I see the hundreds of thousands of apps on the different platforms as competition so we are in good company

Edit - just in getting noticed alone that is

 

Recon, I'm going to have to disagree with that. On a case by case bases, maybe. But historically, while competition is great for the consumer, and even innovation, there is a finite number of business, and the more its split up...well, someones paying for it <_<.

In your instance, perhaps your product/service was better then your competitor, but if there is one mechanic shop in a small town, then the next week 5 more popup, you can't tell me thats not going to damage someones bottom line. Sounds great for an inspirational story on the virtue of competition, but the math doesn't seem to work ...

 

F.Y.I. the Mesh Editor Update v1.4 Video audio is so low on YouTube that I can barely hear it with both firefox and windows volumes at full. the original Mesh Editor Video audio volume is fine.

 

While this may be true in the small town instance, it has long been known in business that if you want to open a gas station and your choice is to be alone in the middle of a block or on a corner with three other stations, you will be more successful on the corner with the other three gas stations. This may carry over in the game market if you advertise your survival game with a group of other survival games. You get spillover business, and if you are better, you will get a reputation.

Having said that, good luck to all game developers.

 

Hi Alan @MediaGiant,

Need some help please. Finally doing the game graphics. Bought a pack off the store. It's very very nice except for one thing. Nearly all the models have a massive amount of materials on. The dev used shader forge to create custom shaders/mats. Below is an pic of one of the buildings with it's 15 materials.

Any ideas on best settings for prefabmaker as when tried it didn't end up looking the same. I suspect it would be the same for any combiner tool.

Thanks

 

Hi doc, I've tested Prefab Maker on a few different models including houses and while it sometimes has difficulty creating an atlas from models that already contain an atlased texture I don't think this is the problem here.

It is most likely related to the textures being tiled, having texture coordinates that are outside the 0 to 1 range. It is mentioned in the product blurb that it doesn't support these, but it is on my to do list for the next release.

If you'd like to send me some before and after pics to support@meshmaker.com I'll see if I can spot the cause.

 

Thanks Alan,

i will try to work on it today but mad busy. Either way I will need to sort it.

Thank

 

Hi,

Your asset is great for mesh stuff. But if I have a UI hierarchy of a parent and children and I want to move the parent inside the editor without moving the children. So the children should move in the other direction of parent to keep the same position.
Does Mesh Maker have something like that?
I know it's 'Mesh' Maker, so it only make sense if it only deals with mesh pivots and stuff, but if that feature exist, it will be pretty useful.

 

Hi @MediaGiant,

Just letting you know it's not just the tools that are great but the included assets. I needed a glass shader and the one included in the pack performs better and is lower overhead than the other I had

Still not sorted out simplyfying that pack I mentioned a while back. Phong of meshbaker is helping and he also said it could be tricky.

Thanks

doc

 

Hi Doc, I'm glad you are making headway with that model. If it is texture tiling then it can be difficult to get that working within an atlas while keeping the resolution of the other textures. Also glad to hear you are finding other uses for the assets too.

On a side note, it has come to my attention that in Mesh Editor v1.4 while edge/triangle spitting the tangents aren't being recalculated which can upset advanced textures with secondary detail maps. Rather than rush out an update for this one problem I have put together a small utility for this called Tangents.

You can download the tool here at http://www.meshmaker.com/addons/Tangents.unitypackage

There has only been one report of this happening so it might be a rare case but hopefully this tool will help in the interim while I continue the work on the next program, which is going really well btw

 

Hi Hoksha, sorry for the late reply as I didn't receive any email notification regarding your post. As you said, I don't think the Mesh Maker collection can help in this case.

One thing I will be adding is a FAQ section to the website where I will collect all of the most common questions from this forum and from the dedicated forum (http://forum.meshmaker.com) to help people without them having to dig through all of the posts.

Another feature request that I will be adding is for a map or chart showing which tools are suitable for certain jobs. While it isn't a dire problem, as the number of tools increases this is becoming a concern for new customers.

To everyone who has left feedback on this forum and within their reviews I'd like to say a big thanks! It is very inspiring and keeps me motivated while working on the new projects.

Best regards,
Alan

 

Thanks for the continuted support. Slowly but surely getting there

 

I'm seeing some unusual behavior on imported character meshes. The verts/edges/faces that are being selected are offset from the actual mesh in the z-direction. It makes it impossible to use Mesh Editor, as the mouse position does not line up with the selected geometry. Images here show the result of selecting all edges, then selecting a few faces by clicking into empty space, then the actual deleted faces. Any ideas what is going on?

 

It appears that the model includes blend shapes and the selected mesh is not the base mesh. Is it possible to select the root mesh in the models hierarchy and to lock onto it instead? I believe Unity has now included support for blend shapes to the Mesh format so I will be adding similar support for these in the next version of Mesh Editor.

 

It does have blendshapes (it's a Mixamo Fuse rigged character). I don't know how to select a root mesh. All I can see is the body mesh, which when selected in the Project tree, says there are 50 blendshapes. There is support in Unity for blendshapes (I'm on 5.3.4). You can animate the blend weights just like any other animatable property.

Is there a rough ETA on when you will be adding support?

Thanks for the help.

 

I believe Unity has had support for importing blendshapes since 4.3 but the ability to edit the blendshapes via the Mesh class is a more recent addition, though I can't find any info on when it was actually added. When I do a seach for GetBlendShapeFrameVertices (the most likely method used for editing) in google I get about 10 results.

The last time I worked on a mesh with a lot of blendshapes it was difficult to find the base mesh, the T pose. It may have something to do with which root motion is selected (https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AnimationRootMotionNodeOnImportedClips.html) so changing this may allow you to edit the root animation mesh.

I'm currently working on a new application to add to the collection. It is coming along well but it's a big project and is taking much longer than I expected. Unfortunately I can't say when this project will be completed, and then I'm committed to finishing the next update for Construction, so it will be some time after that.

 

Ok, thanks for the quick reply anyway.

 

You're welcome. Sorry I can't be of more help but I'm still searching around to refresh my memory on how I did this. If I find any info then I'll be sure to let you know.

 

A couple of ideas:

From https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/BlendShapes.html
Drag the asset into the hierarchy window. If you select your object in the hierarchy and look in the inspector, you will see your Blend Shapes are listed under the SkinnedMeshRenderer component. Here you can adjust the influence of the blend shape to the default shape, 0 means the blend shape has no influence and 100 means the blend shape has full influence.

From http://www.west-racing.com/mf/?page_id=257
You need to make sure that when you export the mor data that the mesh you are exporting from matches the FBX version of your mesh. For example if you are morphing an animated human character when you export to FBX the T pose mode is used but in your scene the character could be in an idle pose so the mesh data no longer matches the fbx data.

 

I'm looking for a tool to decimate Daz character models, has anyone used Mesh maker to achieve this? can this be done in Unity yet, so far I have tried Daz's decimate, Simple Lod and Mesh baker but the results if thats what I can call them don't work. Tho' I don't see a direct decimate tool here could I get a result with this package. Thanks.

 

Hi AgathaCrup, thank you for your inquiry.

At the moment I don't have a LOD tool in the collection. I used a third party library to create one a while ago but it wasn't up to scratch so I had to scrap the project while I look for a new solution. It is certainly on the list of tools to add though.

Regards,
Alan

 

Hi! I have a question: is it possible to use Prefab Maker to make an atlas/combine the materials without combining the objects - but instead making copies of them with the correct UVs for the atlas? It would be very helpful for Unity's native batching... I am undecided between your collection and another asset which has the functionality but not all these other nice tools

 

Thanks for checking out the Prefab Maker, at the moment the program creates a single object with new UVs based on the atlas, but I believe it should be fairly easy to add this type of feature in a future update, I just didn't know at the time that it would be needed. I'll certainly add it to the list of new features.

 

hi,I just buy your plugin at store,
here is my feature request
1:is that possible auto fixed hole when I move window/door. throught wall.
2:add 2d map draw and auto create 3d content

3：add one way to add Ceiling?

 

Hi layola, thank you for your purchase and support for the programs. I really like those suggestions and while a fully automatic approach may be a bit optimistic I will certainly keep them in mind as I work towards adding more content to the collection.

 

hi,@MediaGiant could you give me some detail for your xml database information here?

what's the relationship between <cell> and <wall> ?

one cell to six wall ? can you give some more detail here?

 

The Construction design file stores the information based on the cells and each cell contains four walls, which are for the four sides of the cell. The width and height of the cells are based on the Start Parameters which can be changed by opening the foldout at the top right of the window.

The key point is that the Unit Size is in millimeters and everything below the Unit Size is in units. So if you set the Unit Size to be 10mm and choose a Cell Height of 10 this would give you a wall height of 1 meter. A Tile Height of 2 would give you a floor tile that is 2cm in thickness. And an Edge Width of 6 would give you walls that are 12cm thick (10mm x 6 x 2). After changing these parameters it is best to close and reopen the Construction window for the saved settings to take effect. The Reset button should have done this but it doesn't appear to be working as expected.

By default the scale was based on the first person character controller which resulted in a default size of 12.5 x 5 feet (19.5mm x 200 for the cell height and 19.5mm x 80 for the cell width). This was also close to real world dimensions for a house but I will be adding a range of parameters to allow people to quickly choose between a few default sizes.

I hope that helps with changing the cell/wall heights and widths. In the next major update I am planning to make the walls variable height and to provide double and triple width walls which will allow for bigger features like garage doors and larger windows.

 

While I have the opportunity here are some answers to other questions related to the Construction program:

The program doesn't provide the doors or windows. How the program works is it creates the walls, floor tiles and roof sections (much like the Sims games) and then you select your own doors and other assets to use as features in the walls. The wall is automatically carved to the exact shape of your door or window assets, provided it is convex like a circle, rectangle, square and not concave like a star or crescent moon, so the good news is that you can use any other assets like air conditioners, fireplaces and the wall will be carved to fit that shape.

It is hoped that the ability to use any model as a cutting feature is far better than hard coding the program to only work with existing features as many other programs do. If they are oversized you can choose to auto scale them to fit within the width of one wall section.

The main feature which is not yet implemented is an undo/redo system. The program is very easy to use so deleting and building is so fast that I don't think this is a major drawback. But it will be added in the next update. Again, I know the undo/redo feature is a standard for all editors but I also hope that the editor is quick enough to rectify a mistake. It is also hoped that using the program is actually a part of the fun as it is in the Sims games.

The program also allows you to make almost unlimited levels up and down to make a highrise building with a basement as well.

There is no support for angled walls, rounded walls or stair rails yet.

You can also test the design while you are creating it by clicking on the play button to walk around the design, once you exit play mode you can continue to design the house.

The program also has a feature to quickly add and position prefabs as furniture and fences, if you add these then they will be added to the final prefab when you click on the Build button. Everything will be under a single prefab which you can reuse throughout the scene. The interiors are sparse at the moment so there is only half walls and arched walls, so most of the interior is made up with furniture for shelves, etc. Once you have finished designing your building you just click the Build button and the program will create a full prefab of the building and parent your assets as part of the final prefab.

In the current build the automatic cutting supports features that take up one grid space. In the tutorial I mention that double and triple width walls will be added in the future development section. If possible I will add the ability to automatically cut many walls if the feature is oversized to support garage doors etc.

Another change that will be added is the ability to change the floor type, from foundation to standard, once a level has been added. At the moment you need to select the type of wall you want before clicking on the Add Upper/Lower Level buttons. So if you want a foundation level then please select that type of wall before adding the new level and the same for a standard level height.

The automatic cutting of a wall may have a problem with complex prefabs that contain many meshes all grouped under an empty game object. The solution to this is to add a mesh filter to the parent object and set its mesh to the largest of the sub meshes. It can then be used as normal as a feature in the wall.

To add a ceiling to a building you simply add a new upper level and use the tile mode to add floor tiles which become the ceiling of the lower level.

To export the final prefab to another project it is recommended to highlight the folder where you saved the prefab to and select Assets>Export Package from the Unity menu as this will export the materials and meshes used in the construction of the prefab.

 

Hi @MediaGiant,
Purchased the Mesh Maker pack yesterday, and my gameplay prototyping is now faster than ever, due to not needing to wait for 3D artist for small mesh fixes.

However I cannot drag select when locked in, so moving sections of the mesh around sucks...
I'm on OSX El Capitan, Unity 5.4.0f3.

Oh and btw, from your videos it appeared that it was possible to avoid saving an asset, if you wanted to adit the mesh directly, but I may have misunderstood that. However once I've locked the mesh once, why is it that it doesn't just "resume" using that asset, instead of me having to lock => override every time, as far as I can tell, if you wanted to save multiple mesh assets (at every step of your process), you could just type a new name in the name box, and press save.
Just a suggestion / feature request that would lighten my workflow a bit.

Cheers,
Mads

 

Hi pyjamads, Thank you for your purchase and support for the collection.

The program uses the first three letters of the OS name to detect the system which is normally "Mac", but I think there are versions that don't follow this rule so the program may be defaulting to the Ctrl button. If it is working then you should be able to use either Command key to group/marquee select. If it isn't working then you can go into the Settings area and select another hotkey to use and you should be able to choose either the left or right Command keys from the list.

You may have to re-lock onto a mesh if you have entered play mode or Unity has reloaded the project in order to get back to editing, but as far as I know those are the only times when this is necessary. Originally the program did edit the original but there was a backup stage where it would ask you to create a copy which was simplified to leaving the original alone and just working with the copy. It may not be as conventional but as you said it allows for quicker saving in multiple stages with no chance of overwriting the original since it is up to you to decide when is the right time to swap the meshes.

I'll certainly rethink this in the next major update if needed.

 

Thanks for the quick response!

Yeah, I've tried setting it to other keys in settings, and testing both cmd and ctrl, but non of that seems to do the trick. I'll try a few other things next week, let's see if I get it to work.

 

To test if the hotkey is being detected you can try a marquee/group selection. If you hold the hotkey down and left click and drag in the scene you should get a selection box. I had a mac user who had a similar problem and he was able to change the hotkey to 'A' so he was able to extrude by holding down both the 'A' key and the shift button.

I'm just not sure why the list of all available Unity keycodes isn't working on some macs. I will try to add a new feature for selecting a hotkey where the program will prompt you to press the key you wish to use for the custom hotkey.

 

MeshMaker is truly amazing. I have two favorite tools in Unity, and MeshMaker is tied for first place. I would gladly give up anything else BUT my MeshMaker. I have not even begun to scratch the surface of all it can do, but I am already dependent on it.

I have never subscribed to the belief that there is no such thing as a dumb question. I know this for a fact, because I ask a lot of questions, and many of them are quite dumb. Here is my dumb question for you:

I use Meshmaker to create double sided meshes and then Cutter to open up doors and windows. I've shown my work to many of the original creators of the products, and they are amazed to see their structures with working interiors! Here is my biggest problem, though. Many of these structures do NOT have collisions. Right now I create every needed collision one piece at a time. SLOW & TEDIOUS!

Using MeshMaker, is it possible to add collisions to these structures?

Whatever the answer, thank you. Thank you for taking time to read this, and THANK YOU FOR MESHMAKER!!!!!

 

And thank you so much for such a kind review. It really helps me get through the troublesome times and self doubt

I'm guessing you don't want a mesh collider based on the visible mesh. In this case it might pay to use Mesh Cutter to break the model into simplified pieces to use as collision meshes and you could use Prefab Maker to group them back into a single mesh. This might not be ideal but I can't think of an easier way with the current tool set.

I am however working on a tool that will make this job a very simple process. If all goes well I'll be looking at releasing the new tool in December in the hopes that it will be added to the collection before Christmas.

 

Hi @MediaGiant,

Like the sound of the new tool

Meshmaker has saved me hours of work in this project. On of the most useful was the 'make double sided'. Saved a massive amount of having to tweak meshes in blender. Also just done some nice painting of rocks to a level. It gives that bit of artistic control on placement.

Meshmaker is still one of my most used tool sets.

 

I purchased it today, however I've ran into a big problem. I didn't read the instructions and dragged the mesh to the prefab folder and it didn't work. Then I read the instructions and problem solved.


Thanks for the wonderful asset!

 

Thanks Doc and anonymous_tactician, glad to hear you got it working and are enjoying the tools.

 

Thanks, Custom hotkey setting would be great!
I've now determined that I was running into two different problems, no modifier keys work with regards to using the marquee / group selection, but also while group selecting at least in my dual monitor setup, the selection doesn't hit what it's supposed to on my macbooks retina display, but it works fine on my external monitor. Yeah, no, I just tested with only the retina laptop display, and selection doesn't work there. (I mean obviously the work around is to only do mesh editing on the external monitor, but that sucks a bit)
I'm suspecting this could have something to do with unity's retina support that was added not long ago...

Anyway, hope this is put on a todo

 

The left and right Command keys are set as the default on the mac, but if selecting them, or any other modifer keys, from the list of available Unity keycodes isn't working then perhaps there is deeper problem with non-standard key mapping on certain systems. I have new code which runs more checks for both windows and the mac, plus a new feature where you can request the program to wait for you to press your preferred hotkey. This will simplify the custom hotkey selection but I am still reliant on the Unity API to correctly detect the modifier keys, which appears to be letting us down in this case.

It sounds like the retina displays are a similar problem. I am trusting that the Unity API is reporting the correct mouse position and pixel distances and that they are the same regardless of the hardware being used. Since they have added support for displays with a higher pixel count then their API should take this into consideration behind the scenes, which doesn't seem to be the case.

I will certainly continue to work on both of these problems and use alternate solutions if necessary. I only ask that you bear in mind that it took Unity 4 years to add support for retina displays so I might need a bit of time too

 

Hi, I just started trying out MeshMaker today (latest version) and I'm having a problem. (Speaking as regular user here, not Unity employee BTW.)

I can't get extrusion to work. I'm on Mac and I've tried both control keys, both command keys, setting a different hotkey, all of that with and without shift - no matter what I do I only get movement of the selected triangles but no extrusion.

This is Unity 5.4 on OS X 10.11.1 with Mesh Maker 2.0.5. Any idea what might be going wrong? Any other info you need?

 

Hi runevision, thanks for using Mesh Maker and for your support and sorry to hear you are having a similar problem with extrusion on the Mac. This seems to be related to the modifier keys not being detected on some Macs, but others have still been able to set a standard key such as the 'A' key as the hotkey. If this is set you should then be able to extrude by holding down both the shift key plus the 'A' key at the same time and then clicking on and dragging the handles.

It sounds like you are in triangle mode and have selected some faces before moving the handle so that isn't the problem. It also doesn't seem to be a version issue as it works in my tests with Unity 5.5.0a5.

I will do more research into why the keycodes for the modifier keys on some Macs aren't being recognized by the Unity API but I've been using the same code for a couple of years now:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2.         public static bool CheckHotkeyDown(string keycode)
3.         {
4.             switch (Event.current.type)
5.             {
6.                 case EventType.keyDown:
7.                 {
8.                     if (Event.current.keyCode == (KeyCode)Enum.Parse(typeof(KeyCode), keycode))
9.                     {                
10.                         return true;
11.                     }
12.                     .
13.                     .
14.                     .
15.  

The keycode string here is simply something like "LeftControl" or "LeftCommand" and it should work the same on all machines.

Sorry I can't be of more help here but I will do my best to find a workaround/alternative for this.

Best regards,
Alan

 

Okay, I tried once more to set it to the A key and use shift and A. As soon as I press A I get a rapid succession of error beep noises - the sound Mac makes when pressing a key that is not used by anything. This led me to dismiss this as not working last time I tried it, but this time I tried doing the dragging anyway, and it does work.

So two takeaways:

• It seems to be a problem with detecting modifier keys indeed. (Command, Control, Alt; none of those worked for me.) The string parsing seems suspect; I'm not sure why you're using strings but I suspect it's vulnerable to both OS inconsistencies and localization issues.
  
• I think you need to add Event.current.Use() in the code path that does something when extruding. Otherwise you will either get OS error sounds, or have something else be able to use the event at the same time.