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[egypturnash]

Another Maya tutorial: learn the basics of polygonal modeling by building a hammer. My hammer looks far more... hammery... than the one they show. Because I smoothed it in sections instead of all at once, creating nice contrasts of sharp edges and round ones. Playing around a little to have it be metal and woodish instead of just metal is interesting, if a little confusing.

No image, it's just a boring hammer. On to NURBS...

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That was short. The NURBS vertex creation tool is pretty awkward, for someone used to the sublime beauty that is AI's Pen Tool. I wonder if there's a way to sculpt a path in AI, then import it? Bet not. You never know, though. Well, on to "sculpting a surface". That should be more interesting.

I think that when I try making my first character model, I will have to do it using all the modeling methods at my disposal. What parts are best made with polygons; what best with NURBS, with subdiv surfaces... integrate, learn which suits my way of thinking best... I'll want to make something wholly in polys, I know, if I want to look for game work. Nobody's mad enough to blow the processor power to do a game in NURBS. Yet.

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"Sculpting" a surface is even more awkward. Ugly. Not a method that appeals to me at all.

Comments

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Actually yes there is. I used Illustrator to make a nice spiral then imported it into Maya to use as a path for making a sea-shell. Now I don't know how complex of an AI file it can handle but it can at least cope with basic stuff.

[milkpanzer.livejournal.com]

You can model things with NURBS and convert them to polys for gamework. Apparently this is fairly common practice when using Maya. At least so said the book I had. I haven't really checked in 'real life'.

[lediva.livejournal.com]

NURBS!

I have nothing at all relevant to add, except...

NURBS!

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

Building the object with NURBS/surfaces, then simply converting it to polygons is far more flexible than working with polygons from the start. It's the equivalent of creating a vector image and converting it to raster, or creating it raster from the start, really. Sure, you can upsize and sharpen and all that, but it will never give you the crispness and control working with a perfectly defined form gives you. :)

But of course, it's easier and faster to just use polygons. Depends on the job and deadline. Learn them all. As usual. :)

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Your hammer is hammery! That's KA-BLAMMO!

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

When I took 3D modeling (we used 3D Studio Max), I tried it both ways: making a NURBS surface and converting it to polys, and building entirely with polys.

The NURBS-to-poly method is handy, except that after converting, I got this crazy-quilt-looking pattern of polys that was really hard to edit without totally fucking it up. So I had to get it just right before converting, and then hope I wouldn't have to edit it later.

By contrast, the basic build-out-of-polys method was as follows: start with a sphere (or, more often, a cylinder), carefully shape its front-view silhouette by applying the scale transform to each level of vertices, one after the other (centering the transforms to preserve lateral symmetry), then carefully shape its side-view silhouette by applying scale and move transforms to each level of vertices all over again.

It basically *was* scupting, and every bit as tedious.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

All my experience thus far has been with using polygron primitives and extrude tools in Max. But then again, all my models for Tamaghis had to be low poly, so that informed my decision. ;-)