General questions...
 

I've been hammering away on Maya for probably five months (on and off) with little to no success. :( Since this is the easiest modeller (as in I can actually create *something*), I'm going to stick with it. To aid in this, I'd like a few questions answered, please.

1. After browsing through the WIP section, how do you create such smooth shapes? Is it through using NURBS instead of polys (using the "moulding" technique?)

2. How do you create those white/greyscale renders that look almost photorealistically solid? If its to do with render res, I don't know how to set the render globals to more than 640x480.

3. When viewing my model with hardware texturing on, why are the textures so blurred? This changes to normal when rendering. Is it my hardware? (ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB)

4. How do you subdivide a face so one face is, say, split into four faces?

5. Are booleans a bad idea to create more complex shapes?

6. I've tried that UV mapping video tutorial (the one with the dice). How do you map textures to more complex shapes?

7. When shifting vertices about I get a pink warning message in the bottom right of the GUI. Should I not be manually shifting vertices around?

Sorry for all the questions. I've been storing them up.

Jon.

1) Polygons > Smooth will smooth polygonal geomtry. There's also SubDs.

2) Most people use the GI_Joe MEL script to fake Global Illumination.

3) It's just a preview.

4) Edit Polygons > Subdivide

5) Not necessarily, but they don't work right all the time.

6) We've got a few tutorials going over this here and I have a brief freebie at my personal site.

7) A warning is just an FYI. It doesn't mean anything is wrong. An Error, on the other hand, is bad.

Looks like a case of bottled up anger to me. Im gonna sentance you to anger managment courses. this hairy doctor will sleep in your bed with you and want to spoon.. J/K LOL. here's a few answers for you.

1) Smooth shapes can be accomplished in a number of ways. as a a matter of fact. every modelling form has some type of smoothing option. Poly for example have polygon>smooth which subdivides your faces evenly over your surface giving the illusion of a smooth surface. Nurbs and Sub D's on the other hand are bent surfaces (in simple terms). there surfaces are calculated by a proximity controler of some sort. Sub D's use a polygon Proximity shell to manipulate how the surface is calculated while nurbs surfaces use Control Verticies. these 2 surfaces are the ONLY true smooth surfaces in any rendering program. But polygons, while not truely smooth, are widely used because of there extensability and ease of use.

2) older pictures are just using good lighting techniques to get that photorealism. some of them, where also created using whats called GI Mel scripts or GI Joe Mel's as such. todays pictures done in Maya 5 use Mental ray a lot. it adds an element called photons to your work. they are emmited from lights and bounce from surface to surface according to how they are programed. this gives a nice smooth lighting effect.

3)my guess on this one is that it takes memory and resources to show you a really good picture so maya gives you a crappy reference and saves the resources for your work.

4)Use the sub divide tool or smooth tool.

5)Absolutly NOT they are great for modeling but whith nurbs modelling use only when you need to.

6) There are more video tutorials out there for texturing. MtMckinley has some great ones i believe. If you like poly's, he's gonna be your best friend. this guy is a poly master. Look for one of his posts, and check through the vip tutorial areas. When you get better at the basics advanced mapping will follow.

7) Yeah. it usually says that moving this element may cause an undesired effect. I just ignore it and make sure i keep my model clean. not sure why it does that.


Hope this helped

hahaha see. theres mike. he was posting at the same time as me. Hi Mike

3. You can change the resolution of your hardware texturing.

Open the attributes for the shader, go to hardware texturing and set the texture resolution to highest. You might notice the performance drop though

Thanks all. :)