A couple of questions for my first model...
 

After trying out a few tutorials to get a basic feel for maya, I decided it is time to make my own model. I am trying to make a simple 'friendly' character model using nurbs. So far I have drawn out the curves and made square patches, then I have manipulated the CVs of the curves until I got to what you see below. Here are my problems:

1)

I have no idea what the best way of shaping the eyelids is. After adding a nurbs sphere for the eye, I have found that simply moving the CVs of the curves doesnt give me enough freedom to shape the eyelids around the eyeball as I want. A rather tedious way that was working reasonably (until maya crashed after nearly an hour!! :banghead: ) was shaping the CVs of the surface patches and completely ignoring the curves.

What is the simplest method of doing this? Bear in mind that I intend to fully animate this character once it is finished - including facial expressions.

2)

No matter how long I spend aligning the CVs of the curves, I still see gastly join lines in between each patch face. Attaching several patches together helps a little bit, but then that opens a whole other range of problems where the new patch doesn't align with the ones on either side of it.

It would be great if someone could either let me know, or point me to a tutorial that explains how to smoothly align my nurbs faces.

Thanks

-Rob

Explaining how to do your eyelid in type is too hard to do. find a patch modelling head tutorial for the lid. it will have lots of pictures for you to get the idea with. as for the seams, use Global Stitch tool to smooth it all out after you have them lined up as close as you can get them. set the stitch too to closest knot, match parameters, Normals, no stitch edge, .05, .100, 1. try those settings and see if it helps.

Thanks for the help iron_tick, but I cannot get this method to work correctly yet. Sure, after doing a global stitch lots of my seams become a lot smoother, but then this causes gaps to appear between my patches again.

I tried fixing this manually by moving the CVs with 'snap to points' on, but I noticed that when I fixed one gap, it caused a new one to open! So if only I could now find a way to close all the gaps I would be sorted :)

So......uhh.......how can I do this??