Creative Geometry Termination Advice?
 

Hi Guys,

I've been modeling this character of mine in polygons, and I created the head, hands, and feet as separate objects, then attached them. I'm attaching the head/neck area to the body now, I had 3 extra rows of geometry running up from the body (on each side).

I've tried a couple things, and I'll keep trying, but I thought it might help to have some fresh eyes throw around some ideas. I'll post a picture of what I'm talking about.

Thanks in advance,

First Attempt
 

Here I tried running a line of geometry from the face (5-sided) down into the 3 lines and created a quad face. Then, I finished it by taking a row from the neck and running it around and down the front.

Not the best way maybe, still have a 5 sided, but it seems to work alright... any other ideas?

That should be fine.

Rendering
 

The only problem I seem to be having is that is won't render with Mental Ray because of a 5-sided on the cheek. Which kinda sucks... I'm sure I can figure a way to change the geometry, but you'd think Mental Ray could out render the Maya Software renderer, lol.

All I could see was the teeth/gums and the eyeballs, ha ha.

Funny thing, there are all these good tutorials on Mental Ray, but it can't handle a 5-sided. Too bad. All my models are all quads, but when I made the head on this one, I couldn't seem to avoid a 5-sided (N-Gon). Even when I convert to SubD there is one 5-sided on the face that doesn't change, I've noticed converting to subD can fix little oddities in the geometry. (Gives good ideas how to fix the poly mesh).

Anyone know if Mental Ray for Maya 6.5 can handle N-Gons? (5-sided) ***Actually, can Mental Ray even render SubD???

Thanks for the tips,

in the manual it gives a list of restriction for rendering with MR and this is one of them.

just poly smooth your mesh.

Ah, I don't use MR, so didn't realize that restriction.

yes, smoothing your mesh results in quads, so that should work, as vlad has said.

PolySmooth & Mental Ray
 

Hey Guys,

Tried 2 renders of a character of mine, one with polysmooth and MR, and one with Maya Software and SubD. Both looked about the same, except MR seemed to be a little more crisp in the eye area. Of course, I haven't really gotten into rendering yet, which I'm sure will create some huge differences, especially once I have some backgrounds in the scene as well.

Thanks for the tip about Polysmooth, I had thought about using it before, but thought that I might lose render quality or time. Polys definately render faster, less calculations, correct? Originally I was going to model in Nurbs, then I tried Polygons, lol.

***Sure Enough, Mental Ray will render SubD, just not 5-Sideds.

I got an email about the Mad Scientist with the Lab CD a while back, I think it would be really useful, I'm going to order it. I've got a couple characters, I made a psd file for the image planes so they'd all be the same proportions to each other. Now I just have to size sets properly and create props for them.

Thanks for you time