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# 2 14-03-2012 , 03:32 PM
ctbram's Avatar
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Well NURB's are pretty much out of fashion. I am not aware of any studios that allow them in the pipeline. Maya's implementation of NURB's for real hard surface final models is pretty substandard. You have to do a lot of per patch manual tessellation and rebuilding to avoid visible seams and odd parameterization anomalies. The round, fillet, and square, and boolean tools are extremely finicky.

This is not to say you cannot build decent NURB's surface models, it just requires a really deep understanding of Maya's extremely antiquated NURB's tools along with a lot of hard manual labor that should be done automatically.

Autodesk and Alias before them have done almost nothing to the NURB's tool set in Maya as far back as I can remember and I started using Maya shortly after it was released in February of 1998! From Maya 1.0 to Maya 3 or 4 NURB's were the hotness as small computers of that period did not have the juice to manage large polygonal models. From Maya 4 until now poly modeling has become the norm and is why Autodesk and Alias have ignored the NURB's tools.

This is a true shame as NURB's are extremely efficient and excel at creating complex hard surfaces composed of simple booleaned shapes with precision rounds and fillets without the fuss of trying to route a tangled rats nest of edges or bowing down to the Quad god!

Just as a note Maya's NURB's tools are a stripped down set of tools from the professional surface modeling package StudioTools, now called Alias xxx from Autodesk. In porting they completely stripped out almost all the surface continuity tools thinking they were too complex for the average artist to grasp and in effect made it a zillion times harder to achieve surface continuity between surface patches! For instance there is no zebra plots, no continuity checking (except for the square tool), and although curves of greater then 3rd degree are allowed in maya there are no tools to take advantage of them and therefore only allow data from proper surfacing applications to be imported. GG Alias!

And so after a long winded diatribe, there are not a great deal of video tutorials that I have seen that cover NURB's modeling in Maya. Your best bet would be to find some old Maya books from the Maya 3 and 4 days as they tended to cover NURB's (and more importantly, their quirks and rules) more thoroughly. All the recent stuff I have seen is pretty poor because most of the guys that know NURB's are gone.

The only ones I have seen are some VERY old Gnomon organic by Alex Alveraz and inorganic surfacing by Darrin Crumweide, an old organic dragon modeling tut from Alias, an old inorganic one from Alias which I have seen and it's terrible, and two from Dover Studios that look to be very basic and don't seem to be anything more that you could get from a good Maya 4 basic intro book.


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 14-03-2012 at 04:50 PM.