Hi there,

Mechanical builder here, doing his very first EVER Maya character.

I have had my nose buried in the manuals for several weeks now, and purchased some of the gnomon DVD's.

I am working on my very first ever character, a "grey" alien.

I am using the Alvarez method of building up the geometry (Organic Modeling I & II), and it seems very fast. I got the basics of my head design fleshed out in a matter of hours, although I have rebuilt it now about 8 times because I didn't like the initial 7 results

Anyway, I come from a "physical" background, having been a pencil artist for awhile doing various comic books and some work at marvel in the mid 90's, and building macquettes for feature work.

In modeling, I found it more intuitive to work interactively in the perspetive window than to line up hulls and CV's in the front and side views. It gives me the feel of sculpting the model as opposed to doing it paint by numbers.

Anyway, as to my question......

I built the head per the DVD's. I have not yet taken the head model and done the make it live, draw curves on surface, detach curves and then patch it yet.

I did use the techniques I learned and built the body, the arms and legs from primitives. Care was taken to line up end points on each piece so that the individual components when placed together almost looked like a model kit fit.

My question is, can I use the parts I made from primitives, or do I actually need to patch them all? it seems like doing the work twice.

Also, I get the impression that I cannot mix nurbs and polygon surfaces in the same scene?

I tried to model a high collared cloak in Maya, but it looked like crap. Very stiff and phony looking. SO I used the curves I made and modeled the cloak in Lightwave. Interestingly enough, a minor flaw in the way Lightwave handles patching twisted the geometry being created and it actually made the collar look far better than my results in Maya. I guess it pays to use 2 tools sometimes.

I was able to export the collar into Maya, tinker with it and save it again, but when I try to import it into the scene I am working on, it never loads.
(It was converted to polys to smooth it)

If anyone really wants to see it, I'll post pictures.

Thanks.