Curving Geometry

# 1 28-09-2006 , 04:43 AM

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Hi all,

I got a ticky question.... I have modeled 400+ polygon 'tiles' and placed them into a map of the world (see below)

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# 2 28-09-2006 , 04:45 AM

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Now I would like to somehow curve or wrap these 'tiles' so they form a globe (see below).

Is this even possible & if so, anyone have any idea how it may be done????

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# 3 28-09-2006 , 10:21 AM

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You could try 2 bend deformers one in the vertical plane and another in the horizontal plane and give that a go

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# 4 28-09-2006 , 10:25 AM

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Many thanks for the suggestion gster123, I did give the bend deforms a quick try but wasn't getting the result I wanted. I'm not saying that they are not the way to do it, just that I couldn't make it look nice. However, I have come up with another idea which may let me animate the tiles to land on the globe surface 1 at a time (which is what I really wanted).

I will post a playblast as soon as I get it working.

Thanks again m8 user added image

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# 5 28-09-2006 , 10:52 AM

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Group the tiles first and then center the pivot

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# 6 28-09-2006 , 12:50 PM

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Thanks again for the quick replys. But I managed to sort it another way. Here is a playblast of the result...

https://www.kickarz.com/earth_tiles.avi (0.9MB DivX - right pick & save target as)

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# 7 28-09-2006 , 01:33 PM

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just a personal opinion, but if they are just gonna rotate like that i would have just textured a sphere *shrug*

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# 8 28-09-2006 , 09:39 PM

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Sorry I should have explained.

The simple rotation on the playblast was just to display the completed model. These tiles will eventually be animated to fly at the rotating globe 1 at a time, as they hit the surface they will stick to it then start to rotate with it. This is why I didn't go with the bend deformer idea as I couldn't seperate them for the animation.

The sequence will become part of a TV advert for a website for an online community (www.e-dunia.com). Each tile will be textured with a photo of a site member (see below) to illustrate the concept that the site has members from all over the world.

I will post the animation when completed. Thanks again for all who took the time to respond. :bow:

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# 9 29-09-2006 , 10:25 AM

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oh ok i get it... well how did you get it to work itself out? i think i would have done it the totally long and unnecessarily frustrating way... i would have used my original texturing-on-a-sphere idea to place them all in the globelike fashion, then i would have created a locator for each of the blocks, created a point constrain for each block to its own locator, then parented all the locators to the spheres... to animate, i would have worked backwords (starting at the end of my timeline) from there... i would have then animated the constrain weights from one down to zero for each individual block... wow just typing this makes me hope you found an easier way... user added image

oh and a random afterthought... how long did it take you to decide how to arrange all those blocks in the first place?

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Last edited by NeoStrider; 29-09-2006 at 10:27 AM.

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# 10 29-09-2006 , 04:44 PM

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Well... Setting out the tiles to into a world map was fairly tricky. I have a nice world texture which I used a as template and simply overlayed it with a grid (80 units high x 40 units wide). To this I set out the tiles the best I could in photoshop. This became by guide texture which was placed on a sphere in Maya. Next I modeled the tile shape (size = 2 units x 1 unit) and duplicated them into a row of 40 tiles high. I then (1 at a time) moved these 40 tiles to the globe so I ended up with a single row from north to south poles. This row was then duplicated 80 times with a Y rotation of 4.5 degs. So after I had by globe completely covered in tiles, I then just went around and deleted all the tiles in the ocean.......... (phew!!)

Animating them is still proving difficult as each tile needs to fall from camera toward the globe, hit in the right place and then start spinning with globe until all 400+ tiles form the world. If I parent or group these tiles to the globe (to allign the rotationo) they dont wanna be set at camera for start of their path. I am going to try your idea using the locators (thanks for the tip Neostrider).

Now - update::

I wanted the globe to be a grid under the tiles so I modeled heaps of torus' (another huge undertaking). below are some new pics...

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# 11 29-09-2006 , 04:50 PM

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and with a test texture on the tiles....

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# 12 29-09-2006 , 06:16 PM

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that globe must have been a lot of work! i've made a globe before (that looks like it's just wireframe, like what you've got...) but instead of creating it using torii i actually just created two grid textures with the same values... one for the color attribute and the other for the transparency attribute. if you were to add glow i don't think anyone would really notice it was lacking real depth.

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# 13 02-10-2006 , 12:33 PM

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Yes, very true. I did at first make a .png map in photoshop. It had a transparent alpha background with a grid patten layed on it. This worked well as maya used the alpha as the transparency (and might be a little ezr as u dont have to make 2 maps). But I had a thought of flying the camera right through the middle of globe. So I went with the torii design - SIGH.

Also, as this is the wrong section for a WIP & my original question was answered, should I now restart this in the WIP area or just keep posting updates here?

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# 14 03-10-2006 , 05:02 AM

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well the torii globe definitely looks good.

if you were going to move this post i think you'd get more exposure, which could help.

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# 15 06-10-2006 , 04:10 PM

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Thanks again for ya help NeoStrider. I have now moved this thread back to the WIP area.

https://forum.simplymaya.com/showthre...649#post212649

I have also added a link to a playblast of the possible animation. I hope you are able to check it out...

"If you think you can or if you think you can't....... you're right!"
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