alias nurbs helmet tutorial

ctbram · 02-08-2005

I wanted to play with nurbs a little bit so I have been working on one of the alias tutorials to build a nurbs helmet and goggles. Here is a quick render of where I am on the helmet part.

For the renders I used:

mental ray > production > final gather default settings

800 x 600 > tga

set camera env coler to white with Value pushed to 1.5

I sure wish I could fingure out how to use final gather properly. My renders all come out tantilizingly close to what I want but always to dark in some areas and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to increase the light in the dark areas without washing out the light areas.

This is a pretty good demo. There were two things that were a bit bothersome. First, there is no narration and Second, the author uses some hotkey that lists all the components and allows fast selection of individual compoenets. It is a neat feature but the author does not give any hint as to how to get it and I was not able to find any pre-defince hot keys for it.

I really like nurbs for surface modeling. I aspecially like the nice consistent edges I can achieve using trim and surface fillets. I prefer the nurbs workflow over polymodeling. Constant edge splitting is tedius although having to manually adjust the tesselation for each surface in nurbs can become a pain as well. Nurbs are really great for hardshell non-organic models where you don't have to worry about seams blowing apart due to deformation. For things that deform alot I must concede polygons easier to work with. I just wish Maya had a more robust sweet of poly editing tools.

Maya only supplies to bare minimum of polygon editing tools. MJ polytools helps. Byron's poly tools no longer works with version 6.5 and I don't think he is planning to make a 6.5 compatible version. Alias is on a kick of releasing a new version of Maya so frequently that is is tough to invest time into making modules only to have them get broke within a couple months when a new release comes out.

Nurbs just feels more precise to me then polygon methods. A consistent integrated set of poly editing tools would be a very nice addition. Hopefully version 7 will include some better polytools.

I'll be starting the modeling of the goggles to go with the helmet next and I'll put up some posts as I go. I am thinking about redoing the Jedi Fighter model using an all nurbs approach.

I just completed the poly modeling tutorial for it and would like to compare the poly process and final result to the nurbs method.

Cheers,
Rick M.

pic 2

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