CGTalk - [nurbs] best way to attach limbs to a body

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rizwan

03-20-2004, 01:49 PM

Hello all,

I'm modelling a cartoonish cat and have been running into trouble deciding how to connect the forearms/legs to the main body (modelled by a deformed sphere).
http://home.gwu.edu/~rizwan/maya/character.jpg

I've tried intersecting the surfaces, trimming, and then using blend fillet, and that works pretty well, but when I tried to rig the character, the seams come out on extreme deformations (like if I put his arm all the way forward, the seams on his back shoulder start to show.

Is there a better way to set up this character? In particular, what's the best way to go about attaching legs to the bottom of the sphere?
http://home.gwu.edu/~rizwan/maya/stitching_question.jpg

Someone suggested to me that converting it to polygons is the best approach, especially if it's going to be animated. While i'm not against this idea (i've never worked so much with polygons before), I'd like to know what the usual solution using Nurbs.
Sorry for the newbie question, I just didn't want to start something only to find out later it was the bad approach

-riz

jscott

03-20-2004, 06:15 PM

Read this first:

http://plissken.fatalunity.com/tutorials/stitch/

Then this:

http://www.mtmckinley.net/tut1.html

peace,

-jscott

robin

03-20-2004, 09:02 PM

there's just too much isoparm on your geo, you can fairly have the same smoothness without all of that.

You absolutly need the same number of patches for 2 slices to be joined.

rizwan

03-23-2004, 12:02 PM

Thanks for the links guys!

It really cleared up what i was lookikng for, I never got stitching to work right because my parameters were never normalized. I reduced the geometry because I didn't need it, and connected the arm to the body using stitching. I had a lot of problems with creasing and uneven surfaces, and even on the smoothest stitch, i still see some kind of surface discontinuity. I guess this is normal, and I saw the discussions on tesselation in case you get holes (which I do).

My question now is, Is this a normal part of the NURBS workflow?

Once all the pieces are stitched, you're supposed to delete all their history and then do one global stitch, which keeps it together. Is it normal to keep this global stitch on when rigging a character, especially one which has a high range of movement. Or is there another better way?

Thanks for your replies, they really saved me a lot of time, so i really appreciate them.

-riz

peanut

03-23-2004, 02:37 PM

thats a lot of question friend, patch/nurbs modeling takes some time. I learned the hard way by experimenting on Nurbs, i could fairly answer your questions but, your better off doing it yourself. There is not a single guy here that uses Maya/Nurbs the same way the other guys do.

play play play play with them t'ill you master your surface and bend Maya to your will.

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