Poly Geometry??

[dmcgrath]

For polys (like Nurbs) you pretty much want you final character to be all quads. As few triangles as you can get and no 5 or more sided polys (n-sided). I say just build it until you can't go any farther and then start over. I looked at your file real quick, and if you turn the wireframe shaded mode on you can see where the texture mapping is going to be a nightmare. Without sitting in front of you and explaining it would be hard. It just takes practice, I have been modeling a few months now and every new model has it's problems. But the next time you build it, it'll be easier and quicker. Even with as little as you have right now, you could start over and do it in probably half the time.
You have a cool character in mind. Just keep at it, it'll get easier.

[playmesumch00ns]

gmcgrath's given you some good advice. When you're modelling, try to remember that the 'perfect' model woul be made of identicaly-sized quads. While this is never going to happen, do make sure you steer away from long skinny faces, as well as the 5-sideds dmcgrath mentioned. Triangles aren't ideal but they're ok, just remember they're not going to look as good smoothed as quads do.

If you stick to quads and start from a primitive such as a sphere, your UVs shouldn't be too messy, as Maya's poly tools preserve the UVS well. Do note, however, that if you delete and create any faces, their UVs will not correspond to the rest of your model.

However you work, your UVs are likely to be a horrible mess by the time you're finished, and you're just going to have to spend a couple of days in the UV texture window.

There are some good tutorials out there on UV mapping, bt a good process that works for me is as follows:

- Make a simple checkerboard pattern with mid-range colours that aren't to harsh on the eyes (I like a pastely-browny orange and green) and apply it to your mesh. Most likely it will be horribly distorted

- Apply a projection that suits the shape of your mesh, eg for heads, a cylindrical or a spherical projection usually works well

- Open up the UV texture editor and start shifting UVs around, trying to make the checkerboard in your model all nice and square.

- Some pieces will be a nightmare to try and pull out into shape, so select those faces and apply a new projection (making sure the resulting UVs go into the current set, not a new one), then scale and stitch those new UVs into the rest of the set.

Essentially just repeat and tweak until the checkerboard texture is even over the entire mesh. For some parts, such as the inside of the mouth, you'll want to have seperate UV sets with a different material. For some parts you probably won't be able to get a good enough resolution without smearing, and in this case it's a matter of making sure the problem areas are in places that they won't easily be seen.

Good luck with your model, it's looking nice already, although there are some obvious problem areas. As dmcgrath said, it's hard without sitting down in front of it with you, but these are the most obvious points:

- The eyes are a bit of a mess, you want to try and make evenly-spaced loops, as this will make animating it a hell of a lot easier, especially in the bottom-outside corner. A paradigm that is often used is 'edge-loops'. You can model a whole face in concentric strips of quad polys, essentially following the underlying muscle structure (there will be tris where the loop come together). Obviously, it's harder to apply this to an ostrich than to a human, but try to keep this in mind as you refine the model.

- If you're going to animate it, you'll need more segments in the neck, as it's going to have to bend a lot. For a character like this you may well want to use a spline to control the deformation of the neck, so think about how many control points you would want in that spline, and match that number with the number of segments in the neck.

- If you're going to animate the wings, they'll need to be modelled 'off' the body. You want to model them at about half-way through their maximum reach, so sticking out from the body at about 45 degrees.

It shouldn't be hard to fix the model at this stage, and you've clearly got an eye for what looks good, so try applying these techniques and ytou're sure to come out with a great-looking model. Good luck, and don't forget to keep us posted on your progress in the WIP forum!

Happy Christmas!

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