While surfsearching for information about a Maya Mel script I’d seen in action years ago, I happened across a nice polygon modeling timelapse video on anotherhell.com which some of you who visit this blog might find interesting. There’s no audio. Just polygons being manipulated into the shape of a boot. Fun to watch.
The video is available for download in the tutorial section of the site (Link) and is a .rar compressed file, so you’ll need to have something like WinRAR to decompress it.
Be sure to check out the rest of the site as well. You’ll see the rendered boot as well as some nice character models.
If only everything were modeled using polys and subD’s.
{Image Copyright © 2002 – 2005 John Iysun Raho}
csven, have you had any luck creating tooling-ready models from poly/sub-d surfaces? Are there parametric poly/sub-d tools available? I’m kind of spoiled by Pro/E.
Yeah. Actually I did wind up creating a tooling-ready part from polygons a year or two ago. Unintended though. I was just converting and after I was finished, I did a draft check. Just consider the polygon edges your partline.
I converted from polygons to NURBs and then imported into Pro/E and solidified. I don’t know of any parametric poly/subD tools. There are a couple of mesh-to-Nurbs options available. One is in Rhino and one is in Maya. There might be more, but I’m unaware of them.
There’s also a mesh-to-Solid tool. That’s available as a plug-in for Rhino or as a standalone (actually a plug-in for a relatively unknown CAD application that comes with the tool).
Thanks csven. That’s pretty much what I expected to hear. Does Maya convert from polys/sub-ds to NURBS?
Yes. There’s a built-in tool for converting. But it can be tricky to use and take a long time to convert.