modeling suggestions 2

[jujubee]

Hey Suurland- I reduced the number of polys. Does this image look better/easier to work with? I'm going to proceed and try to weld the vertices up but I dont think the vertical edges along the arms will match up. If they don't match can i delete some of those edges safely? It's mind boggling to think anyone can match vertices up like that. Maybe that's not what I'm supposed to do.

I think one of the problems that I have is that I tend to work with as many polys as I can possibly squeeze out of my computer. Guess that's the problem with alot of people starting out in Max.

[suurland]

Looks better now, but the arms could still have fewer polys.. if they had only 4 sides it will be easy to stich it with the body.

But you are right.. using as many polys as possible is VERY stupid, the simpler things is the easiere it is to work with.

/Thoma

[egz]

Yes, EPoly is editable poly.

For this model this is how I created it:

1. I started by grabbing your JPG and cleaning it up to get just the silhouette alone. I then loaded this as a backdrop in my front view.
2. Create a plane that fills the torso. Give it 3x4 sections.
3. Convert the plane to Editable Poly
4. Turn on NURMS subdivsion in the EPoly rollout, give it 2 iterations
5. Drag the verices around to match the shape of the torso. Line up the top two middle verices with the neck, and the top two vertices on the left and right with where the arms start. To make it easier to see what you are doing you can assign a standard material with 50% opacity to the object, and turn on solid shading.
   You should now have something like this:
   
6. Switch to edge mode and select the middle top edge. Hold shift and drag it upwards to extrude it to create the neck and head. The head only needs about 5 segments.
7. Do the same for each of the arms, rotating and scaling each edge as you go, or extrude a lot of segments and move the vertices in place afterwards. It depends on what you prefer.
   You should now have this:
   
8. Switch to element subobject mode, and select the object. All the object should be selected. Select Detatch from the edit geometry rollout. check both the Detatch as element and the Detatch as clone box. Flip the normals of the cloned element, since this will be the back of the object.
9. Select the original element again (turn on ingnore backfacing if it is hard to select the right one, but make sure it doesn't stay on since you'll need it off later). Switch to polygon subobject mode, and extrude the polygons so that you get a nice thickness to the object.
10. You should now have the silhouette, smoothed on one side, and sharp on the other, like this:
    
11. To fix this, go into vertex subobject mode, select all vertices, and select weld. You should end up with this:
    
12. The last step is to fix the variable thickness. Start selecting the edges in the arms, one segment at a time, and scale them along the y axis to the approriate thickness. It is easiest to select in the front view with the lasso, and scaling in a side or top view. Make sure ignore backfacing is off, since you want to get both the front and back edges selected. Go through all edges until you are satisfied with the result.
13. To stop the smoothing on the bottom, you can either delete the 3 bottom polys, or extrude them a tiny amount to make a nice sharp edge.
14. Voila:
    

If you want my file you can download it here:
http://vray.info/assets/egz/box-silhouette.zip

[suurland]

Haha.. that mini tutorial took more then 23min to make didn't it??

/Thomas

[egz]

hehe, about twice as long

[jujubee]

Oh my god. I don't know how much to thank you for this. That is truly fantastic! Anything I can do to help just let me know I really really appreciated that. I'm so sorry you spent the time working on this to help me out. I feel really bad now cause of your generous kindness. Everyone on this forum is so nice. Your work should really get posted as a general max tutorial for smoothing complex splines!

While expiramenting, I went the method of using 3 cylinders with lower amounts of polys as suggested earlier. Welding was a bear to work with as I could never get the right amount of numbers of vertices in the arms to match up- and most of them welded together unevenly. Below is an image of the stages to achieve my figure.

Your method is 100x better and more accurately symmetrical! There definitely is more than one way to skin the cat in this case and you were most efficient. I can't express my gratitude. Thanks so much!!!

[dejaVu]

If you took your "Suurland-method" torso cylinder (that's a mouthful) and extruded the 2 polys at the shoulders up either along a spline or extrude transform, you would have gotten a similar result.
Whack on a Meshsmooth and you're there.

Guess you won't be switching to Maya then...

[cocolas]

thanks much for the poly tute egz....

quite helpful...


paul.

[suurland]

There is many ways to get from A to B.

But jujube what's up with the body, the errors looks like there is some vertices that isn't welded or something. Atleast it's not pure quads your using downthere.

/Thomas

[jujubee]

The 'body' spline was based on something I threw together in literally 2 seconds and it looks matter-of-fact shitty (down, dirty, and easy.) I had tossed the original 'refined' spline file after three days of frustration and deadlines (having learned new modeling techniques such as NURBS and metaballs)- I wasn't interested in producing 'artwork' here through this forum. I was more interested in the raw technique after failing miserably.

My tendency with a spline like that was to extrude and meshsmooth- thereby producing unwanted self-intersecting polygons and tesselations. And my other methods of modeling were producing too many seams. I just wanted to know what the most efficient method to get from point A-B as I obviously wasn't achieving that goal. Low polygon modeling is really underestimated after seeing your solutions. And I would have never thought to start off with patches like that.

The original file was already finished a couple of weeks back by a different modeler using Maya. It has just weighed heavily on my shoulders for a while that I couldn't finish it and wanted to learn how. My friend Kenn Brown - the artist who asked me to originally create it for him as a favor (www.mondolithic.com) will have it published in Business 2.0 magazine. It looks a world different. Check out his work if you have a second to spare- he has numerous covers and inserts for Wired, PC World, Popular Science, etc. He is truly a gifted artist and it's well worth a visit for inspiration alone. It's amazing what he does with Max and Photoshop. It should appear in this coming month's issue as an award. I don't want to post his final as there may be some copyright issues. I'm sure he'll have it on his website soon enough.

Also, please feel free to check out my new website if you have a sec to spare. Feedback is more than appreciated. I'm posting new images at a rate of about one every three days or so (while I'm unemployed LOL):

http://www.lunarstudio.com

Like I said before, thank you all for your wonderful help and suggestions. Four days of screwing around- but you guys made it all worth it. I think it's very educational!

[jujubee]

Oh. It's early in the morning Thomas. Guess I missed your point with the last message.

Yeah- it wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I had too many polys in the arm cylinders as well as a bunch of useless cap segments. Ended up welding a couple vertices together where the cylinders met and it produced some artifacts- I couldn't figure out a better way to toss the extra polys so the numbers would match up without having to completely redo the arm segments from scratch. I think that's the biggest pain in working with Polys- the matching of vertices. Plus I was concerned with how smooth meshsmooth would really work on something so low poly. Guess I underestimated meshsmooth. But the general idea was there that it could be done.

If I had to do it again, I might try just extruding the 'shoulder' polys for the arms on the torso cylinder- using vertex rotations, scaling, and the slice plane. There would be four segments horizontally for the arms. I assume meshsmooth would have worked fine on this.

[dejaVu]

Oh. It's early in the morning Thomas. Guess I missed your point with the last message.

Yeah- it wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I had too many polys in the arm cylinders as well as a bunch of useless cap segments. Ended up welding a couple vertices together where the cylinders met and it produced some artifacts- I couldn't figure out a better way to toss the extra polys so the numbers would match up without having to completely redo the arm segments from scratch. I think that's the biggest pain in working with Polys- the matching of vertices. Plus I was concerned with how smooth meshsmooth would really work on something so low poly. Guess I underestimated meshsmooth. But the general idea was there that it could be done..

>>I think Thomas was wondering why there are those strange radiating polys in the torso area...nowhere near the arms. They should not have Subdivided like that if they were clean polys.

If I had to do it again, I might try just extruding the 'shoulder' polys for the arms on the torso cylinder- using vertex rotations, scaling, and the slice plane. There would be four segments horizontally for the arms. I assume meshsmooth would have worked fine on this.

Why go to all the trouble of Extrude, Rotate, and scale when you can collapse to an Editable Poly and use Extrude along Spline option?

[jujubee]

hmm- never tried extruding along a spline...

[Psy]

saw this and decided to give it a shot, will post a wireframe and how i modelled it in a lil bit if u want.

[jujubee]

Nice try- that's sorta what I was getting when I first started off. What I was shooting for was exactly what EZG achieved. The model needed more roundness and depth. The problem with a simple extrude like that is that it dooesn't provide cross-sectioning along the main face in a symetrical pattern a human eye would want to percieve. As you can see, extruding a spline doesnt work with meshsmooth in this case.