A Question About --> Introduction to Hard Surface Modeling

# 1 14-03-2012 , 03:05 PM

Animator
Join Date: May 2011

Location: London

Posts: 5

A Question About --> Introduction to Hard Surface Modeling

I'm really curious about this training series and would like to make a purchase of it. Has anybody here already gone over them?

Link To: Introduction To Hard Surface Modelling
https://simplymaya.com/autodesk-maya-...d=89&sub_cat=4

My reason for wanting this is to learn how to utilize Nurbs for hard surface modelling, I usually go down the box modelling route with this type of model but the little description made me want to ask your opinions on this set of videos and how well they show you how to use Nurbs for Hard Surface modelling.

I appreciate any responses... Thanks in advance!

Last edited by II Neko II; 14-03-2012 at 08:34 PM.

Quote

# 2 14-03-2012 , 03:32 PM

Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2004

Location: Michigan, USA

Posts: 2,998

Well NURB's are pretty much out of fashion. I am not aware of any studios that allow them in the pipeline. Maya's implementation of NURB's for real hard surface final models is pretty substandard. You have to do a lot of per patch manual tessellation and rebuilding to avoid visible seams and odd parameterization anomalies. The round, fillet, and square, and boolean tools are extremely finicky.

This is not to say you cannot build decent NURB's surface models, it just requires a really deep understanding of Maya's extremely antiquated NURB's tools along with a lot of hard manual labor that should be done automatically.

Autodesk and Alias before them have done almost nothing to the NURB's tool set in Maya as far back as I can remember and I started using Maya shortly after it was released in February of 1998! From Maya 1.0 to Maya 3 or 4 NURB's were the hotness as small computers of that period did not have the juice to manage large polygonal models. From Maya 4 until now poly modeling has become the norm and is why Autodesk and Alias have ignored the NURB's tools.

This is a true shame as NURB's are extremely efficient and excel at creating complex hard surfaces composed of simple booleaned shapes with precision rounds and fillets without the fuss of trying to route a tangled rats nest of edges or bowing down to the Quad god!

Just as a note Maya's NURB's tools are a stripped down set of tools from the professional surface modeling package StudioTools, now called Alias xxx from Autodesk. In porting they completely stripped out almost all the surface continuity tools thinking they were too complex for the average artist to grasp and in effect made it a zillion times harder to achieve surface continuity between surface patches! For instance there is no zebra plots, no continuity checking (except for the square tool), and although curves of greater then 3rd degree are allowed in maya there are no tools to take advantage of them and therefore only allow data from proper surfacing applications to be imported. GG Alias!

And so after a long winded diatribe, there are not a great deal of video tutorials that I have seen that cover NURB's modeling in Maya. Your best bet would be to find some old Maya books from the Maya 3 and 4 days as they tended to cover NURB's (and more importantly, their quirks and rules) more thoroughly. All the recent stuff I have seen is pretty poor because most of the guys that know NURB's are gone.

The only ones I have seen are some VERY old Gnomon organic by Alex Alveraz and inorganic surfacing by Darrin Crumweide, an old organic dragon modeling tut from Alias, an old inorganic one from Alias which I have seen and it's terrible, and two from Dover Studios that look to be very basic and don't seem to be anything more that you could get from a good Maya 4 basic intro book.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 14-03-2012 at 04:50 PM.

Quote

# 3 14-03-2012 , 06:12 PM

Animator
Join Date: May 2011

Location: London

Posts: 5

Thank you for the detailed response but I've seen many Maya tutorials for modelling with Nurbs in Maya however they're converted to polygons after, like some of the training by SimplyMaya but after reading what you have had to say, I feel like I should just stick to my polygon modelling.

I've recently seen a friend plough through modelling some decent models by using Nurbs to base it out and then going from there... It was one of my main reasons for looking into it and finding this video series by Simply Maya but I wanted to get some feedback before purchasing, if I end up purchasing.

Quote

# 4 14-03-2012 , 11:13 PM

Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2004

Location: Michigan, USA

Posts: 2,998

Don't worry about it. Using NURB's to generate basic starting shapes is probably the most common use for NURB's in Maya, but has really nothing to do with NURBs surface modeling.

If you want to learn the basics of hard surface polygon modeling the Mech tutorial by Kurt Boutilier is a fine tutorial, as are the apache series, the spitfire, the land speeder, the tie fighter, and the jedi fighter. But these are ALL polygon modeling tutorials and have very little to do with NURBs aside from generating basic starting shapes.

Anything by Kurt Boutilier will generally start with NURBs just to rough out the basic mass of the model and then will be converted to polygons from which the remainder of the model will be built. That is just his style of modeling which is generally a good approach for organic modeling but Kurt has managed to make it work quite well for inorganics as well.

Hope that clears things up for you and if you decide to try out one of the tutorials I am sure you will find some useful techniques along the way and hope to see some WIPs in the forums.

Cheers
-Rick

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 14-03-2012 at 11:27 PM.

Quote

# 5 15-03-2012 , 11:45 PM

Animator
Join Date: May 2011

Location: London

Posts: 5

Well to be honest I think that I have a great understanding and decent level of skill within polygon modelling already, I simply had my eye on this piece of training due to the description and the fact that it uses Nurbs to get to the final stage of a hard surface model... It just interested me as I don't know too much about nurbs and would like to know more.

I really do like Kurt Boutilier's work and have seen a video of his not too long ago, I like his content and I may very well purchase the Apache tutorials, even though I feel confident enough of my skill to make something like this I believe that watching these videos should still help me improve my current techniques and process even more as I'm sure there will be things that will help strengthen my skill within this set of videos.

The Mech Warrior tutorials seem fairly interesting too and I will most likely end up getting this too but as for right now I may still get the Introduction To Hard Surfaces to view the workflow as it's only three hours?

After this I will try to get the Apache series... Or do you think that I should just jump toward the Apache tutorial?

Thanks again for all of the information and replies. It's appreciated user added image

Quote

# 6 16-03-2012 , 04:05 AM

Technical Director
Join Date: Feb 2004

Posts: 2,988

Well NURB's are pretty much out of fashion. I am not aware of any studios that allow them in the pipeline.

Originally Posted by ctbram

As far as I know, Blue Sky's pipeline is still based off of them.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Quote

# 7 16-03-2012 , 12:36 PM

Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2004

Location: Michigan, USA

Posts: 2,998

That's cool ND, my hats off to Blue Sky then, because I like NURBs, and I have used much better NURBs modeling apps then Maya, and if Blue Sky uses NURBs (and I mean beyond just starting forms, which includes using the round, fillet, square, stitching and boolean tools) and Maya, I give them a lot of credit.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Quote