NURB versus Polygon modelling for game objects

# 1 08-01-2007 , 09:40 AM

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Join Date: Jan 2007

Location: Cambs, UK

Posts: 10

NURB versus Polygon modelling for game objects

I would like to know which type of modelling would be best for a new Maya user who wants to create game objects.

I dabbled with Polygonal modelling a couple of years ago and whilst I was able to achieve fairly crude results quite quickly and easily, the increasing complexity became troublesome.

NURBs modelling seems to me to be more natural way of sculpting objects without generating a baffling number of triangles on my screen.

Ultimately, the objects I create will need to be Polygonal models to work with the various game engines I intend to use. But I guess if I model in NURBs I can convert them over to Polys without too much trouble.

So which should I choose? Model in NURBs and convert the results? Or model in Polygons from the start?

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# 2 08-01-2007 , 10:16 AM

The Maya Mountain
Join Date: Aug 2002

Location: Seattle, WA

Posts: 8,245

I can tell you that out of all the game artists I know of, including myself, we always start from polys and end with polys.

-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

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# 3 09-01-2007 , 08:51 AM

Registered User
Join Date: May 2006

Location: Thailand

Posts: 8

converting NURBs to poly can be easy if you already got model that built from NURBs but I could say that it is not a good choice..even you can control poly counts while converting but you cannot control it's shape...for game modeling every polygons have to do their job in good manner, like every face that you inserted should make model to form some different shape...so if you convert it by choosing it to be very smooth, to be as same as the original NURBs...it may takes many polygons in scence which means that more hard job to engine...if you want to control it poly counts, shape that came out(often) won't fit with the thing you wanted..... so maybe starting with poly and ended with poly is the best +_+...I think.......

Last edited by ming; 09-01-2007 at 01:53 PM.

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