sculpting a face and attaching mirror halves

# 1 25-12-2002 , 02:51 AM

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sculpting a face and attaching mirror halves

Hi,

I've been reading the Maya2 Character Animation book, and it was helpful to SOME extent, but I thought they left out quite a lot of explanation from it.
Anyway, the problems I am facing are

Using NURBS :

1) While sculpting a face, how do I know how many isoparms I need to concentrate in a particular area (eg, mouth, eyes, nose) so I can get smooth surface when I either pull or push my surface or adust CVs?

2) What is the easiest way to model a face?

3) I tried mirroring the right half of the torso and then using the attach surfaces tool, what I got was just some extra isoparms where I joined the two surfaces and I still had 2 separate halves and not 1 whole torso. Is that how its SUPPOSED to function? Or did I do something wrong?

Thanks,

~nspiratn

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# 2 25-12-2002 , 06:13 AM

The Maya Mountain
Join Date: Aug 2002

Location: Seattle, WA

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1 - PRACTICE! user added image

2 - Based on preference... mine's using polys, starting from a simple cube.

3 - Make sure in your options that you've unchecked "Keep Originals." As for the extra isoparms, if the 2 halves are exact duplicates, I wouldn't think that would happen, as they'd have the same number of spans and such. The mirroring could possibly have switched the surface's direction, however, so check that.

-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

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# 3 03-01-2003 , 11:50 PM

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And based on my preferance...

Nurbs Planes is the way I go. Most deffinently more complicated, but you can get more detail I think. Anyway, this man you see here is from https://coldfusion.art.msstate.edu/ca...ngtheory3.html which, for some reason, is not currently working. Anyway, it goes into great detail on how to model a head from patches and gives several examples of good and bad versions of models. I have drawn out the seams of each patch in this image and have included the number of isoparms on each patch as well. After you model this head, you can either leave the patches unstiched and bind the skin as-is, stich the patches then bind the skin, or convert to polygons, combine all the patches, then line up all vertices according to the layout of the geometry, THEN use Edit Polygons> Merge Vertices to close all the gaps.

Anyway, that's my way.

www.Darkware3D.com

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# 4 03-01-2003 , 11:56 PM

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Just a side note - modeling a head with the patches laid out in this fasion is a foolproof way to avoid those ugly seams in the middle of the face. As you can see, the mouth, nose, and portion between the eyes were not mirrored, which leaves you with a seamless model.

www.Darkware3D.com

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# 5 07-02-2003 , 08:00 PM

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What if I wanted to keep the model as NURBS?

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# 6 09-02-2003 , 01:26 PM

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oh darkware, thanks for the picture. but i have a question about the mouth area. is the outside just one edge in U direction and the both V directions meet just below the lips, and the seam of the lips is the other U direction curve?

Originally posted by Dann
What if I wanted to keep the model as NURBS?

Originally Posted by

then you just leave it as NURBS, as darkware pointed out:

After you model this head, you can either leave the patches unstiched and bind the skin as-is, stich the patches then bind the skin

Originally Posted by