re cracks....
Hi there,
Nurbs can be fun, but as you have found they can be quite painful too.
to fix you cracks at the seams (this goes for any type of seam using two or more nurbs objects eg. blend fillet, stitch, etc...).
select the offending objects (object mode not component mode),
Open your 'Attribute Spread sheet under Window>General Editors>Attribute Spread sheet.
With both/all your objects still selected find the tab in the attribute spread sheet called 'Render'.
Under this tab turn off double sided.(renders only the faces seen by the camera speeding up the renders)
Now for the cracks. Under the tesselation tab turn on 'Explicit tesselation attributes (select the field for all objects with curser and enter YES.
Scroll along until you get to U and V division factor (these can be set to the lowest factor/amount that renders smoothly for you). The Attribute that will fix the crack is called 'Smooth Edge', type in On as per previous step with Explicit attributes.
Also for binding the geometry to skeleton you could copy your nurbs mesh and tesselate the copy to the lowest possible amount that still keeps the shape and convert it to a poly model. From there you could create a wrap deformer that 'Wraps' the poly around the Nurbs surfaces (holding them essentially together like a lattice), then bind the poly to a skeleton.
In the online docs this type of binding is refered to as 'Wrap' binding and is a common way to get nurbs to behave well in animation.
SubD (or fake SubD) are popular methods for modeling now because they are easy to manipulate like poly's but render smooth (at render time) like nurbs. Also, people often convert nurbs to poly's, then to SubD as there model progresses along because each technique has its own value at different times along the process of creating a finished object.
Hope this helps
re jim
Mayan elder......only in years.....
Last edited by Jim; 19-10-2002 at 01:01 PM.