MODELING COMMENTS
I asked Bradley Sick,
veteran Rhythm&Hues modeler, if he had any words of advice for our project
modelers...
Would you happen to have a list of
modeling tips, "for the kids," that I could pass along? Would you be interested
in putting one together?
I don't
have a list of tips at hand. It would be interesting to make one, but without
knowing specifically what is not known, it's hard to know what to
say.
Also, there are any number of ways
to model in Maya. (I'm assuming that everyone's modeling in Maya?) I'm really
only familiar with polygonal modeling, but there are nurbs and subdiv surfaces
as well. I know that, with polygons, if you're lighting in Maya, it's fine to
have triangles. Even if you're lighting with MentalRay it's okay. But if
you're going to use MentalRay's displacement, I think you need all quads.
However, if you smooth a model before rendering it, the output is all quads
anyway, so you'd be good to go.
Is
everyone modeling with a lower resolution model, then smoothing it at render
time? I'd recommend that route. Maya 6.0 has a nice Smooth Proxy tool that I
used on a personal project -- it lets you work on half of a "cage" model and
simultaneously see a whole, smoothed result. And it was surprisingly fast,
especially if you put the smoothed version on a separate layer and only turn it
on when you need it.
Posted: Fri - July 29, 2005 at 11:13 PM