Nurbs Patch Modelling

 From:  Michael Gibson
1596.33 In reply to 1596.30 
Hi Danny,

> Now I'm confused, what method was this Jinwoo dude
> using, is'nt it Nurbs patches ?

Well, the final output is NURBS patches, but he never goes into very much detail about the specific methods used during modeling.

I had previously assumed that the T-splines plugin for Maya was used for that, but I guess that was not the case. Maya actually natively has some SubD to NURBS conversion capabilities within it as well, for some reason they are not very well known or widely used though.

I think there is a lot of control point manipulation of single patches there, for example in this post:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=3192749&postcount=105

> I made type c with just One patch <....>

> <..> Nowadays I mostly use type C because its light and efficient I guess. <...>


So for example that one type of ear is made up of a single surface that probably was deformed by moving its control points around. That's kind of an older style organic modeling workflow that people used before SubD was available when it was difficult to make curved objects out of polygons. NURBS modeling used to be the leading technique for character modeling back then.


So with this kind of thing you're usually looking at the result of a lot of very particular adjustments to control points to sculpt the shape how you want it.

It takes a pretty large amount of time to get enough practice to understand how the resulting surface is going to behave when you move points in a particular way.

SubD tends to be more flexible for this type of thing since it is easier to insert more points into just one spot instead of always having a uniform grid of points like a NURBS surface always has.

- Michael