By the way your giraffe turned out pretty good!

Hi Anis,

I used a combination of MoI's tools to make the dog model.

The paws are simple spheres which were *scaled to an approximate oval shape, then control point edited, using the Scaling tools and the Align and Move tools on pairs or groups of points. The head, nose, ears and tongue were also made by control point editing of spheres. A Network Surface was used to make the main body. A 2-rail Sweep would also have worked, but to be able to shape the contours of the body from all sides - front, back, left and right, a network surface seemed to offer more control. Sweeps were used for the limbs and tail. After all the components were constructed, I did a lot of scaling and nudging to position and proportion everything together. The parts were then Booleaned and fillets were applied to soften the seams.

I actually had to go back a few steps in my incrementally saved model and make some revisions after I discovered
the legs were too close together to work as a jewelry model. Here's the final version. As it happened, on this version,
I couldn't get the amount of filleting I wanted on the legs on one side, so I split the model down the middle, deleted
the troublesome side, then mirrored the successfully-filleted side over.

I'll try to do a basic version of your giraffe example later this week with some more details.

Thanks,

Jesse

Edit: Hi Michael, I just tried the frame-edit tool in the new MoI v2 Beta..it definitely makes control point editing easier!
Can it be used to move points as well as scale and rotate?

*Could you also explain how scaling the solid object rebuilds the amount of control points? It makes a big difference in terms of the potential of the object to remain smooth and workable, if that makes any sense. -JDK

>Can it be used to move points as well as scale and rotate?

Jesse,
Have you tried Petr's "Nudge" tool. It works great for this.

MoI resources-Petr's page. Dobre Je!

Burr

Hi Burr,

Thanks, I do use Petr's keyboard nudge tool, it's very good.

- Jesse

Hi Anis,

For simplicity's sake, the detail isn't quite exact and I made the model symmetrical, even though the pictures show that it varies in shape from side to side. I set up the three images in the corresponding viewports to trace with curves. For the main section, I used a network surface. I modeled most of the other parts from spheres, editing groups of control points. If you turn on the control points on the jaw and ear parts you can get an idea of how the points are "sculpted". MoI's selection tools and display features make it possible to grab points and move them around. I used the align tool, the scaling and move tools and the new frame editing tool in the MoI v2 beta. If you have any specific questions, just ask... :-)

-Jesse

>>Have you tried Petr's "Nudge" tool.

Those scripts on my webpage are mainly Michael's custom command / scripts. Mostly I cite author's name in parenthesis.

>>Dobre Je!

hehe... have you started learning Czech, Burr?


Petr

Hi Michael,

You seem to have had no chance to react to this edited part of Jesse's message...



Petr

Oops, I didn't see that edited-in later part.

Jesse, you wrote:
> Can it be used to move points as well as scale and rotate?

To move points, you just drag directly on the points same as v1... Are you asking about a certain kind of movement different than that?


> *Could you also explain how scaling the solid object
> rebuilds the amount of control points? It makes a big
> difference in terms of the potential of the object to remain
> smooth and workable, if that makes any sense. -JDK

Scaling a solid actually should not change the number of control points in the surfaces in the solid...

Maybe I'm not quite following what you are referring to here though, could you go into some more detail?

(PS - I'll be out for a couple of days)

- Michael

>hehe... have you started learning Czech, Burr?


Sorry no! When I was in Italy I met a Czech girl and all I can remember is jak se maj, ja se mum dobre je. or something like that.

I always wanted to learn czech or russian though never invested the time I needed. Just one of those dreams I have. And always running into Czech guy's playing hockey!

THat czech girl was the most beautiful woman ever!

Burr

Hi Michael,


Well, I'm a little confused about this...but it looks like when a solid sphere is drawn in MoI and scaled 2d in a particular way, it changes from a 3 degree object to a 2 degree object, decreasing the number of control points...however, when I saved the sphere and opened it in Rhino, it read as a 2 degree object.

My original point was that if you want to control point edit a sphere into another shape, scaling it 2d also reduces the number of control points, making it less shape-able.

Jesse

Hi Jesse - I see what you mean.

The part that is confusing here is the "automatic deformable points" feature.

This is what makes a degree 2 sphere that is made up of 4 quadrants instead show the control points of a deformable degree 3 surface approximation. The sphere is actually degree 2 the whole time but if you move one of the points, it will get automatically converted into a rebuilt degree 3 surface approximation so that it can be squished smoothly (you have probably already seen the kind of quadrant segmentation that happens if you move the points on a degree 2 surface that has fully multiple knots in it).

This automatic refitting is only active for surfaces of revolution. If you scale a sphere in the direction that its seam is running, it will remain a surface of revolution, but if you scale it along one of the other directions it will no longer be a surface of revolution and won't have the automatic refitting applied to it.

I think it may be possible to me to extend this to work better in the future instead of only working on surfaces of revolution.

- Michael

The basic idea is that if you draw a sphere, I want to keep it as degree 2 if you don't need to mess with its control points since the degree 2 version is a totally precise exact sphere.

But if you want to turn on control points and squish it, you get the points for a rebuilt degree 3 version, but the sphere itself does not get changed to use that degree 3 rebuilt surface until you actually drag one of those points around.

- Michael

Hehe... the "automatic refit with deformable object" feature seems to have a lot of hidden secrets -Petr