I AM the Poly King!
Apr. 8th, 2003 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caraigOkay, before people wonder, 'Poly' in this sense means 'polygons.' =) Today actuallly went pretty well, all in all. The past week has been filled with some rough times especially with the starting of Final Project. I've pretty much become a recluse from the net, and it's been a bit rough kleeping my mind focussed on the project. However, there is good news in this.
Today *sigh* I had to re-start the head of my character. Now, for those of you who don't speak CGIese, I'll provide a translation in a moment. The original head was a radial head formed from a NURBS cylinder. Y'see, you take a NURBS cylinder, use one end for the neck, and twist and turn the rest of the cylinder so that the other end is the back of the throat and it all looks a bit like a head. It's called a 'radial head' because it forms a radial pattern of isoparms (thinks that you can use to manipulate it into the shape you want) outward from the mouth.
Anyway, i converted the radial head into polygons. NURBS stands for 'Non-Uniform Radial B-Spline,' and it's as ugly and horrible and math-y as it sounds. Polygons are altogether nicer and friendlier. A vertex in a polygon is exactly where it is; unlike in NURBS, a control point or vertex doesn't exist in some three-dimensional position off of the surface it's defining. So, I converted the radial NURBS head into a polygonal radial head. It wasn't working out too well, I wasn't getting the control I need. (As any character rigger can tell you, it's all about CONTROL, mwahahaha!) In all, it looked pretty ugly. The instructor hemmed and hawed a bit then finally said, 'I'd suggest you start over.' Meh. That wasn't exacly what I wanted to hear. However, he told me some neat ways in how to do it. Take the original shape of the head, take a polygon cube and make it match the shape of the next, extrude, shape, trim ,extrude some more... then just split the polys till I get the level of detail I wanted.
TRANSLATION: My original head was causing me problems, so I had to rebuild it. Sorry to get so long-winded, but wanted to pass that-all on to any animators out there!
And, actually, it was the right thing to do. I got more done on the head in six hours than I did over the course of, oh, sixteen or so when I first built the thing, and it just LOOKS better, to boot. I wish they'd taught us that method originally, but I had suspected that the final project class was going to be like this.
Well, this day wasn't *perfect* but I could have gone through it a lot worse. I manged to finally use that very cute 'productive' mood icon! =) All in all, I'm optimistic about what
For now, off to watch '24,' arguably the only worthwhile thing on broadcast media-crity these days. Unfortunately, I have to suffer through a few minutes of American Idol. I know it takes guts to get up in front of a lot of people no matter what your talent level, but, man, this just makes me twitch so much it's not even funny.
Today *sigh* I had to re-start the head of my character. Now, for those of you who don't speak CGIese, I'll provide a translation in a moment. The original head was a radial head formed from a NURBS cylinder. Y'see, you take a NURBS cylinder, use one end for the neck, and twist and turn the rest of the cylinder so that the other end is the back of the throat and it all looks a bit like a head. It's called a 'radial head' because it forms a radial pattern of isoparms (thinks that you can use to manipulate it into the shape you want) outward from the mouth.
Anyway, i converted the radial head into polygons. NURBS stands for 'Non-Uniform Radial B-Spline,' and it's as ugly and horrible and math-y as it sounds. Polygons are altogether nicer and friendlier. A vertex in a polygon is exactly where it is; unlike in NURBS, a control point or vertex doesn't exist in some three-dimensional position off of the surface it's defining. So, I converted the radial NURBS head into a polygonal radial head. It wasn't working out too well, I wasn't getting the control I need. (As any character rigger can tell you, it's all about CONTROL, mwahahaha!) In all, it looked pretty ugly. The instructor hemmed and hawed a bit then finally said, 'I'd suggest you start over.' Meh. That wasn't exacly what I wanted to hear. However, he told me some neat ways in how to do it. Take the original shape of the head, take a polygon cube and make it match the shape of the next, extrude, shape, trim ,extrude some more... then just split the polys till I get the level of detail I wanted.
TRANSLATION: My original head was causing me problems, so I had to rebuild it. Sorry to get so long-winded, but wanted to pass that-all on to any animators out there!
And, actually, it was the right thing to do. I got more done on the head in six hours than I did over the course of, oh, sixteen or so when I first built the thing, and it just LOOKS better, to boot. I wish they'd taught us that method originally, but I had suspected that the final project class was going to be like this.
Well, this day wasn't *perfect* but I could have gone through it a lot worse. I manged to finally use that very cute 'productive' mood icon! =) All in all, I'm optimistic about what
For now, off to watch '24,' arguably the only worthwhile thing on broadcast media-crity these days. Unfortunately, I have to suffer through a few minutes of American Idol. I know it takes guts to get up in front of a lot of people no matter what your talent level, but, man, this just makes me twitch so much it's not even funny.
