[[Shizo]]

Any 1337 3d d00dz here?
If so.. i can't apply Surface modifier to my splined head. The head is half-face made of bezier/smooth splines.
I followed this tutorial, and i can't pass the step "apply Surface modifier" cause it doesnt work! http://www.3dluvr.com/content/artz/3dsmax/std/polyhead.php

He selects all splines (and so do i) and puts surface on it (which i cant do). When i do that, the splines disappear and in 3d view i get some weird gray dots.
Help?

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nothing really matters to me

[Ben Barker]

Post some pictures of your spline cage.

[Guy]

personaly i think thats the dumbest way to do heads. i usualy start with a box or a sphere and lots of mesh editing, but then thats with poly's and not bezier splines

[Frost]

It's not stupid at all to use splines for modeling, in fact, it's probably the only decent way to do high-definition models.

[[Shizo]]

here is head.. how i fix? :p

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nothing really matters to me

[Flinthawk]

Here's a few tips, Shizo, some which you probably already know.

1: Go back through and make sure all the splines are one spline object.

2: Use 3D snap to make sure all the vertices are together in the same spot.

3: Make sure that there are 3 or 4 vertices, no more, no less, that are surrounding any area that you want a patch to show up.

4: On the Surface modifier panel turn that threshold value to 0.001. Also, I usually check the 'Remove interior patches' box.

Hopefully that helps some. As a side note to a couple responses here, splines isn't a stupid way to model characters, infact, all the characters we're doing for our game here are done in patches (converted to meshes until we get the programmers on patch support ). There're still some drawbacks to using splines but the same can be said for Mesh Smooth modeling as well. Patches gives us an easy way to do detail levels on the fly, within the game engine, without having to store the data of two or three more meshes needed for levels of detail. Mesh is still the way to go for environments, objects or other things that involve more straight lines than curved but I've hearing more and more companies looking into spline modeling for organic objects and characters. Just fyi

-Flinthawk

[[Shizo]]

Flint, i used 3d snap all the way (following the tutorial advice hehe) and i went and attached all splines together as you said... Now instead of gray dots i get nothing at all :p
Can you look at it real quick and maybe apply a surface to it so i can learn from it?

And yes i checked if the view showed wireframe/3d =] I also tried rendering..
Here is the file forums_3dhead.max

[Flinthawk]

Alrighty, just took a look at it. First thing wrong was what I mentioned in tip number one...the Surface modifier, as far as I know, doesn't apply itself to multiple splines so you have to make sure all the splines for the head are one single object, preferably an Editable Spline, so I went through and collapsed all the splines and attached them as one object.

Next, you may have used 3D snap but some vertices were still off...3D snap does this at times, you just have to make sure by zooming in to make sure they are indeed overlapping each other. It was working buggy for me, too, so I had to zoom in to make sure everything was kosher. Also, when using snap, make sure your axis contraint is set to 'View' and not something like 'Local' or 'Parent'.

Also, on the Surface modifier panel I set the Threshold to 0.001, as I mentioned.

Oh yeah, you said you attached all the splines but didn't see anything...maybe it was working but the normals were flipped. Throughout the process of working in Surface tools you'll find that additions or subtractions of splines cause the normals to flip occasionally...just go to the Surface panel and check or uncheck the 'Flip Normals' button to reverse it.

That and I went in and added or deleted certain vertices and segments to make sure each hole (except for the eye socket) was made up of only three or four segments...having anymore will cause Surface not to draw a patch there (which is why the eye is a hole).

I couldn't upload the max files to geocities for some reason but here're two screenshots showing how it came out.





In my e-mail I also included a head I'm currently working on to give you an idea of how it all looks towards the end. Hope this helps

-Flinthawk



[This message has been edited by Flinthawk (edited February 03, 2001).]