[Ben Barker]

What I did yesterday. It's from the Quake 2 intro.
My digital prof told the class that nobody used polygons to model smooth surfaces. So I modeled this out of polygons.



He's stupid on so many levels. He thinks NURBS and shit don't use polys. He also refers to NURBS in the singular, like "NURB". Why is this man teaching?

[Darklighter]

heh, nice model.... and yeah, i'm a teaching assistant at my skool and i've seen some 'tard teachers too

[TheMilkMan]

nice model man,.....hwo many polys is that thing...maybe he is right about the smooth surfaces though...nobody does use polys to make them it is much better and faster just to use patch modeling ...or splines ... I mean you can make curved surfaces with polys but it is easier just to use patches??? I dont think the guy was being an idiot maybe he just wants to teach you the best way to go about doing it???

[Ben Barker]

He thinks that bezier splines and NURBS don't use polys, that they are resolution independant. He likened a spline model to a curve in Illustrator, and said "You can zoom in as much as you want, and you will never see segments!"
I spent the next 30 minutes after the lecture trying to explain to my friends how it is all polys. I usually have to dispel about half of his lecture, when things start to go wrong because people follow his instructions.

I should invite him to render a NURBS model in wireframe (if you can even DO that in Cinema 4D, the shitty program he teaches). Hey, LOOK! POLYS!

The pod is about 70 thou. In the animation I'm making you get pretty close to it.

[Epsilon]

How does one go about getting hard edges and smooth mixed together when using meshsmooth on poly's? would you be willing to give me some info on this sort of this?

[email protected]

[Ben Barker]

I didn't use mesh smooth. Most of the pieces were extruded or beveled cross sections with chamfered edges. I also used a lot of lathes and the skew, bend, and taper modifiers. Most of the small details are face extrudes/bevels. There are also a lot of primitives.

The curved shapes were modeled as a 2D surface, then given thickness with a plug-in called "Solidify" (it extrudes the faces based on vertex normals, sort of like the 'push' modifier. Just thickens the surface, really).

The air scoops on the sides are lofts.

I tried doing it with mesh smooth first, and it totally flopped. I need some more practice with that technique.

Here is the canonical Brazil rendering. Sorry if this offends anyone

[Guy]

nice model. love the detail in the back.

i must also agree with ben. nurbs arnt that great. i mess around with them a bit, but i find poly's much nicer. nurbs tend to slow down the comp a lot. especialy when you have a big scene to render. they just look nice in the viewport cause there arnt as many lines the screen has to redraw.. anyways.. nice model ben. going to texture it?

[kerosene]

Very good model. It is a pain that in many schools such good facilities are ruined by disasterous teachers.

Nurbs is (are very good for certain stuff. When doing really demanding and accurate cuntinuing surfaces or/in real life products. They are also sometimes really fast to model with and have good bevelling and trimmin posibilities but then you end up with rendering heavy model.

and now strong point that I talk about good NURBS package and in product/mechanical oriented modeling. Rhinoceros 3d is just wonderfull in many cases.

Was this model done in 3ds Max? btw. what school are you in. I am considering continuing studies.

I use nowadays mostly surfacetools for organic stuff, Rhinoceros for products, and meshsmoothing for not so detailed things.

The car in my page has quite challenging NURBS modeling but renderings suck quite a bit.

heikki anttila

Nurbs car

Surfacetools (patch) head (in progress)

[Vesuvius]

he is a moron and you make the pretty pretty models

[Shaded]

Bloody marvellous. Keep it right up.

[MeatyCheesyBoy]

That looks great. I can only see one very slight problem, hopefully you don't mind me pointing it out, the surface on the front has a part where it isn't quite as smooth as it should be. The way the light is hitting it, it looks like it has a slight ding in the surface. I circled the part I'm talking about below. You can see it better in your pic because mine is super low res.



But like I said, it looks great and that's just a very minor quibble.

[ April 24, 2001: Message edited by: MeatyCheesyBoy ]

[Marvel]

I'm a tad dissapointed (not at your model though , there really are programs that handle splines and such but have never seen polygons, for example Real 3D is such (atleast version 3.5 - I'd assume V.4. is also, but supposedly they included polygon support as well). So really, if you have a curve, you can zoom it _indefinetely_! I hate to bring this up, but perhaps your teacher isn't as dumb as he/she seemed, it might just be he/she isn't familiar with all the possible programs (i.e. the most common ones that are stupid enough to transform surfaces into polygons when rendering ).