Day 184

So last week I was getting a little sick but this week I was really sick. Due to that and the fact that the next lessons involved stuff I didn't really like, my motivation to work was fairly low and I didn't get that much done. Anyway, the next part of my book involves modeling another character but using a new approach. Every character I've made so far in all my books was done using polygons. This time I'll be making them out of curved surfaces (aka nurbs). From my limited knowledge of modeling, this method isn't used very often. I think awhile back people thought it would be the next big thing since the models will be smooth and you don't have to worry about the blockiness of polygons. However, nurbs aren't as easy to work with as polygons so they aren't used that much at least in this application of character modeling. This post will be about a general technique called socking where we're trying to connect two nurbs objects. Above is half a sphere and a cylinder meant to represent an arm and a shoulder but really it's gonna look like a penis.

First up is to cut the shapes into smaller pieces called patches. The tube is split into four while the hemisphere is cut into nine pieces with the middle one removed. Then I attached the four tube parts to four of the sphere parts.

Now I want to close the gaps. I do this but cutting the pieces I just attached and then attaching other nearby patches together. Then I detach those, attach others, and repeat until the gaps slowly close. Eventually, the gaps become small enough that I can apply a stitching operation to all the patches at once to close up all the seams which you can see on the right.