CompuServe Messages

Mike, << use it in combination with shaper/lofter/smoothing to end up with a mesh I could Bone>> that's excatally how I did my Face Hugger The key to getting smooth mesh animation from bones is even distribution of faces – Smooth does this. << Does this sound like a feasible general purpose modeling technique for organics?>> Feasible? YES! I think it's the best organic modelling solution for 3DS right now. The big holdback I have with skin is that you can't add detail – yeah you can up the smoothness of the polymesh it creates. Or you can always go back and reloft all your meshes with more segments. But with metaballs and smooth you can add another blob, then smoooth it out, add another blob, etc. – I think these – coupled with the upcoming Meshpaint 3D will be the most powerful organic creation tools available for 3DS. one of the coolest things about smooth is it's ability to add detail – let me explain – you might be familar with the 'skin head' stuff I did a while back. the mesh was really low detail – I took it, tessalated it twice, and smoothed it – now I've got a mesh that looks just the rendered skin version, but I can optimize it to much less faces than skin creates because skin places faces evenly around the mesh. When I smooth and optimize, I get all the detail I want around the facial area, but only what I need around the rest of the head. Another thing you can do if you really want to use skin, is this. Create your skin mesh as one object – no slices. then use bones to create morph positions for those objects, and just morph your character. The only real reason I'd suggest doing this is if you need to use the mapping capabilities on UV coordinates. <<smoothing seams>> add as much detail as you can to the object, the Smooth – Optimize-Smooth-Optimize-etc until you get what you want. <<what settings? Do you tessalate the whole object, or just selected faces?>> I never go above 2 degrees in Optimize. I usually tessalate the whole object, unless it runs me over the 64K limit, in which case I select and tessalate. -Kyle