CompuServe Messages

Sorry I haven't replied sooner, but my schedule for the past few weeks has kept me from tuning in here except for a quick scan every few days. There are several ways to dealing with "pinching" maps at the ends of meshes. On something like a dolphin I would detach the faces of the tail and fins at the base and turn them into separate objects, so that they could be mapped appart from the body (just use planar mapping from the top for these). As for pinching around the nose… well, the easiest way around this is to just avoid texture detail at the very tip where it gets pinched the most. The beauty of using the grid as a guide and rendering reference views is so that you can see exactly where any distortion will happen and adjust for it when painting the maps (i.e. stretching detail out when painting it in the map where that spot is pinched on the mesh). You can also select faces at the tip of the nose, detach them, apply spherical coords to them, and re-attach them. This last method may require you to do some serious vert welding to get the proper smoothing back on the mesh at the split, but you may get by without having to do that (it can be quite tedieous… trust me, I know from experience <g> I'm still wishing for the ability to map selected faces in R5… please….) Anyway, the bottom line is when you run into serious pinching, it's probably best to split the mapping job up into pieces, even if it adds a little more maintenence work to the mesh. I'll be getting my weekends back soon and will finish up an article I've already started on modelling and mapping with this technique, which of course, will cover all the details, hopefully clearer than i've done here. hope this helps a bit. David PS. The Grid.tga you mentioned earlier was the kind upload of someone else, but sorry, I can't seem to remember who. (whom?) …Bill B. ??