Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 5: NURBS! NURBS!

NURBS

This is just a screen shot of me playing around with the CV NURBS tool. Nothing fancy.

Lofting

Here I learned how  to connect two different NURBS lines to make one plane. 

Revolved Surface

I actually got to play around with Surface Revolutions when I was modeling the catapult. It seemed like the coolest modeling technique at the time. It's still pretty darn cool. This is a wine glass I made using a simple NURBS CV path and then revolving it. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. 

Extruded Surface

 

So next was learning how to make a profile curve (the CV's I've been working with so far) follow along the path curve  (PV's). Looking at the diagram in the book seems to me to be a bit deceiving. I placed everything where it was placed in the book and my end product came out like this. Notice how it's all pinched in the middle? Not good. 

So I worked with it for a while and finally discovered that if I moved the PV from the middle of my CV to the sharpest curve along that CV the curve wouldn't bunch up. In this case the CV was in an "I" shape and I ended up moving my PV to one of the points along the horizontal part of the shape. Hard for me to explain. Unfortunately I didn't take any other screen shots. But if for some reason anyone is curious let me know and I'll go a little more in depth. 

Here is the finished product when I moved the PV 

Much Better.

Planar Surface

I'm sure this will come in handy further down the line. I took two NURBS circles and created a plane with a hole in the middle of it. It could be used for tattered dragon wings or something to that effect. 

Beveled Surface

This was pretty easy I simply drew a shape with the CV tool and then beveled it. 

Boundary Surface

Probably my favorite technique. I had to draw four CV paths and then create a 'boundary' from them. I think you could make some really neat stuff with this! 

Combining Techniques

For this exercise I created two lofted  surfaces and connected them with a third surface. The directions on this part were a little bit harder to follow. In the end it was just a lot of switching between modes to be able to select the correct components in the correct order.

Converting NURBS Model to Polygons

In this section I converted a NURBS model into a polygonal model, which if I want to put anything into a game would need to be done. The axe file was already created, which is sort of a bummer, I would have loved to go through a step by step on how to model it myself.

Ah well.
The one on the right is the NURBS model and the one on the left is in polygons.