19 March 2003 (Wednesday) - Day 18

I haven't updated the diary for a good few days; both because I've had little time to work on the Dragon, and partly because working with bones in Max is an unreasonably difficult process.

I finished with the base texturing at least; It took much of Sunday to piece together all the relevant maps, but I'd already covered much of that with the head texturing. I want to add some colour patterns to the skin, but I'll wai until the final composition before I decide for sure which type (I've got a black "triangular" tribal stripes pattern in mind, but I think the relevant areas may already be too dark- I may have to opt for a contrasting blue..)

A quick test render (the left image is a straight grab from Max viewport of course: )

As I mentioned earlier I've also been skinning the whole model ready to pose. It's a process I normally enjoy in Maya, but I must say I've finally found a real shortcoming in Max.

The skinning system is fine for low resolution game models, but incredibly painful and tedious work for high res in Max.. I can hardly imagine a mored tedious method for adjusting weights.

Maya has a very flexible system, with an intuitive spreadsheet (component level) for weights allowing you to edit as many as you want simultaneously and quickly. For a more interactive setup of weights, the paint skin weights tools is quite a joy.

Max, on the other hand, requires the editing of individual vertices for the spreadsheet editing and the weight painting is hardly even functional. To top it all, I've yet to find a reliable way of mirroring this workflow (a feature that's all too easy in Maya)

I'd much rather do it in Maya, but it looks like I'll have to suffer for now..

 

 

 

mouse-over: Crappy Skin

 

Hardly related to the dragon, but here's a little modelling tip I came across a while back (playing with extrusions, as they don't alter UV placement)

 
Better Edge Chamfering

 

The way the light is cast off polygon surfaces is mainly related to the "normals" (the way the apparent smoothing is calculated to the direction of the center of the next face). To ensure a chamfer adheres to the normals of the neghbouring polygons;

1) Always run an extrude on the selected edges before chamfering.

2) Make sure you run the extrude with an "extrusion height" of zero; and the base wide enough to encompass the following extrude.

3) Chamfer the edges as normal.

 
The images should be self explanatory, but in case they're not - the shape on the right is modelled with better chamfering.

 

 

Back to working on the skeleton then...

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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