poly to nurbs?

[tikimon]

is it at all possible to somehow transform a polygon character to a nurbs one? i'm trying to use pfx to place fur on my polygonal character, and so i need a nurbs "jacket" to go over the polygon to do this. however, if i could convert this character to nurbs, it would look a lot better, and would be easier to fur. is this at all possible, either through making the character live or by some other method? i've tried making him live and placing curves on it, but it's taking way too long to get the correct shapes, and enough of them to loft the character properly. if anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

by the way, subds won't work... the character is extremely heavy (not by choice!), and converting to subds makes it worse, and it also does not carry the correct uv mapping either.

:=TiKiMoN

[gmask]

Hey,

There is no automatic way in maya to convert poly to nurbs. There are some very expensive apps that do this and they are mainly used to convert laser scans to nurbs but they still require an operator rather than a button push. Anyway the way to do it.. and for you needs it should be easy enough.. is to make your model live and then draw curves on the poly mmesh that make patch boundaries and then loft the curves to make nurbs patches. The next step is to either use the poly mesh as a wrap deformer for the nurbs patches or bind the nurbs patches to the skeleton.

[cyphre]

Also, I have found "Make Live" to be an decent way to do that. A nicer way for me to draw on my object is to set it so you can only place points on vertexes. This will only be useful for drawing lines on top of polygons. Then if you have designed your polygon right it should be easy to see where diffrent patches would be on your model. I would create my nurb lines in a box for each patch and create it by using boundary instead of just drawing each line in the U or V dirrection then lofting.

The only problem you will run into doing this method instead of using "Make Live" is that sometimes the point you just placed for the line will go to a vertex point thats on the other side of your object. This only happens sometimes when, in your view, the front and back vertexs line up or if your closer to the back vertex rther then the front.

Hope this helps

[serious]

hi,

i also am trying to convert a poly object to nurbs. i tried using make live but the points dont seem to snap on the poly object. i tried to do it on a nurbs object just to be sure if my steps are correct coz i havent used maya very much (i'm a softimage user). it does snap on a nurbs object. it seems that make live doesnt work on polygons? or maybe its just on my pc. any help is appreciated.

thanks,

[flys]

Make Live on polys works differently than it does on nurbs surfaces. If you draw a curve on a live nurbs surace all you have to do is draw a start point and a finish point (pending you don't cross a seam) and the curve will hug the original nurbs surface. However when working on poly's you should always lay down a lot of points to define the detail of the surface (this can always be cleaned up later). If you try just a few points the curve will be created by finding the shortest path between the two points totally ignoring the original surface.
Hope it helped.

[bullets_rain]

Uhm I know this is probably what you DON'T want to hear ... for your situation, it might be best simply to use the polygonal model as a template from which you build a NURBS surface model. Model the major masses first, ignoring all the detail, just get the general volume and shape "right" (well "right" being you're happy with it). Then for the detail areas, begin by creating curves to loft, rotate or square away by vertex snapping NURBS curves to the vertices of the polygons in the detail areas. You then have to blend these individual detail pieces into the main masses via slicing, stitching etc (usual NURBS modelling).

Generally it's like starting over (uhmm wait it probably is pretty much starting over...) but instead of 2d image planes to work from, you have an actual 3D object which CAN (May??) make the process a bit faster.

Cheers and good luck!