- ALIGNED IMAGE PLANES
- ALPHA ONION SKINS
- MAYA CARD TRICKS
- MAPPING VERSUS MODELING
- INSERT HERE WHILE DRAWING CURVES
- EXPLICIT, R-RATED NURB TESSELLATION
- TESSELLATION VERSUS CVs
- LINEAR VERSUS CUBIC HEROICS
- CONSTRAIN THOSE UNRULY CURVES
- THE REVOLUTIONS WILL NOT BE TELEVISED
- BI-RAILING THE MISSING GLASS SLIPPER
- SLIPPER REBUILDING
- SHADY, UNDESIRABLE ELEMENTS IN MAYA
- RANDOMIZE THOSE CVs
- JUNKYARD DUMPING SIMULATION
- USE OF PHOTOSHOP AS A MODELING TOOL
- AUTOTRACING FOR FUN AND PROFIT
- PHOTOSHOP PATHS TO MAYA CURVES
- WRESTLING WITH DISPLACEMENT
- ANIMATE YOUR MODELING
- SET SUBTLETIES
- TRANSFORM TOOLS SHORTCUT
- INTERROGATING POINTS AS TO WHERE THEY LIVE
- FACE PROPOGATION VIA SHELL IN POLY SELECTION CONSTRAINTS
SLIPPER REBUILDING
One of the true great Swiss Army Knife commands in your modeling toolbox is Edit NURBS, Rebuild Surfaces. You can change U and V Degree, direction, and number of parameterization spans while retaining the boundary and shape of the surface. This comes in handy when optimizing surfaces or creating the right spans for animation behavior. Let's look at the shoe modeled in the previous tip. Let's say it is too heavy for a real-time game. Turn Spans to 1 and 1 and output to Polygon Quads. This is a NURBS command that often is more flexible to use than the NURBS To Polygons tool. Now let's say that we need to up-res the shoe for a close-up in an ad campaign. Turn Spans up to 20 and 20, output back to NURBS, and we have a gleaming glass slipper worthy of close inspection.