robcat2075

If you post JPGs more people will see them in the forum. BMPs don't display, they have to be downloaded.

My system is less than yours. Faster is always better, but I get by. A:M doesn't need extreme graphics cards. Your card is probably better than mine too. But did any of the above suggestions improve your situation? PageUp/PageDown is a biggie.

Can you show a wireframe of the model? 4000 is getting up there. You can use the pageup/page down keys to adjust the tradeoff between smoothness and realtime response. PageDown until you hear the bell for the fastest setting.

That turned out well! That's the biggest mustache I've seen today.

They're invisible. Those should be classic OK spots for hooks.

Looks promising!

Now to try to paint the thing. I'm going to use my brand new, minimal manual unwrapping, cylindrical UV mapping method. I made a pose that bends the chin down and aligns the head around the Y axis The nose is so prominent I'll map that separately, so I hide the nose when I apply a dummy checkerboard map to the head with cylindrical application method. I made another pose that aligns the nose around the Y axis. I hid everything but the nose and applied the lower portion of the map you saw above. When both applies are done the head looks like this: The resulting UV view looks like this: This looks like pretty reasonable mapping with not too much time spent moving the mesh around to get it ready for a decal. Extra bonus... because these are cylindrical decals I only have one seam to paint over at the back of the head and one under the nose. Although the UV view looks like the seam point are one patch over front the back of the head and the bottom of the nose, 3D painter seems to still interpret the seam as being at those splines.

That's a fine looking car. Did they really sell them in baby blue?

It's already pretty clay-like. you can push and pull points all over the place.. There isn't an add-on for that. Many modeling techniques you might know from polygon programs don't apply to splines. You want to learn spline modeling techniques. I'm not sure what you mean here. Have you done the modeling tutorials in "The Art of Animation:Master"? That's stuff you gotta know before you try a dragon.

I stitched a circle around a CP at the base of the head and extruded that for a simple neck. It won't be seen, but the cloth will need something to deflect against.

Yeah, I also don't like the way the jowl and bottom of the ear seem to be the same thing. I'm finding hooks that work smoothly on one side refuse to be smooth on the other side. So while resplining those I've reworked it to give a more definite ear lobe, send the jowl line down farther.

Here in Texas you get run out of town if your poem doesn't look like a poem. My inclination would be to go to an easier-to read conventional font so the text could be smaller. But if you love it, you love it. I think I'll get one for my niece.

BTW, I'll just note I have a scheme for mapping without unwrapping http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=317436 Basically you let A:M's cylindrical mapping capability do the UV unwrapping for you. I know it won't satisfy everyone, but I'm going to try it on my Punch model. Sorry, no vid on it.

Could you reduce the type size so the verse formatting would work?

After studying Xtaz's solution I realized there are some hooks (highlighted in color) right next to each other that could be re routed to join in a conventional CP. The red and yellow can be joined as in b but that makes a 3 pointer right on the crest of the cheek and has a hook in its side which will be hard to smooth. Hooks going into 4 point patches are generally fine, but into 3 pointers not so much. Instead I ran the red spline up to the eye and hooked the yellow into its side as in c. The green and blue cause a 3 pointer when they join but it's not in a problem spot so it's fine. In d I simplified a bit more under the ear by shifting the the pink and purple hook and spline down one CP and eliminating the brown spline. This result CFAs fine. It's not that the original a would not have worked, but simplifying the topology was probably better anyway. Here's a turnaround of the possibly finished head mesh. I'll probably need to add a simple neck PunchTurn3DH.mov

That looks real nice, Ken. When I open the PDF the text doesn't look formatted like in the sample page you have above, where every line ends in the rhyming word like i would expect. Is it intended that way? I thought it might be my Acrobat reader, but it's still the same after I upgraded.

Thanks. Yeah, it was looking kind of doubtful for a while. There are some hooks that are causing some surface weirdness and not CFA ing so I'll have to rethink a bit of it. Tomorrow. This has been a full modeling day for me since I almost never model.

Ear

Here's a completely filled in view. Much adjusting will be done but I think this will work. Doh! Forgot the ear! Edit: revised to move 5 pointer farther off jowl bulge

Most of that original profile spline has been replaced now by modeled parts, so I'll delete all of it except the back of the head. There are some obvious splines we can add to connect the chin to the top of the head. As you add splines some patches become obvious that can be completed and filled in. But after this it gets more mysterious. You have to experiment with making connections from one part to another and always aim to use the fewest possible CPs to describe your shape.

If someone could come up with a series of steps that actually cause this to happen it would probably get fixed real quick. If you're on Windows you can do a search for all files that contain a text string. That would be a quick way to find them.

The eye will be rather like the mouth, not anatomically correct, more of an indentation on the surface. I start with the eye opening: Closing the eye is like the mouth corner... I extrude the eye ring in a couple times and delete the last ring to give me a bunch of free splines: The horizontal splines are extended toward the center to meet at a new CP (blue arrows). The vertical splines will be matched and attached to it. (Yellow arrows) I'll do a little bit of shape fixing now but not much because when I attach other face splines to it it will probably need to change some more. Next... Trying to stitch it all together! Added Note: I would not normally model a face with an extreme smile like you see here. If it were a mouth that needed to be rigged and animated I would model it in the most neutral, flat, unsmiling pose possible. It's very difficult to rig a face with a smile built into it to do the small mouth poses like "oo"

Mouth Copy/Flip/Attached This mouth is somewhat more complex than on the paper maché model previously shown above as reference (basically painted on), but much less complex than a mouth that would need to be rigged and animated.

The next major landmark is the mouth. I copied the part of the profile that makes the lips and teeth and extruded that sideways a few times: I scale and rotate the cross section into place and close off the corner. Closing the corner is a bit tricky. I deleted the cross section from the end of the extrusion and left the hanging spline ends... ... then matched the splines from the top and bottom and attached the new loops to new CPs I added (y key) to the center spline.

http://www.brilliantisland.com/am/amtutorials.htm