Crabby

[KenH]

I saw a crab model on another forum and wondered if AM would be capable of similar. I think I convinced myself that AM is...mostly. The only thing missing from the model is about a hundred spikes. Not only do I not have time to model all that but I did some tests with displacement maps and if they didn't need so many patches, they would be perfect for such details.

Anyway, this is as far as I'm taking it for now and wanted to show it.

[Paul Forwood]

I like it, Ken. Have you tried using hairs for the spikes. It seems a perfect candidate for the job. Make the base really wide and taper to a pont.

 

I hope you'll be posting this guy in motion some time!

[strohbehn]

Great crab, Ken! I've been thinkiing about the same thing for my lobster, but just didn't have time to look into a solution yet.

 

I'll bet Paul's hair idea would do the trick nicely.

 

There's one thing that bothers me with this model, though. His legs, body, eyes, and "forearms" are modeled beautifully... then the main pinchers are rounded on the inside. I'm not sure he could actually grab anything except at the very tips of the claws. What do you think?

 

Also, I love the render on this one. Did you do that with a skylight rig, or what? I'm pretty lost when it comes to lighting.

 

Please post new shots as you make progress.

 

Mark

[KenH]

Thanks guys. I never thought about using hair. That might just work.

The pincers do look out of shape....I think it happened when I rotated them for this shot. Also, I used Jeffs free light rig to render it.

 

I don't think I'll get round to making him move or anything else though. But if anyone wants him, just say and I'll send him to you.

[binder3d]

Hey that looks great. But what makes it lower than the one you saw? You said mostly as good. Dont get it. Yours looks great already.

[Rodney]

Ken,

 

Nice crabs!

 

There are at least two ways you might be able to make the spikes relatively easy using splines.

 

You could use Emilio's Sweep plugin set to copy along a spline.

 

or for better variety or control of the individual shapes of the spikes:

You could use that same spline (say copied from off of the crab) in a choreography window to have the splines move along the path (use ease to get variety, another action perhaps or scaling to get differences in geometry) and export out to AV2 format. This would create a model per frame of the animation along that spline path. From there you could import all the separate models (at the same time) and they would be created in place.

 

*Might have to do a tutorial on this some day because it's a lot easier to do than explain.

Edited January 6, 2005 by Rodney

[Zaryin]

I agree about the pincers. but everything else is fun-tastic!

[Paul Forwood]

Hey that looks great. But what makes it lower than the one you saw? You said mostly as good. Dont get it. Yours looks great already.

 

I think Ken may have been refering to this:

 

Crab

 

I can smell the sea.

[starwarsguy]

Yeah! That's the point of that hair feature that lets you shape it.

[KenH]

Hey that looks great. But what makes it lower than the one you saw? You said mostly as good. Dont get it. Yours looks great already.

Got it in one Paul.

To start off, my crab isn't up to that one. But then I probably didn't spend as much time or get paid for mine Aside from that, to add all those spikes as geometry would result in a high patch mesh and low count meshes is AM's strength. But the solutions are just as capable....it's just a different way of doing it.