Building Bender

[bighop]

Hi all,

 

I'm trying to build bender. I have the body done, but I'm having trouble cutting out the mouth, everything bends around the curve of the mouth. Any suggestions would be of great!

[Eric2575]

It looks like you are very close already. It looks like you have the mouth spline as one continuous spline? If so, then you can select that, also select the bottom neck spline as a guide, and then hide everything else. You should now be looking at two continuous splines in wire mode. Next, lock the bottom giude spline in order for it to stay unaffected during the mouth spline editing. Now comes the bias tweaking from the top down view. You have to tweak the bias handles of the mouth spline to follow the locked guide spline exactly. Once you have the splines match perfectly from the top view, you may have to carefully do some adjusting from the side view. Be careful though, since even small tweaks from the side or front view will very often need some corrections from the top view again. This is actually a technique that requires a bit of practice to perfect and conceptualize, but once you get the hang of it, curved surfaces will be your friend. Hope that helps.

 

Eric

[bighop]

Yes, I keep forgetting to lock things down. I have to try that. I cut the mouth out of the head, and added the extra splines to make the rounded corner.

[robcat2075]

I realize it's not a pure splining solution , but I think this is a job for a boolean. and you can animate the size of the boolean to make mouthshapes for speech and never mess up the smoothness of your cylinder shape.

[bighop]

Thanks, Is there any tutorial for booleans?

[Eric2575]

The first reference that comes to mind is the Technical Reference Manual. You can download it from the Hash web site. The second place to look for would be a search on the forum with key word: "boolean"

 

Here is the result of about 5 min worth of spline tweaking the way I described it.

 

Oops, sorry, the pics are a little big.

[3DArtZ]

you dont need to boolean this.

you're slpines are not laid out properly to form the mouth.

you would need to have a couple slpine loops for the mouth.

also, when you extrude the mouth inward it will help to solidify

the shape.

Mike Fitz

www.3dartz.com

[largento]

Isn't Bender's mouth always the same shape? I don't think it animates.

[bighop]

His mouth does not animate. The wires in front of the back of the mouth move when he talks, and sometimes the whole back plate moves.

 

Mike: Thanks for the tip. So I should make a mouth and connect it to the head?

[Tralfaz]

Hi bighop,

 

Your Bender is looking pretty good. Largento is correct in that the mouth shape itself doesn't move, so you could model it directly into the head using the suggestions already given. You may even be able to cut down the number of control points in your head as the splines and bias control points do a great job of obtaining the shape you need. Then in behind the mouth, model the upper and lower teeth separately so they can be opened and closed or animated as necessary.

 

Keep up the great work. Really love this character and I am often caught quoting 'You can bit my shiny metal @$$!' around the house (in a joking manner of course). My wife would kill me if she thought I was serious!!!

 

Al

[bighop]

I think I have it. The mistake I was making in the head was I was cutting out splines, and then trying to add a mouth spline. So I added the mouth spline BEFORE I cut out the extra splines and it was much easier to make the final adjustments.

 

One picture is the head cut out the wrong way. A close up of the head, and the final body. I'm starting a "Clay" type render before I go off to bed.

 

Thanks for all the advice, it was a big help.

 

Andy

[Tralfaz]

Congrats on solving your Bender problem Andy!

 

He is looking really great now!

 

Look forward to seeing more of him...

Al

[bighop]

Thanks Al.

 

I did some more tweeking, tomorrow I'm rigging this thing. I'm going to do the 2001 and the new SQ rig.

 

I also tried the "Clay" type rendering that you posted, thanks for that, but the render time was going to be over 11 hours. Did I do something wrong? Maybe my G5 is way too out dated for this.

 

Thanks again for the remarks,

 

Andy