Subtitles of the Movie

When you are first starting to model it’s a little easier to and more intuitive to work with NURB surfaces. If I create a sphere and I activate the modeling controls for a sphere, it is much easer to see right away what kind of effect that changes you are making to the surface has on the surface. I’ll delete this now. When you work with polygon objects such as cubes and you begin to extrude faces as we saw in the last section, it’s harder to visualize what kind of smooth surfaces is generated as you begin to extrude faces. So when you are modeling with NURB’s you see very directly the surface that you’ve created, and also NURB surfaces are a ittle simpler in the sense that they are just square patches. Additionally at first, rendering is quite a bit more intuitive. I will just show you the polygon rendering menu. If we want to texture polygons, you can see there are all sorts of tools, and so with NURB’s they facilitate sort of a better introduction to the vast array of functions that Maya has to offer. And interestingly enough, a NURB surface can be converted into a polygon surface at any given time. This is actually a very common practice in the industry, that NURB surfaces are modeled first. You develop a very clear idea of what kind of surface you are working with, then you convert your NURB surface to a polygon surface, and then you work with your polygon surfaces to generate a sub division surface which is an integrated skin. And I will show you now, I’ll create a NURB primitive sphere and I am going to go to edit NURB’s, rebuilt surfaces, and in my options I am going to change my output geometry from NURB’s to polygons. And I will turn on control points and rebuilt, and you will see that from that NURB sphere that I had, I generated a polygon object. So at any given time you can convert from NURB’s to polygons. So primarily we chose to work with NURB’s because you have a more direct connection to the actual surface that you are working with. Rendering is more intuitive, and that polygon objects can be generated from NURB’s objects at any given time. It should be noted just at this point that in the game industry polygon modeling is absolutely pervasive, and also low polygon count modeling is very very important for rate of interactivity. For video and feature film work - I usually teach individual artists who work with NURB’s at first and work with multiple NURB surfaces when they are creating a character. It's an easy way of generating very nice smooth surfaces that can be molded in to very believable organic shapes.