Planar surface a cop out?

[jAQUAN]

I just wanna know if I'm doing this right. Anytime I need to close off a shape I just use a planar surface which I found out are just planes trimmed with 2d shapes. I don't know enough about texturing/lighting to know if this is going to cause problems down the road. It sure leaves a lot of holes at the seams, even when I increase the Nurbs tesselation in the Render Globals. Just hoping a veteran could enlighten me about the pitfalls and alternatives.

[Millies45]

Hey Jaquan. I would say that if you can avoid using planar surfaces then by all means do, because they definately will cause problems later on. Planar surfaces tend to bring problems when you animate, cause they tear at the seams, but for modeling and texturing they should do fine. Just remember one thing about texturing planar surfaces..Don't texture a planar surface on it's own and then texture the rest of the surface, when you texture your surface group the planar surface to the corresponding surface and then texture the whole thing as a group. To fix the hole problem you would have to increase the tesselation on the planar aswell as the corresponding surface because, everything works in relation to everything in maya. That should fix the hole problem. If the planar surface does give you problems try modeling the shape by using the bi-rail command, that works really well with curvey looking shapes like yours. Just a suggestion. Hope I could be of any help.

[jAQUAN]

Thanks so much for replying, you wouldn't believe how many boards I've asked this at. I suspected all the things you said but it's nice to hear someone say it. I'm too new to know if I'm painting myself into a corner.

I've been using adobe illustrator for about 10 years so naturally I chose NURBS as my stomping ground. I suspected I could eliminate planar surfaces all together so it's encouraging to hear you say so.

Currently the image is one bi-rail and one planar. Could you describe how you would do it all in birail? From what I've learned you are supposed to achieve one continuous mesh (by patch-modeling or trims I dont know) so the texture/bumbs will flow correctly. Am I wrong in that?

Here is the larger shape the above image is part of so eventually I want to make it look like one piece of metal.

[Millies45]

Hey Jaquan. I apolagise for the long reply, but I have been trying to figure out how you would be able to build this surface with birail and proves to be a challenge. I have been modeling it myself to see what ways I would go about it, to make it a complete NURBS surface without using a planar surface.

To be honest, it is pretty impossible (for me anyways) to make this object a complete NURBS surface without using planar. So I eventually found a solution. I Know what u mean about using NURBS. I am a NURBS user aswell, I prefer it to polygons, but in this case I had to settle for a subdivision surface, which by the way I find to be very cool indeed. It's not NURBS but it's pretty close. Anyways I did the following:

I created the outline of the object in the top view using my EP curve....I then duplicated that curve 3-4 times and moved each duplicated curve above eachother all the while scaling them smaller than the other.....I then lofted from curve to curve (bottom to top).....I was still left with a hole at the top, so what I did to close that hole was, selected the vertices and used the snap to curve option (hold down C on your keyboard), and then snapped the vertices from the one side of the curve to the other......I then deleted my history and converted the surface to polygons.....I used the control points option in the convert to polygons option box and converted.....I then welded the vertices in the middle of the surface and again deleted the history......and I then finally converted once agian....This time I converted the polygon surface to a SUBD surface...Select the subd surface and clean the topology of the surface, and it should be all good.

I know it's a lengthy process, and that it's a subdiv surface, but it was the only way that I could figure out how to elimanate the planar surface and keep it a complete single surface. You could of also used the stiching method but that is a pretty tricky procedure and I am not all that good at stitching surfaces.

So those were the steps I went through to create that surface. I hope that you find it useful and helpful. If you still need further help, I will be more than happy to help you out.