Curved planes in 3ds max?

Ahoburg

Hey, fellas. I've been trying to make some hair in 3ds max using alpha planes and whatnot but stumble on creating nice and curvy planes, like on this picture:



I can do it by hand, moving vertexes and whatnot, but my result is always messy and not that pretty. How do I go about creating something as neat and tight as these planes? I tried some curve extruding and lofting, but couldn't get desired results. Thanks.

Obscura

We did it with splines, planes->path deform, and/or with splines->nurbs, then converting to polies. I used the nurbs method, and my coworker used the path deform. Both worked fine, maybe the path deform method is a bit faster. Hope this helps!

jeroenbackx

Some different approaches:
Use bend and ffd modifiers.

Use curves to snap to or create renderable splines which you can then make planar, or maybe even use a path-deform.

Alternatively, if you are going to create them by hand. start lower-poly and add edgeloops incrementally. Then give them nice curvature by using the "set flow" that comes with the graphite toolbar thingy.

Ahoburg

Thanks, I'll try all approaches today and see what works best.

Eric Chadwick

We have some more techniques here too
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/HairTechnique#Hair_Technique_Links

Mark Dygert

Don't forget about the conform brush in the ribbon modeling tools.