Modular shapes workflow (Bended shapes)

djoexe

Hi, I'm currently working on a portfolio project and I want it to contain a modular castle. I went to polycount forum then I saw this picture from Kevin Johnstone from Epic and I wanted to reproduce them in 3Ds Max, but I just can'T achieve the result of the two pieces that I marked.

Can anybody show me some sort of step by step procedure to achieve this result.

Thanks

Mark Dygert

Taper, Bend, Twist modifiers with the pivot point int the right places. You can also experiment with rotating the "mirror" gizmo in the symmetry modifier. Not only is this good for duplicating details around a circle but it can also be used to carve up meshes at very specific angles if you uncheck "weld along seam" then delete the extra elements.

Deadly Nightshade

I don't use Max but if I were to make those in Maya, I would use a NURBS-curve and then clone it radially, with the pivot point placed in the corner. I would then use "loft" to create a surface between those curves. And finally I would convert that surface to polygons. Shouldn't be more than 5 mins of work.
You could also use deformers as the poster above me suggested.

Pola

It's deformation of an existing unwrapped mesh, I'm not sure if nurbs is the solution as you want to maintain UV's. Maya has the same deformers that Mark mentioned, use the manipulators and tweak the values til you get a desired result. You can stack deformers, I forget where but there is a way to reorder the stack if you need to.

I was able to get a similar result to the one on the right quickly with two bend deformers. One bending the wall mesh in a forward curve and a 2nd bend deformer to curve it around.

Deadly Nightshade

Pola wrote: »

It's deformation of an existing unwrapped mesh, I'm not sure if nurbs is the solution as you want to maintain UV's.

It isn't.
If you do it with NURBS (surfaces) and convert them to polys, you also have to UV-unwrap them. That shouldn't be any problem with the proper tools though.

But even so, if you do it with deformers you have to optimize in the end anyway. Piece number two is a good example: With deformers you would get a lot of verts collected in the corner, and slamming them together will affect the UV's - UV's that you will have to go in and fix manually.

I consider both workflows about equal.

Mark Dygert

I'm pretty sure Kevin explained that they all use the same texture sheet and most where derived from the same flat wall mesh.

Deforming a flat wall that is already unwrapped, you normally don't have to do too much to the UVs and all of the shapes in the example above appear to be using the same square texture.

Where if you create those curved shapes some other way and then unwrap it, you will have a much harder time conforming the UV's to that square texture. It isn't impossible, just one way has you working with the UVs and the other has you moving onto other things...

1) Box.
2) Bend Z, Angle 90, Direction 90
3) Bend X, Angle 180, Direction 90
4) UV's same as original box.

djoexe

Wow thank you very much, that's exactly what I wanted from this thread. Big help here, thank you Mark