Modeling with just a few specific polygon shapes (so they keep their proportions)
Hi! I need to model a lowpoly camel.
The problem is my client wants it to make It in polystyrene and put fragments of mirrors on every poly. For this, he can't measure every poly's sides to cut a piece of mirror to fit on It. Instead, what we want is to create a model that he can cover with a few (2, 3, 4, 5...) preestablished shapes to keep the process much simpler.
My question is... is there any easy way of doing this in Maya or Cinema 4D? The shapes could be quads, triangles or quads and triangles, and I could use an external model as base.
Thank you!
Replies
Interesting problem! My first instinct is to recommend a procedural modeler like Houdini.
I would bruteforce it. Just model the elements and place it by hand in 3D.
yeah finding an automatic solution, while really an interesting task, unless you have to mass produce these, will take the same time or more dependent on your experience with a tool like houdini.
The issue here I think is that they need to have constant sized faces - which is a very tricky problem for anything that's not a regular primitive (sphere is easy, teapot is not)
I'm approximately 300% certain neither of those apps have a built in tool that would do the job.
Thinking about how you might implement it in code is giving me a headache. I can guarantee that the output won't be the same shape as the input though
You'll never be able to get a perfectly fit together surface using regular shapes. If you've ever looked at a mirrorball they still have gaps between the pieces.
In maya you could try using the polyRetopo command - it's on the Poly modeling shelf and is basically the same thing as zremesher - it gives you fairly even quads
For the brute force approach. I would make a rough camel-shaped model, and N "mirror" thin-box pieces, then constrain them to the camel surface, duplicating and sliding them around as needed. Then just select all the inner faces of the boxes and make the lowpoly from that.
Thank you all for the comments. Since my client was in a rush, he decided to do a different thing. It really was tricky and I imagined It wouldn't have the simple fast solution we needed. Anyway, thank you very much for the comments!