How to make a quad-based sphere for TurboSmooth/SubDiv Proxy later on?
polycounter lvl 18
Hi everyone,
Is there a way to create a sphere consisting of only quads? I would like to avoid tris, so as to avoid problems with TurboSmooth and SubDiv Proxy later on.
1. Standard polygon sphere > TurboSmooth
The result is not good, because you will get a bunch of wrinkles in the polar regions of the sphere, where the original low-polycount sphere had tris. If you use the geosphere in Max, the result only gets worse with geosphere's higher reliance on tris.
2. Standard polygon cube (box) > TurboSmooth with iteration set at 1 (or 2) > Spherify > Editable Poly > TurboSmooth with iterations set as high as needed
Result is pretty decent, but not perfect. The first TurboSmooth operation and the subsequent Spherify gives you a low-polycount sphere that is entirely quad-based. Editable Poly turns it into something you can manipulate on a vertex basis, and the second TurboSmooth gives you a smooth sphere. The only problem is, when you rotate the viewport to look at the sphere at different angles, you can almost see the corners of the original cube, as the shading and the shiny highlight spot moves across the surface of the sphere. Playing around with Smoothing Groups didn't seem to help any.
Has anyone come across a better way to create a sphere that can be TurboSmoothed or SubDiv Proxied with good results? Better yet, is there an alternative to TurboSmooth/SubDiv Proxy that gives good results with either quads or tris?
Thanks.
- BR
Is there a way to create a sphere consisting of only quads? I would like to avoid tris, so as to avoid problems with TurboSmooth and SubDiv Proxy later on.
1. Standard polygon sphere > TurboSmooth
The result is not good, because you will get a bunch of wrinkles in the polar regions of the sphere, where the original low-polycount sphere had tris. If you use the geosphere in Max, the result only gets worse with geosphere's higher reliance on tris.
2. Standard polygon cube (box) > TurboSmooth with iteration set at 1 (or 2) > Spherify > Editable Poly > TurboSmooth with iterations set as high as needed
Result is pretty decent, but not perfect. The first TurboSmooth operation and the subsequent Spherify gives you a low-polycount sphere that is entirely quad-based. Editable Poly turns it into something you can manipulate on a vertex basis, and the second TurboSmooth gives you a smooth sphere. The only problem is, when you rotate the viewport to look at the sphere at different angles, you can almost see the corners of the original cube, as the shading and the shiny highlight spot moves across the surface of the sphere. Playing around with Smoothing Groups didn't seem to help any.
Has anyone come across a better way to create a sphere that can be TurboSmoothed or SubDiv Proxied with good results? Better yet, is there an alternative to TurboSmooth/SubDiv Proxy that gives good results with either quads or tris?
Thanks.
- BR
Replies
Max: I used a single smoothing group for all the polygon faces in the editable poly before the TurboSmooth (low-polycount sphere), then I tried it again with another editable poly after the TurboSmooth (high-polycount sphere), but the "corners" remained in each case. I also tried different amount of segmentation for the original box, and that didn't help, either.
Max and Maya: I deleted every other edge in the polar tris, so that they looked like polar quads. TurboSmooth and SubDiv Proxy still gave some bumps on the polar surfaces, but the bumps were much less than if I had left them as polar tris.
I took some screenshots to illustrate the problem. If anyone wants to take a look, they are available in a 248 kilobyte zip file in:
http://rapidshare.com/files/114879968/Modeling_Questions.zip.html
Thanks.
- BR
It seems you have to keep that order or else it goes into a boxy looking shape.
So if you wanted a 3 iterations you would have to do this
Turbosmooth 1 iteration. Sherify. Turbosmooth 1 iteration. Sherify. Turbosmooth 1 iteration. Sherify.
Later
Alex
Make a box with 4-8 divisions length/width/height,
Spherify it,
turbo smooth
Works pretty good, though still not perfect.
Thank you for all the feedback and help. After experimenting with everyone's suggestions, the solution finally dawned on me, and I was able to achieve a perfect quad-based SubDiv sphere using the following workflow in 3ds Max:
Standard Primitive Box (set length = width = height, set all segments = 1) > TurboSmooth (set iterations = 4 or higher) > Spherify (set at 100%)
It turns out you don't need to spherify before TurboSmooth. The key is to spherify afterwards.
I haven't been able to find an equivalent Maya command for Spherify, so I haven't tested the above workflow in Maya. For anyone who wants to test it, change the material assignment to something like blinn, because the default lambert material tends to hide the geometric surface distortions.
BTW, my original goal was to start with a low-resolution polygon sphere, manipulate vertices to make a low-resolution model out of it, then use TurboSmooth to get a high-resolution model. If you want to do something similar, do not use Spherify after TurboSmooth, or else Spherify will distort your model severely.
Interesting side note: I was in Google searching for a Maya mel script, and my search terms were simply "maya" and "spherify". The 5th search result tells us something about just how fast Google is.
Thanks.
- BR
Discussion: http://forums.3dtotal.com/showthread.php?t=57329
Download: http://files.filefront.com/quadPrimitiveszip/;9804989;/fileinfo.html
Pretty sure that's the one I use. It's been awhile since I've downloaded it. It includes Sphere, Pyramid, and Ellipsoid. It also allows you to set height/radius/iterations/etc. Works wonders.
Just throw the .ms files into your Max\Scripts\Startup directory. Start up Max, go to your Create tab, and scroll the combo box down to Quad Primitives. Easy to use.
Results:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1306131/QuadSphere.ms
1 make a cube give it like 8 divisions each way
2 make a sphere with 50,50 divisions
3 scale the cube so the sphere is inside it.
4 select the sphere then select the cube. (in this order)
5 go to mesh>transfer attributes
the settings should be as follows.
vertex position on
vertex normal on
all others off in this section
sample space is world
mirroring off
next 2 off
then search method set to closest to point.
and hit transfer.
the cube should now be a perfect quad sphere.
but here is the catch you have to select both and delete the history otherwise they will attempt to update with each change you make so you wont be able to do anything with it, well except some sort of crazy animation. But if you delete history you can delete the first sphere and now you have the perfect quadshpere in maya.
sounds hard at first but its super easy.
1. Make a cube with no divisions.
2. Mesh > Smooth (options).
3. Set the desired # of divsions.
4. Apply.
that makes a non perfect sphere though. check them side by side it was mentioned in an earlier post. AFAIK
1. Create a polygon cube.
2. Add a Sculpt Deformer (found in animations module under create deformers).
3. Depending on the size of your cube in comparisson to the sculpt deformer gizmo you might need to scale the sculpt gizmo bigger to get the desired effect.
Voila.
If you kept the construction history you can still change the amount of segments on your polyCube history node to your liking. Afaik this type of spherized cube never handle's the Smooth perfectly, but the more segments you have to being with before smoothing the better results.