Sand dunes in Maya

Cibo · Apr 2013

I have seen a Video with 3ds Max Patch Grids. The combination from smooth and hard edges and a really good and the overview fantastic.

http://www.ronenbekerman.com/modeling-3d-sand-dunes-3ds-max/

Has maya a usable toolset to create a similar workflow?

The hard ridges at the top of the dunes looking impossible to archive in maya.

onionhead_o · Apr 2013

use subdiv surface, almost the same as patch grids. you could even do it with a regular poly plane subd and then just crease the top edges. The equivalent of smooth in maya is set normal angle.

MikeF · Apr 2013

What onionhead said about creaing is prolly the best way to go.
another similar aproach would be using the sculpt geo tool to pinch the sharp edges if your mesh is dense enough

passerby · Apr 2013

make a dense plane, draw some splines overtop, than use the wire deformer to pinch and left the mesh up around splines.

rube · Apr 2013

subdiv(just pressing 3 on the keyboard, not mayas crazy version of subd's) with creased edges will give almost the same effect, you may have to increse the subdivision levels though depending on just how sharp you want it. Also maya 2013 and up do support bezier curves so they may actually have bezier patches as well, I don't have that version here to check though.

Mark Dygert · Apr 2013

I'm a max user and the patch grid technique is time consuming, it's actually much faster and easier to sculpt it in zbrush, 3DCoat or Mudbox.

Max also has "Substance materials" (I think Maya does too?) which are preset materials with modifiable parameters one of them is "Desert Sand", this has various paramters that you can tweak, wave height, width ect... Each of the substance materials have output nodes that feed into a standard material diffuse, bump spec, displacement ect...

You can also do something similar just with a sub-divided plane and soft select, but passerby's idea seems worth exploring, could be the closes thing to working with patches.

I also remember this old thread where we talked about doing similar stuff in slightly different ways, it might be worth checking out.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1216404#post1216404

Cibo · Apr 2013

I think sculpting is no option. I dont know a "intelligent" decimation Programm with a change of the edge orientation. The hard edges will look like a sawtooth without retopology from hand.
Computer generated decimation is in my opinion one of the most underdeveloped technologies.

Mark Dygert · Apr 2013

Retopo is coming around, mudbox2014 has some great tools for this. You draw out some guides along important areas and it figures out the rest. 3DCoat is pretty good at retopo too, similar functionality. zBrush is probably the widest used but most under developed when it comes to retopo but decimation master does a great job at preserving detail where it needs to be preserved where other packages like max and maya just brute force their way through it.

Max2012 and Maya2014 both have some great retopo tools, where you can paint quads over the surface of another object while it live snaps to the surface. They both also have a quad mesher function that will make a new quaded model over the surface of another model. Great for that sort of thing, faster than trying to patch model a bunch of spline handles, plus the sculpting tools let you do so much more than just make smooth arcs and gentle dune hills.

rube · Apr 2013

Here's a quick example of how a creased plane would look

Sand dunes in Maya

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