Wooohooo, done (I hope)

Right, let me tell you a little story, a story about a man created in 3D max then max decided TO TEST MY PATIENCE!!!!!!!!!!

So as you are no doubt aware I have been modelling a high resolution character for my animation, muscles and all ( I was going to tell you about the nails but well let’s face it that is boring and you all know how to do it. They were modelled as separate objects, cloned and attached to the body mesh but remain their own element.). I have had no end of problems with this. I managed to get all the pollys flowing in the correct directions and a lot of definition after two solid weeks at it, it has been a long slog.

The problems

First off I had to keep detaching different parts of the body to turn it all around and then re-attach them all, this would have been easy if it was not for the fact that I created the character so small that the weld tool welded the whole model together if I selected all the vertices, let me explain this a bit. As I created him small, the distance between the vertices is so small that even the smallest weld attempt pulls in all the vertices around it. When using the scale tool to make the character bigger you do not actually change the distance between the vertices, merely a sort of zooming the scene in to (it’s complicated but it’s true, this is why you should not use the scale tool to resize objects). Anyway, the problem. I had to weld all the vertices one by one. Below in the fingers you can see lines in them, this is where the mesh is detached, I manually attached them one by one.

Next problem came with the symmetry tool. For reasons I am not even going to try to pretend to understand the symmetry tool was doing this to the mesh.

After hours of trying I could not solve the problem and again had to resort to the long and boring process of manual welding. Long! You will also notice that his nipples have disappeared, this was caused by an earlier smoothing process, these needed to be rebuilt. Below is an image of the weld tool on a very small setting ruing all my work.

Problem 572! After sorting the welding on everything and building new nipples this happened to the nose, again I have no idea how bit it was too late to go back, it needed to be solved from here. My problem was that the cut tool was not working and I struggled to get the holes filled. Paul spent ages helping me trying to 'trick' max to create new pollys. This involved creating a polly, slicing it in half, deleting a quarter and redrawing a new quarter. Cheers Paul.

Smoothed he is 264,298 pollys, but looking good. Just as well the uni has the new 8 core Mac's for rendering, if they could only sort out the backburner render farm were well away.

Anyway it is now done and he is ready to be rigged, this is going to go wrong I can smell it.