Thanks for the info.
Hi narc long time no see. I used 3ds sometime back or maybe it was milkshape. I seem to remember it or they had all kinds of gamesupport plugins builtin. I done spent a ton of money on Maya books so will continue learning it along the way.
When I started that V1 rocket I was using the lofting technique for the wings but deleted them and made the wings and uprights that hold the rocket on top with polygon cubes. That wasn't too hard to do.

Does the Polygon Smooth work alright without increasing the tris and polycount too much?

no, polygon smoothing is terrible for that. what you can do is to split/subdivide the polygons yourself so as to tesselate them smaller, you should do this while youre still working with quads, then soften the normals to make it appear more rounded. see here theres a nurbs to polygon feature, never tried it but you probably would need to do heavy poly reductions on anything made that way. another option is to use subD>poly.

yeah... using hte cutface tool and other dividing tools is a good idea... u can then extrude faces and edges... the extrude tools are what set maya and 3ds appart i think. which i s why i prefer Maya

I have used the polygon tools like that but didn't know know if the polygon smooth tool would be allowable.
Also I have used the polygon split edge ring tool. I will need to redo part of of the V1 rocket as I used the smooth tool on it.
No big thing it's just a big cigar.
You know if the Nazi's hadn't been stopped they would have probably put a man on the moon in the 50's.
Thanks guys.

the smooth operation is allowable but it makes a mess. if i were to make this rocket fuselage i think the easiest way is to create a poly cylinder, keep construction history on, and adjust the number of faces its composed of in the properties. its such a simple shape theres no need for other types of smoothing. when it looks good and smooth, then you can subdivide it up into sections or extrude if you prefer, and resize the cv's of each section to make it more cigar-ey looking.

Yes, that sounds good.
Thanks

hey I noticed on the first page you were talking about steal looking balls, you just need to setup a nice shader network in the hypershade window. Theres a material type called Dgs_material thats very good for doing quick chrome. Also for nice renders make sure you have Mental Ray swicthed on for rendering.

to switch this on just go to your plugin manager and tick both boxes by Mayatomr. You can also go into your mentalRat globals and setup Image based lighting. You can download some pretty good HDRI maps for free on the net.

This is a test I did for a shader I'm currently messing about with. The image on the reflextion is just a HDRI map I'm using as a main world light



Marcus

Cool. I got a rendering book the other day for Maya 6 and will practice.
I see those types of balls around the net all the time and wondered how it was done.
Thanks

it's not really as complicated as you really think its just a case of adding a Mental Ray material and dragging and dropping it into one of the channels in your Lambert or Blinn or what ever.

Marcus