8, Modeling a Brachiosaurus: Eyelids

There are different approaches in making eyelids. For this tutorial they will be modeled as separate parts, because the head geometry doesn’t get as dense as if you would make it out of the head surface. It will also be easier to animate.

Hide everything but the right eye: select the right eye as seen from Front viewport, use "invert" to select everything but the eye, and then use the "Hide" command.

With the ’DupEdge’ command, select the top edge of the sphere to extract a copy of it. In the Front viewport, use ’Rotate’ command with Copy option (press C and Enter during process) and make sure you have the Object Snap ’End’ on when you select the ’Center of rotation’. Rotate and copy the curve twice as shown here:

Select the 3 curves, and with the ’Loft’ command (with default parameters) skin them together to a surface. Move the curves into the ’Original curves’ layer.

Set Object Snap to ’Center’, and use the command ’Scale’. Hit C for copy, and scale the surface just somewhat larger than the original surface, to give the eyelid some thickness. Mirror the eyelid 180 degrees with Copy option, so you have a lower eyelid as well.

With the command ’BlendSrf’, select the edges as shown below.

Then join these 3 upper eyelid surfaces with ’Join’ command. Do the same for the lower eyelid. Rotate the lower eyelid:

Make all hidden objects visible with ’Show’ command. Select the eyelids surfaces, mirror those to the other eye, (use the center of the head as ’Start of mirror plane’ with the ’Near’ Object Snap) and the head is almost finished.

9 Modeling a Brachiosaurus: Completing the Head

To model the nostrils, insert 4 isoparms as shown below (make sure ’Symmetrical=Yes’ when inserting the two in the V direction).

Pull the CV’s shown below inwards until you get convincing nostrils.

The final result of the head after this step your scene should be similar to the sample file ’brachio6.3dm' from the dino directory of the CD-ROM.

10 ,Modeling a Brachiosaurus: Building Legs

Make a new layer called ’Head surface,’ put everything visible in the scene into that layer, and set it to ’Off’. In the Right viewport, use ’ShowBackgroundBitmap’ to display the background.

Start outlining the legs with two curves, one on each side:

The upper part of the legs will be blended surfaces, therefore there is no need to outline those areas. As always, try to make the curves as detailed as possible, but with a small number of CV’s.

The legs will later on be capped, so the bottoms of the feet need to be planar. To achieve this, set Object Snap to ’Point’, select the lowest CV on either curve, snap it to the other curve’s lowest CV, then move it back to it’s place while holding Shift so it moves perfectly straight in the same horizontal height.

In the Top viewport, draw a closed curve for each leg as shown below. Make sure they lie on top of the curves from a side view. (Your current scene should be similar to the sample file 'brachio7.3dm' from the CD-ROM)

Select all curves on the back leg, and use the ’Sweep2’ command. Use the settings shown here:

Do the same for the front leg.

Select all curves (’SelCrv’ command), and use 'change layer' to move them into the ’Original curves’ layer.

OPTIONAL: You may wish to edit the legs with CV manipulation.

The back leg is pretty thin at the foot and thick at the top, so it may be a good idea to make the top a bit thicker, by selecting the upper half rows of CV’s, and scaling them (Scale1D) inwards in the Front viewport. Give the front leg a bit more lean, and if needed, move around with the CV’s in any areas where it is necessary.

Insert isoparms as shown below (Direction=U, Symmetrical=Yes) and start stretching CV’s inwards and outwards in those new rows to make the splint muscle. Use the same technique for the front leg.

11, Modeling a Brachiosaurus: Attaching The Legs

Now you will put all surfaces together. In the ’Edit Layers’ panel, set the ’Body surface’ layer to On.

Move the legs just a bit farther out from the body. Select the body surface, use the Object Snap ’Near’, and mirror it to the opposite side.

Select both body surfaces and use the ’MergeSrf’ command. Then use ’RebuildSrf’ (point count of 20 in U direction and 10 in V direction) to rebuild the surface to remove any potential creases.

Now there could be some areas that you might need to tweak, since you can now see how the whole surface looks. For example, the tail could be too elliptical.

In the Front viewport, stretch some CV’s to achieve a more circular look. The stomach area needs to be rounder and wider. CV’s in that area should be stretched outwards. If there are other areas that need to be fine tuned, make the changes now.

In order to make the spine appear, insert isoparms as shown here:

Move the center CV row up a bit to get the peak. Select the CV’s running up the back of the neck, and drag them out also, to make the peak extend up the neck as well. This figure shows the CV’s after being moved:

You might need to smooth some CV’s out with the ’Smooth’ command. (At this state your scene should be similar to the sample file ’brachio8.3dm’ from the CD-ROM.)

To seamlessly attach the legs to the body, you need to blend them. Blending is a hard task ,and requires some tweaking to get the result that you want. The tweak can be as simple as moving one of the objects a bit in order to make the blended surface look better.

Make two spheres with the size and position shown here:

They should be about half a unit from the center of the body (seen from Top or Front viewport). Then mirror these to the other side of the body (use Object Snap ’Near’ here as well). To split the body with the spheres with the command ’Split’, select the body surface first, and then the spheres.

Move the spheres to a new layer named ’Spheres,’ turn this layer off, and delete the surfaces that were split from the body surface.

Now, use the ’BlendSrf’ command, and for the first ’Edge to blend’, select right back leg’s opening, and for the 2nd, select the back legs top edge. Hit A for automatic. Sometimes automatic doesn’t work, then you have to move the arrows manually. Make sure the arrows point at the same direction, and that the arrows are either as far out as possible from the body surface, or as close to center. Otherwise the blend gets twisted. This figure shows how it could look for a successive blending:

Do the same for the front leg.

(Your scene should now be similar to the sample file ’brachio9.3dm’ from the CD-ROM).

IMPROVING YOUR RESULTS: If you aren't happy with the results of your blend, here is a trick to use: select the two rows of CVs in the middle of the blend surface (as shown below), and use the ’Smooth’ command with default settings. Repeat this two more times and the blended surface looks more even, without creases. Usually you shouldn’t tweak with the CV’s of blended surfaces, or the objects that got blended. But this technique is quite useful, and the seamlessness is maintained as long as you smooth no more than three times.

12, Modeling a Brachiosaurus: Attaching The Head

Select all but the body surface, and mirror these in the top viewport (Object Snap ’Near’ as usual) to give the Brachiosaurus two more legs.

Turn on the ’Head surface’ layer. With the 'Rotate' command, rotate all of the head 180 degrees in the Top viewport, move it to it’s position and scale it (’Scale’ command) to the proper size.

Make two boxes (’Box’ command) that cross the neck and are rotated and positioned as shown here:

Use the 'Split' command to split the body surface and choose the box shown below as cutting object.

NOTE: There are other approaches possible to this task that would produce the same results, but could be more convenient. One alternative would be to use the 'CutPlane' command to create cutting planes. CutPlane will work on any kind of surfaces, whether they have been joined or not. If the objects involved are simple surfaces (not polysurfaces), then an even simpler solution is possible: you can just draw some lines, and use the lines as cutting objects to cut the surfaces (when working from a plan view.)

Do the same for the head but with the other box as the cutting object. Hide the boxes and delete the small cut parts that are no longer needed.

Blend the neck edge to the head edge. Use Automatic and Smooth the two middle rows of CV’s three times.

Use the ’Cap’ command to cap all the holes at the bottom of the Brachio's feet so they no longer look hollow. Explode them and delete the top cap of the legs.

Finally use the ’Join’ command and join all the surfaces together except for the eyes and eyelids. The sample file ’Brachio10.3dm’ shows the final result.

Now that you have completed your dinosaur model, you might want to take it into another program for animation, rendering, or compositing with a photographed environment. The notes below describe how author Daniel Ljunggren brought the dinosaur into 3D Studio MAX to produce his final rendering.

If you want to export your dinosaur model into another 3D package as polygons, select all of the dinosaur and use the command ’Mesh’. In the ’Create Polygon Mesh from NURBS object’ panel, go into ’Detailed Controls’, and uncheck ’Refine’, and in the ’Max edge length’, set it to 0.5. Then the result is evenly meshed polygons for use with animation and close-ups. If no close-ups of the head will be rendered make the ’Max edge length’ a value of 1 – 1.5 for lower polygon count.

The figure above shows a final rendering in 3D Studio Max. The Brachiosaurus had four different textures applied: three bump maps and one diffuse map. Two of the bump maps were manually painted wrinkles, and the third was a tileable photo of an animal’s skin (mixed together with the ’Mix’ material). The largest bump map was 2000x1700, in order to look good in close-ups. The diffuse (aka "color") map was painted, about 850x700 in size. Maps were applied as Planar mapping, which turned out well for this purpose.

There are three lights in the scene: one target spot light casting shadows, working as the main light source, and two omni lights (as fill lights) that light up different areas of the dinosaur without shadowcasting. They were carefully placed in order to make the bump look natural.