Invisible escreveu:
> scott wrote:
>> I started with a n x n grid of vertices in a plane... ( a blender 
>> primitive)
> 
> I find that whenever I do this, the points that haven't moved yet look 
> all perfect and regular, and the points I've moved by hand look all 
> wonky and out of place.

You should take a look at mirroring and proportional editing tools. 
Also snapping to the background grid or fixing the editing to a plane or 
axis helps.

> Except that in the other plane, all the points lay exactly on top of 
> each other, so you've got to select the correct point in one view, and 
> then drag it in another view, then select the next point in the first 
> view, and drag it in the second view, and.......

It's not as complicated as you're saying.  But you should know you're 
way through 3D navigation well, because to model things you indeed most 
likely will be rotating about it a lot to have better perspectives about 
how the modelling is proceeding.

>>> The difference being that NURBS produce a well-defined mathematical 
>>> surface which can be drawn at arbitrary resolution and can contain 
>>> sharp corners, whereas a polygon mesh presents only a very crude 
>>> approximation to such a surface (unless you generate terabytes of 
>>> mesh data).
>>
>> You do realise that NURBS objects are converted to meshes before being 
>> rendered, even in POV?
> 
> Actually, I didn't realise POV could do NURBS at all! o_O

It doesn't.  Anyway, subdivision surfaces produce roughly as good and 
smooth surfaces as NURBS out of less detailed polygonal shapes.

>> Surprisingly with smoothed normals you don't need that much mesh data 
>> to get a *really* smooth look
> 
> ...if you don't mind not having sharp edges...

You don't see them with dense subdivided polygons.

> I find it astonishing that there is any hardware on earth that can 
> actually render several hundred thousand triangles in less than a 
> minute, never mind a second. And yes, with the lashings and lashings of 
> trickery applied, you "almost" can't see them in this shot.

Oh, come on!  Your 3D card in the computer already does that about as 
well as a PS3 by now.

> I still find it completely incomprehensible that somebody sat down and 
> spent months placing 100k individual triangles by hand though...

Nobody does that, not even in the early 3D days in the 70s where they 
got models data out of rough 3D scanning processes.

Today, we use subdivision surfaces out of rougher polygonal models 
extruded (you can extrude several faces at once) and bend and shape them 
with various symetrical tools, like mirroring, and proportional editing 
tools.  You can also use sculpting tools and virtually go shaping a 
dense mesh as if you were stroking it with a brush:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=143168

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