32 - Maya 2015 - Basic NURBS Shaping
A Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline, here after referred to as NURBS, were created long before specialization software such as ZBrush or Mudbox existed. You could think of NURBS as the digital clay from back in the day. NURBS allowed graphic artists to create very highly detailed sculpts without the drawback of computing thousands of vertices. Naturally NURBS cannot duplicate the beauty of a million plus polygons but they are still very valuable tools to this day. Using NURBS we will be able to quickly get a base sculpt going for our character model.
Taking a look at the basic components of a NURBS surface you will come to find that it is very similar to a polygon model with a smooth modifier applied to it. NURBS consist of Control Vertex which can be thought of like points on a polygon based model. The Isoparms divide each of the Surface Patches so you could consider Isoparms to be much like edges and surface patches to be somewhat like polygon faces. The major difference is that a single control vertex can affect the shape of multiple surrounding Surface Patches unlike a point on a polygon model.
Since a single Control Vertex can affect multiple surrounding Surface Patches we can easily sculpt out a basic shape using NURBS. This allows us to treat the NURBS surface much like digital clay. Very quickly we will be able to get the basic shape of our character’s torso laid out in half the time it would take to do so using a polygon primitive.
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