Building a mesh using Curves and Birails

Right, I have started playing around with the few of the techniques introduced in a previous post and taken screenshots along the way:

The first step I took was to create a rough profile of the model by creating curves and resizing them in the relevant orthographic view to achieve the bodyshape. I am not using imge planes in this instance, the purpose of this exercise is not to stringently follow a shape but to create a two legged character that has good edge flow and smooth interpolation between points. And to do this using Nurbs. I will be converting this to poly's at the end but I want to use the powerful curve diting capabilities to achive that smooth hard edged look.

Next step was to connect up the curves. Bearing in mind the Topology should consist of four sided shapes I used the Edit Point (EP) curve tool to establish the flow. I displayed the edit points on the curves which gave me a visual reference of division points on the curve. This is a massive advantae because I can now see precisely where ponts such as the halfway point etc are aln the curves and figure outhow they need to connect in relation to each other. The rebuild curve option allows me to add and subtract spans whilst maintaining perfect spacing, rather than pushing and pulling verts around by eye like you would when poly modeling.

Close up of the proposed topology. This method allows superior interpolation between points asa bi-cubic spline will adjust the two points top and bottom side of the control vert you are pulling about.
Next step is to break apart all the curves so they are individuals. This is easily done by using the CutCurve tool (under Edit Curves menu). Now the cage is ready for the birail tool. As you can prably see there are a few issues with consistency regardiong the edit points but that can easily be corrected using the rebuild curve option.

I've started to create the patches using the Birail 2 tool which works by selecting two profile curves and two rail curves and then effectively lofting a smooth surface between them. The Birail'd surface still has history connecting it with the curve, so if you move the edit points of the initial curve around the surface will deform with it. Very useful indeed!

 

 

 

I've gone around the mesh and Birail'd all the curve and created the shape I was after. In some places where the patches are a little stretched a bit of pinching has occured, and the whole thing looks a little faceted because it is made out of seperate patches. This will be overcome in the next stage where I can begin to attach patches together and begin th rebuilding process.