Polygons & Nurbs and other such animation sorcery

Hello everyone, after setting up the wonderful blog your are currently chilling on i went back to research into 3D modelling as this is going to be the first skill i need to learn to actually create the final model well looking things up and finding things out i came across two different things using in 3D modelling these are Polygons and Nurbs, now you may know what a polygon is but i hear you cry "WHAT THE HELL IS A NURB!" I had no clue until about 10 minutes ago allow me to tell you lovely people out there what the hell a nurb is and what a polygon is and comparisons between them.


Polygons


You all may know about these they pop up in maths a lot, so a polygon is made up of the following things....

-Vertices
-Edges
-Faces
-UVs

So if you haven't caught on by now a "Square" or "Triangle" or a "Pentagon" I could go on forever but i am sure you understand. "Well I say I could go on forever but I would start running out of shapes -_-"

And with that in mind you can use these to model with called "Polygon modelling" heres the quote taken directly from Maya's user guide on polygon modelling, "Polygons are straight-sided shapes (3 or more sides), defined by three-dimensional points (vertices) and the straight lines that connect them (edges). The interior region of the polygon is called the face. Vertices, edges, and faces are the basic components of polygons. You select and modify polygons using these basic components" - Maya user guide

So a polygon model is made up of all faces of the polygons and when you connect enough of them you end up with a polygon mesh kinda like this....

Creepy right.....

As you can see the faces of the polygons can be seen pretty clearly on the mesh, the mesh gives the model a base. The modeller can also set divisions, divisions are the amount of faces on a model or mesh etc. and basically the higher the division number the higher the amount of faces the smoother the model looks heres a useful image that's in the Maya user guide:

The middle sphere is more blocky looking than the higher division spheres.

Nurbs

Just like polygons, Nurbs are also used in 3D modelling after some digging though ye old guide i came across the meaning of the word Nurb turns out it stands for (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) and is used to create 3D curves "Hmmm curvy ;)"  "NURBS are useful for constructing many types of organic 3D forms because of the smooth and minimal nature of the curves they use to construct surfaces. NURBS surface types are widely used in the fields of animation, games, scientific visualization, and industrial design." - Maya user guide

Ah so smooth and curvy kinda want a doughnut now.....

And heres one more picture showing how smooth nurb models are to their polygon brothers heres the same model made one with polygons and one with nurbs.

And of course not just models Nurbs are also used to create wonderful geometry scenes so you can create pretty looking hills and mountains Maya has a useful tool called soft selection which lets you bend the Nurb mesh fluidly and naturely allowing the modeller to create nice landscapes.

Cool hill bro needs more trees and stuff

And that's, that for this post Nurbs and Polygons and all sorts we are learning fast right xD next time... well I am not sure what next whatever I start looking at just expect another post whenever :)

Till Next time.

P.S Because I used sources that were not mine in this post i need to credit them or the scary examiners could fail me for plagiarism so this section below is to keep them happy you don't really have to read it but if you want knock yourselves out.


Sources used in this post:
http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2013/en_us/images/comp_snap01.png
http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2013/en_us/images/comp_poly_primSUBDIVdefX.png
http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2013/en_us/images/GUID-F60A5CAC-898C-491F-8F7B-3BEECBA7E8DF-low.png
http://www.3dtutorialzone.com/Polygons_To_NURBS/1.jpg
http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2013/en_us/images/GUID-8B5CB835-D6EF-4767-B425-B5F911A13560-low.png
And finally the very very useful Maya 2013 user guide itself
http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2013/en_us/