Shrinkwrapping primitives to model?

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I’m not a maya user so I’m not sure what the purpose of the spheres is, but I don’t think they’re being used for modeling. The mesh topology is too clean to have been generated procedurally.

[Thomas Pascavage]

but is tht possible somehow? it seemed quite ingenious to create something out of primitives then wrap it up in a mesh, then delete the primitives leaving only the mesh in the form it was in when the primitives were still there

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You can do something of the sort with Cinema’s metaballs, but you don’t have much control and it leaves a dense, triangulated mesh. ZBrush, on the other hand, has a sophisticated “ZSphere” system that can serve as the basis for a final mesh (though it still requires much work to get good topology).

[Thomas Pascavage]

once again, its adam to the rescue^_^ metaball did exactly what i was looking for. youre right about the triangulated mesh, but isnt there a way to fix that? i thought i saw sumthin about cleaning up mesh but i dnt remember exactly what it was

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You can try the untriangulate tool or polygon reduction, but neither is likely to produce very good results. What you can do, if you really need a high quality mesh, is turn on polygon snapping and use the create polygon tool to build a clean mesh on top of the metaball mesh.