Modelling an alien

( page 8)

Eight: Grit your teeth

Rather than create the teeth one by one, we can make a master tooth and duplicate it. A NURBS cone primitive is created and deformed using a Bend deformer. The two are moved to a convenient location in front of the head so they can be easily seen and edited.

The tooth is duplicated using the simple Copy option. We'll now delve into the guts of Maya and connect the Bend deformer to the copied tooth. Here you can see the Nodes that make up the two Cones in the Hypergraph. We want to make another connection from the Bend1 node to the nurbsConeShape2 node.

Middle click-dragging from the Bend1 node to the nurbsConeShape2 node opens the Connection Editor with the each node's attributes listed. The Output Geometry attribute of the Bend node is linked to the Create attribute of the cone. Now when the Bend deformer is edited both cones are affected, yet we can edit the CVs of either independently.

The tooth is copied to the other side, then it is multicopied to create 8 duplicates in a row in the x direction. By grouping them we can scale the group to make the smaller teeth in the middle of the jaw. Another Bend deformer is used to curve the group. Then each tooth is moved and scaled a little to add randomness.

More teeth are added by duplicating the front group and then modifying the members to stop it looking too regular. The gums are also tweaked to add bulges where the teeth are.

Where possible extra isoparms are added to the gums so that more detailed shaping can be done. This sort of editing can be tedious but it's the only way to get detail into the model, plus it makes the teeth look even more scary.