Need help creating T and Y transition surfaces (character model)

Rhino Rhino for Windows
1

I’m starting to practice a little character modeling in Rhino as a slightly more fun way to learn complex surface transitions. There’s a great illustrator named Leo Natsume with a fun, whimsical style that feels like a hybrid of basic geometry/primitives and organic modeling. I know he does everything using polygonal modeling. I’m attempting it with nurbs.

I imported a 2D reference image and have been just extrapolating the rest into a 3D model, just going with whatever feels right. I’m actually surprised at how well nurbs works for this style of 3D character model, at least for the main parts. It’s pretty fun.

That said, I’m now running into the tricky parts.

I attempted to model a basic torso (not even thinking about the coat yet), and the next step is to have it blend into the arms, but I utterly failed at creating a strategy for this :slight_smile: I hope to conquer the upper body soon, but I’ll hold off on Qs for now :slight_smile:

So, I’ve shifted gears over to the legs which seemed a bit easier… until the crotch/waistline.

It’s pretty obvious what I need to do here in terms of the end result, but I’m struggling with how best to do it.

pants
pants1488×835 430 KB

For the bottom half, it was easy. Two blendSrfs. But I have no idea how to handle the top section, and unclear how to resolve what appears to be four inevitable 5-sided end surfaces. This seems like it has to be dead easy but I feel like I keep overcomplicating it and getting lost in a sea of increasingly smaller split surfaces. What’s the right process here?

character - rhino 5.3dm (4.6 MB)

3

Actually, I did discover a way, but want to know if this is the most “ideal”…

  1. I created another blendSrf connecting the “top parts” of the pants, which formed a bulge that extended upwards into the torso…
  2. I then drew a line curve, and used that to trim the bulge out…
  3. Then I used the waistline edge and created a temporary extrusion…
  4. Then I created a final blendSrf connecting the two together.

The result seems nice, but two problems:

  1. I feel like I cheated, because I totally sidestepped the fundamental lesson I’m trying to learn, which was directly transitioning the surfaces to the waistline.
  2. I’m technically breaking the original design with this approach by introducing a weird intermediate fold in the pants.

Any thoughts here?

4

maybe this helps:

1 Like
5

Thank you, it honestly is helpful to see someone just rip and tear into models quickly and still get decent results. Kind of hilarious just watching him do a intersect curve -> tube -> trim -> blendSrf between every single limb in video 2, and it still somehow looks decent.