![]() And you can see now we get our nice polygonal distribution of these faces all the way around that particular shape. For a shape this complex, we're going to need about that 8,000 or more polygons to create this rounded shape. Now in this particular case, this will not be enough geometry for us to really create the shape that we want, and you actually see it's a flat plane wrapped around that particular surface. The first will be Count, and let's set this to 200 again and hit Apply. So again, we can take a look at the two examples that we had before with our NURBS to Polygon conversions. We have our tail here, which was created with an extrude along a curve, so we used a circle and extruded it along a curve that created this spiral shape. Now let's take a look at another example. So the control points will actually give us a lot more efficient ways to convert our NURBS object into our polygonal shape. ![]() I'll go back to one, and go to our Modeling tool kit, and if I smooth this to two divisions, we will actually get the exact same shape. Now what will happen is we will get a slightly chunkier and bigger polygonal version of our NURBS shape, but if I hit the three to show subdivisions, you can see the shapes are identical. This time I'm going to choose Control Points, and you'll see there are no options in here for your Control Points, and I'm going to hit Apply. Now it's a bit overkill, and we probably want to do our conversion if we're going to stay in Maya a little bit more efficiently. Now this would be very useful to able to take into a sculpting program where digital sculpting likes uniform faces across a surface. And what you'll see are evenly spaced or close to evenly spaced polygonal faces, about 8,000 of them, to create our shape. Now there might not be enough to really give us the shape that we're looking for, so I'm going to delete that, select our NURBS surface again, and let's up this up to about 8,000 and hit Apply again. And you'll see that we get a shape built from 200 polygonal faces. I'm also leaving everything set to Quads to start with. Let's actually set it down to about 200 to start with, and hit Apply. It is going to give you a certain predetermined amount of polygon geometry that will be used to create the shape from the NURBS surface. I will typically either use Count or Control Points. It's basing the amount of geometry in between isoparms and other NURBS components, that is actually sometimes difficult to get exactly what you're looking for. Honestly I'd never use General or Standard Fit. Our Tesselation method is set to General, Standard Fit, Count, or Control Points. Now in here we have a few options for creating our polygons, like do we want them to be tris, or triangles, or quads? Either three-sided or four-sided geometry. Now in here, these are the same options that you would actually have in the Revolve tool and the Extrude tool just at the bottom. ![]() To do that, we're going to go to Modify, Convert, and I'm actually going to tear this menu off because we're going to use it over and over again, and the one that we want to use right now is NURBS to Polygons, and I'm going to open up that option box. If I right-click on it, you can see I'm still getting control vertices, surface points, holes and isoparms, and I want to convert this into a polygon shape. ![]() I'm starting here in the 02_04 start file, and you'll see that we have a vase that was actually created by revolving a NURBS curve. Let's look at some of the convert options that you'll use most inside of Maya. Paint Effects can generate plants, trees, grass and many more shapes procedurally that you can then convert to a base polygon shape for your project or to finish modeling. Now you can also convert other types of objects like Paint Effects brush, particle, fluids, and textures into geometry which can make some very interesting base models or even finished models. These would typically come to you as NURBS objects and you would need to make them polygons. For example, a CAD file for a product design or car design. Now you should still know how to convert geometry using the Modify Convert options, because you may receive a model from somewhere or someone else that would need converted for your project. And what's even better now, Maya has many of the NURBS Convert tools already built into them. Utilizing NURBS tools and converting the NURBS objects to polygon is a great idea and sometimes gets overlooked by new modelers. Understanding that NURBS modeling workflows can easily create certain basic shapes that revolve or extrude like wine glasses or chords makes that type of shape much easier to create in the early modeling process, even when you're going to be ending with polygons. Geometry conversion is not a complicated or difficult task to accomplish anymore, but knowing when to convert geometry types can make your modeling process go much more smoothly.
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