Mechacoyote

Well, here is the piece I did for the Saturday Morning Cartoon show.



It was great fun making it and putting my nutty modeling system to the test. In essence it's a modification of the Subdivide Proxy system in Maya that lets you work on a low-poly mesh while seeing the results in a hi-poly smoothed mesh.

Only for mine, it applies an extrude before doing the smoothing and creates a couple of attributes for controlling the thickness of the extrusion and how hard to make the edges. The result is that you are only working on the top surfaces and get automatic thickness without having to deal with all the extra verts and faces from the sides and bottom. I started work on the system when I was modeling a hi-res vehicle and was like "they build the thing out of formed panels, I should do that too."

To see an example of how much less information you have to deal with check out the low-poly mesh below.



You can see that the elbows are really just a bunch of square faces of different sizes. The panels are all a couple faces with the edges cut to allow for the extrusion of both pieces to show.