Quad Male A

Long time no type. Part of the reason I started this blog was to share the occasional random bit of info, technique, or tool related to creating computer graphics for games. He’re the first entry along those lines: The Quad Base Mesh Tool.

Mudbox and Zbrush prefer base meshes built out of quad polys, rather than tri or N-sided faces. To that end, a number of artists have developed base meshes that they merge into their scenes to start. I did too, but I took it up a notch: I wrote a simple maxscripted plugin that installs into a toolbar in the 3dsmax UI that when pressed, automatically creates a generic quad poly base mesh about the origin. This can then be exported immediately or edited beforehand for sculpting in MB or ZB.

FEATURES:
Quad Male A is entirely modeled out of quads; 988 of them to be exact. (1976 tri faces when triangulated.) He features full fingers and toes and increased density about the head area. Sorry, no mouth or eyes; he is intended for quick concepting and roughing out forms. Besides, pretty much everyone rebuilds their meshes once the form is approved anyway. Quad Male A stands in a nuetral pose: arms out and down at a 45 degree angle, legs spread shoulder width apart. Quad male is also fully UV’d, based upon my highly developed mapping theories: Exterior UV edges of UV elements are locked to precise pixel boundaries and there is enough edge padding of the UV elements to combat bilinear filtering of a 128x128 mip map at distance.

Quad Male A is VERY generic. I found that by starting my sculpts with a mesh whose form was more developed than this, I would tend to get locked into repetitive designs, so simple won the day and I am freer to explore creatively. YMMV.

This tool was written for 3dsmax 9, though I expect it will run in any version back to release 5, or the first appearance of Edit Poly, whichever came first... maybe. I expect it will run in 3dsmax 2008, (release 10,) assuming something didn’t get totally fubared during development of that product. I haven’t tested it.

INSTALL:

• Get it here:

http://www.alan-noon.com/misc/tools/QuadMaleA.zip

• Close 3dsmax


• Download the zip file and extract the contents as such:
  .BMPs into …\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 9\ui\Icons
  .MSE into …\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 9\ui\macroscripts\Noon_MCRs (I like to separate out my personal scripts. I suggest you do the same.)


• Open 3dsmax


• Menu bar-->Customize-->Customize User Interface-->Toolbar Tab:
  Change "Category" Drop Down List to: Noon
  Drag "Oscar: male quad base mesh" to a toolbar of you liking


• Click "Save"


• Click "Save" (Again)


• Close Customize UI
  

USAGE:

• Press button
• Modify mesh if/as desired
• Export to the sculpting application of your preference
• Sculpt like a madman till the wee hours.
  

NOTES:
This was a fun tool to write. In order to complete it, I first had to write another tool, which I dubbed "The Pluginizer." The Pluginizer takes any mesh and writes out all of the vert, face, and UV data into a format that can be directly taken back in as arguments to maxscript functions that rebuild the model from scratch. So now, creating new base mesh tools is as easy as:

• Build original base model to suit
• Run Pluginizer on base model
• Attach a little snippet of code at the tail of Pluginizer’s output
• Attach the macroscript definition code at the head of the output
• Install macroscript
  

So someday I’ll get around to creating Quad Female A and what-have-you, but till then, let me know how you like Quad Male A and if you end up using him for your work, I’d love to see the results. Enjoy!