Requirements
We were assigned a class exercise this time to model a stiletto heel using only NURBS based on a picture in the lecture slides.
Readme
The NURBS tools used are listed as follows:
For the sole, I used CV Curve Tool to draw a CV curve based on a reference image, then I moved its CVs to form the outline shape of the sole. After that I used Curves->Detach to split the curve into two parts and Surfaces->Loft to form the sole surface beause Planar tool does not work in this circumstances. Since NURBS geometry does not support face extrusion, I Duplicated the sole surface and Lofted isoparms to get the effect of thickness.
To model the heel, I used Curves->Attach to merge the two sole curves into one and split it again to get the bottom curve of the heel. Then I Duplicated the heel curve and moved it upward to form the top curve of the heel. To have a curved effect of the heel, I added a profile curve using CV Curve Tool. The Birail 1 Tool is the key to form the final heel surface. The same technique described in the last paragraph is applied to generate the thickness effect.
I chose to use Surfaces->Extrude to model the two crossing shoe-belts. To form the path curve, instead of plotting CVs vertex by vertex using brute force, I employed curve projection technique in this step because the belt is basically composed of two simple parts and it is supposed to go around the foot. The projected object is a NURBS cylinder. Please take a look at the demo1.png to have an idea of how I model it. The option settings of the Extrude tool is important for the effects, although some final CV fine adjustments are still needed.
To give myself more chances to practice various NURBS modeling tools, the front belt was modeled in a different way by Surfaces->Boundary tool after creating four curves. To make the resulting surface tightly connected to the sole, curve projection technique was used again here to draw two boundary curves on sole.
Lastly, the stiletto was modeled by Surface->Revolve. In order for the connecting part of the stiletto to the bottom of the sole smooth (which is also displayed explicitly in the slide picture), I used Circular Fillet tool I learnt from a DigitalTutor tutorial to fill the gap. The default settings of the fillet tool worked just fine.
Note that since only NURBS are allowed, the resulting Maya scene contains a pure NURBS model. Many other typical and small techniques are used in this class exercise such as pressing “c” to snap to curve when drawing profile curve of the heel. In sum, like the IK project in the last semester, I learnt a lot of NURBS modeling knowledge from this exercise. I hope the subsequent class exercise could be like this.