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splines, especially as you get further along
in the process. Therefore, I suggest work-
ing in the Color Wireframe mode. When in
the wireframe modes, Modeler does not
respect polygon order and will select every-
thing your mouse moves over, not just the
polygons on top.
•
Tip 3
: Use contrasting sketch colors.
The biggest pitfall of working in one of the
wireframe modes is that it can be difficult to
distinguish between your splines and your
polygons. To make this process easier, give
your spline cage one color and your polygon
wireframes another. To do this, go to the
Detail menu and under the Polygons head-
ing, click on the Sketch Color tool. From
the pop-up menu, select Black as the sketch
color and click OK. Changing the sketch
color here will cause our spline cage to be
black when viewed in the Color Wireframe
mode. Now bring up the Display Properties
panel by pressing the <d> keyboard short-
cut. On the Layout tab, change Default
Sketch Color to White. By changing the
default sketch color, we are telling Modeler
to use white wireframes for all of our newly
created geometry. This division of color will
help us determine which polys are splines
and which are patches when viewed in a
wireframe render style.
•
Tip 4
: If At First You Don't Succeed,
Patch, Patch Again. The number one prob-
lem that people run into when spline
modeling is the enigmatic “Curves Do Not
Cross” error. Often this results from splines
whose points aren't welded together prop-
erly.
But sometimes it happens in spite of the
fact that everything has been done correctly.
I
see questions like this posted online all the
time: “My points are welded but I'm still
getting the 'Curves Do Not Cross' error …
What's wrong?” I honestly don't know.
Sometimes Modeler is weird like that. But I
can tell you this: If you go back and select
your splines in a different order (even
reverse order), it will often work. I've run
into a number of cases where selecting top
(1), left (2), bottom (3), and right (4) will
give me an error, but selecting in a different
order, for example, left (2), bottom (3), right
(4), and top (1), will work. I can't explain it.
I can only tell you that it works. It's very
likely that you'll be seeing the “Curves Do
Not Cross” error when you patch your head
model. If that happens, refer back to this
tip.
•
Tip 5
: Don't worry about spline selec-
tion order. To get the normals of your
polygons facing out, you must select your
splines in a counterclockwise order before
you patch them. But as we've seen in Tip
#4, there may be times when this results in
a “Curves Do Not Cross” error. Therefore,
don't worry about the order in which you
select your splines. It's easy to correct
polygons whose normals are facing the
wrong direction after the fact. For now, sim-
ply patch and have fun.
