Hi.
I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.
First, I'm trying to R&D new approaches to plants or trees using organic shapes. I've had some initial success with sculpties, but I've exceeded my understanding of editing vertices. So, I have a couple of basic questions, three actually.
First, using the move, scale and soft selection tools with Edit Mesh (cylinder) allows me to do some deformations, but I always seem to end up with a disproportionate concentration of vertices at the poles. Somehow, it seems that it would be better if I could keep the distribution of vertices more even over the surface. Is there a way to do that in 3DS?
Second. Having two ends, or poles where the vertices are closed or concentrated creates the logical texture distortions when a mapping a foliage texture. I've seen some scuplties where the model seems to have only one end, and nicely formed no less. It appears then that there's a simple method of accomplishing this (collapsing one end on a sphere maybe?)
My method/solution is to painstakingly fold narrowed cylinder ends (vertices) down and in and then soft selecting the upper vertices to create unified spherical surface above (spent two days). Still, I end up with lots of vertices concentrated at the bottom closure. This just seems so inefficient that there must surely be a simple, efficient alternative.
Finally, it would seem that a more complex trunk and limb combination is possible as a single sculptie, although I'm not sure how to acomplish that using the basic move, angle and scale tools with Edit Mesh. It is easier to work away from meshes, then import and an covert to a mesh for output as a sculpted texture. Is my thinking at least close on this?
I don't know any of this and I can't seem to find the answers in the documentation. Can someone point to the solutions that hours of searching the manual haven't produced (doubtless because I don't know the right terminology)?
Thanks in advance.