Well this is the great spline room for Carrara. Bear with me people it has been a while. You see the 3 representing axis and a cross-section. The nature of splines are the cross-sections. It is the intersecting lines that form the quads needed to form splines. Sorry about the size of the image Clint but I think alot of people will appreciate this tutorial. I mentioned patch grids in my Lightwave example. Patch grids are made up of quads and tri's. What I mean by quads and tri's is that your patch must, MUST have 3 or 4 edges. 3 edges form a tri, and 4 edges form a quad. Carrara simulates this in the spline room. Now don't expect my shape to be as good as they are in Lightwave as I get very frustrated with Carrara. Also I am only doing one half of the nose just as you would normally do only one half of the face and mirror the other half. This is a technique used by many professionals to not only save time, but ensure facial symetry. The shape that I will ATTEMPT to create is a nose The nose will be sideways because of my mindset on true depht axis. In Carrara the Y axis is where the Z axis should be and my mathematical logic will not allow me the see it any other way than the correct way. -Examine the settings that we are going to need in order to have an effective organic. For simple reasons, I will leave everything at the default settings -Create the Basic Profile of our Nose. Do this by placing points directly on the spline using the Create Point Tool. Use as many points as you need to get the desired shape. You should not need more than 4 however. If your lines are angled, use the convert point to to make your curve smooth. This tool is one of the best tools for splining in Carrara. (Note that the pink line on the far side is our spline. This is what I will use to create my profile.) -Go back to the very first point. This is where our first cross-section is located. This will be the bridge of the nose between the eyes. Use the pen tool to draw points until you have the desired shape. of your cross section. -Go to your next point. In order use this point, you will have to manually create a cross-section. So with the point selected, choose Selection/Create and you will make another cross-section. Again use the pen tool to make the lower section of the bridge of the nose. You will want to make it wider that your previous cross-section. If there are creases, don't worry. We will fix them later. -Continue to do this until you get to the section with the nostrils. You will want to make this shape differently as to compensate for the where the nostril openings will be after you have finished your spline. These openings are usually done using a boolean operation so we will not see this in this tutorial. -If there were creases in your shape, clean them up using the convert point tool. You can do this by selecting each cross-section and editing the points. -Now that your nose has taken shape, Use free-from envelope to make finer-editions to your splines and cross-sections to have a more realistic and organic appeal. Wala, A smooth organic nose. With this same tecnique you can create an entire face or an entire body for that matter. Splining is the key to good organics in almost all major 3D applications.

Tephladon thank you very much for taking the time to do this, I appreciate it. I'm printing this up and having a go at this tutorial. Nothing But Love Serge

Tephladon, No problem on the images...I have a fast connection . Thanks for taking the time to put this together and posting it for the forum members. Greta info. Regards, Carrara, Ray Dream, Poser Figures and 3D Add-Ons. Hawkin-Z GraF-X

Tephladon, I think I'm missing something obvioius here. I understand how you create the nose in the spline modeler (and the tutorial is great by the way), but I'm assuming that a face would be composed of several surfaces created in this way. But how do you patch them altogether in a way that would make the face appear seamlsess? Regards, A B

Thanx Abcarter. You will create the entire face the same way that your created the Nose. Also when I did use Carrara in the past, I used a pipeline extrusion method. As you probably not, your cross-section will always be aligned with the spline. That makes it much easier to do complex organics like faces. For this tutorial I kept everything default for reasons of simplicity. To do the rest of the face simply profile the entire face and start shaping out your face using the cross-sections. Take the second cross-section on the nose for example. You would not just stop at the nose, you would extend it around the cheek and finally up the jaw and stop at the ear. It is not hard to do or visualize once you get started especially when you start seeing your face take shape. You would do this all the way down to the base of the neck. If done correctly, everything from lips to head, nose neck etc... will be very smooth and you will have an organic that will rival any model created by more expensive programs. One good thing I need to say about Splines. If you are doing morph targets say facial expressions or even jiggling breast or muscular contractions, the spline modeler is the way to go because once you have your first object done, it is all a matter of moving your points at key areas to change the shape. This is perfect as you will always have the same number of points provided that you don't add any more cross-sections. This is imperative when morphing and the outcome is quite stunning but I doubt I will do a Carrara tutorial on that.

I am all for jiggling breasts!!!

So would I make half the face in the spline modeler, then convert to vertex, next duplicate with symetry then weld identical vertices or would the entire head be made in the spline room?

Ok this may sound dumb, but the reason i could never accomplish anything in this room is I didnt know to keep adding cross sections. I do have one question about it tho. I can keep adding cross sections on the Y axis but can I add them on the Z axis or X axis? I am also guessing you changed extrusion settings from pic 5 to pic 6 b/c I see the green line on the floor of the working box? Anyway with art I find that I am able to take rules & proceedures to adapt to what I need to do, but I am very slow to figure them out for myself :) Looks like I have to spend some time in the spline room for a bit :)

Thats right serge. Convert, Mirror, Weld Identical Vertices. Depending on how close you got to what you wanted in the spline room, you may or may not have to do clean-up on your model to move polygons and points into your desired position. Brenthomer, every time you add a point on the cross-section, you automatically add a line to the y axis. You just don't see the line until you begin to free-form and then you will see a green line, and blue line. Note that you can also modify the pink spline on the Y axis the get a better shape. You can choose point to point surfacing or shape to shape surfacing to make it easier for you. You have to work with it. You will get it, believe and once you do, it will be awesome. Okay Okay, I will go to my sister's hows and write a head tutorial for you guys. Expect it here in a couple of days. It's the weekend and I am off with no plans other than my private projects. I think this next tutorial will explain everything.

As Stone Cold Steve Austins Says (HELL YEAH!!!..), thanks a million Tephladon. I can't wait Love and Peace Serge

I'm sorry everyone but I have tried the spline head and relived nightmares about it. The same reason why I put Carrara down in the first place haunted me again. As I got into the complex procedure it crashed, and crashed again and crashed again. So to save myself anymore undue stress I have decided not to pursue this tutorial. I'm sorry serge but I just spent half my weekend pulling my hair out because of stability problems with the software. ALso I was at my sister's house and I was working on borrowed time. If you have any other questions I will try to answer them as best I can, other than that, I am not going within on lightyear of Carrara for the next 6 months

No problem Tephladon, thanks a bunch for taking some of your off time to try and post a tutorial for us. Wish I can be of help to you in some way, I owe you one. I do have a question for you, and you do not have to go into details but to answer that specific question. I will play with the spline modeler my-self and figure it out, the question is do you create the out line of head on the sweep path as you did for the nose or do you make the outline on the cross-section? Love and Peace Serge