What's the hardest thing...
 

Just for fun,
I posted the question on SimplyMaya. What's the hardest/most difficult thing you've ever done or tried to do with 3D. Can be modeling, animation, fx, lighting, rigging, etc. Just try and be specific.

For me, the hardest thing I've tried to do so far is model an ear.

Ear modelling is hard, but it gets easier with practice - the thing is that you're dealing with a lot of soft detail, you're trying to have a reasonably low poly count so it can be stuck onto a head, and even then when you stick it onto your model's head, you have to figure out the angles correctly. Personally, the hardest thing to do is t stick a big project through to the end. Modelling is relatively straightforward - UVs can be tricky but there are tools out there to make things easier, but the real problem for me is having the staying power....as my many half-finished projects attest to :)

Ears are easy for me, noses, on the other hand, seem to tie me up sometimes. Ears, you can do whatever with, don't have to worry about the flow around them, there's little to no deformation in the area around them. Noses are tied right into the loops around the eyes and the mouth, and you have to make use of what open geometry you have which can be tricky.



Hardest task I've run across so far has been modeling a baseball. I'm not talking a sphere with a nice image map, that'd be cake. I'm talking full on, modeled seams and stitches. That had me beating my head off the wall for a quite awhile. :headbang:

Took a couple stabs at it over the course of two years before I got anything I was satisfied with. The stitches making a "v" in the same direction the whole way around the ball, eliminated pretty much any chance of just being able to model 1/4 of it, and mirror it a couple times till I had a full ball.

I think the baseball's been he biggest challenge I've had so far.

warlock - i hada great tutorial video on how 2 make a baseball i think i still got it on a cd sumwhere, models the seams and the holes and everything it looks great, came with a magazine.. if u still wana model it i cud tell uhow its done if ur interested. :)

ok bk 2 the post - the most difficult thing i have modelled is ..............*thinkin*....... probably the thing im modellin now which is the female pirate (for the competition) - no problems wiv the human figure but modellin clothes on the body is kinda tricky specially long baggy clothes with creases. and possibly hair yet 2 try hair properly thou :D

Thanks, I did get it sorted tho, just took a lot longer and ended up being a lot more complicated than I had anticipated it would.

Used a lot of rail clone, weld average, then rail clone a segment of the welded, and repeat as need be, till I got it smooth enough, then hand tweaked and patched it from there out.

It turned out well enough I guess. Can't call it poly friendly, but it'll bake off a wicked normal map if I want.



Yeah, I s'pose hair can be pretty tricky, deciding what approach to take, I think it comes down more to the texture than it does the modeling.

I like this approach to hair I think...[Naturally you'll probably want to throw more polys into it than that, but the same principles apply]

Low Poly Hair - by Paul Tosca - on 3DTotal

i used lightwave in gr 7 about 4 years ago now and the hardest thing for me is learning it all again:p

The hardest thing I've attempted so far was to animate one of my characters waking up in bed, pulling back the sheets and get out. The number of different interactions taking place was scary! In fact, I never did it in the end, I just began the motion and then used camera angles to imply that it had taken place (deadlines to meet after-all ;))