BSW - CAAyr3 - Practicing Veins

 Practicing Veins

My environment for Drifting Through The Void will include a lot of veins covering a lot of surface area, wrapping around objects and walls, etc. Therefore I need to find the most efficient way of doing this. I have found two different ways to approach this. One where I would need to create and texture the geometry before curving it. And one where I would create the curve geometry and then take it in to texture it after posing it. 

                                                                    Curve Warp Deformer

This was the first attempt at creating a vein around a simple cube. I created a cylinder, then a cv curve with multiple control points, then created a curve warp deformer to connect the two. After tweaking settings, this meant I could control the curve which then controlled the geometry around it. After playing around with it for a few minutes I realized that I didn't have enough geometry to use to wrap the geometry around the cube efficiently creating problems. 

This try was more successful as I used the same process as before however with a lot more sub-divisions on the cylinder and a lot more points on the curve. This lead to smoother and easier control geometry.

Here you can see the difference between the two ways to do the above process. One using lock length and one unlock length. the one on the left shows the curve with an unlocked length which means I can control the curve freely however the geometry will only keep to its original form. Then on the right, the curve has a locked length leading to all the points moving with each other almost snake-like as you form it. This leads to it being harder to shape the vein around the cube as moving one point, will move the rest if you are not careful.

Poly Extrude

Here is a different and more efficient way of creating the veins as you do not need to worry about what geometry you have created before trying to pose it. First, you create the curve around the object then simply add a cylindrical face and extrude to the end of the curve adding divisions as you go. This way is quicker and easier to set up and once you are happy with the geometry, you can take it to be textured.

Sweep Mesh