Getting Wrinkles with Metamation

"What are some techniques one can achieve folds in a metamated target without considerable increase in the poly detail of the cage (lo res) model? For example, how could one feasibly achieve wrinkles like Pixar's Geri in a metamated cage? I've heard of some techniques that people apply by strategically using three point polys to cheat the wrinkle in a model.....? "

There are several ways to get nice wrinkles without severly increasing your poly count. If you are using metanurbs, try picking polys in certain areas and smooth shift. I set the outset to zero and then use stretch/move/drag etc to pull the points together and out or in to get wrinkles and folds. Another trick is to decide where you want the wrinkle to be, pick a poly on each end of the wrinkle and triple them. Now pick one of the quads in between and use metaplane splitter.The tris on each end will constrain the split to just the quads in between. After you split the polys you can pull or push the points to get wrinkles.Once done youll need to weld the polys together on each end of the wrinkle. Either way works well. There is also a new plugin available called metagroove that does the same thing on selected points automatically. The nice thing about using these methods is that you only add polys where you need them.

Larry Shultz

Achieving wrinkles can be achieved in various ways, I start out with a making a spline cage and while creating them, I keep in mind where I'm going to need more geometry/detail, that's where I would put more curves or poly's.

After you do the necessary preparations for your metanurb cage, you can add wrinkles by either smooth shifting on a value of 0 and manually displace the shifted poly to your preference, or you can enclose the poly's to be wrinkled with triangles on each side and pull points out in the middle. Another method would be using edgeopener and adding geometry to the newly split hole. There is also a modeler plugin that creates wrinkles ( I forget the name, wrinkler maybe), I've only seen screenshots of it but it looks very cool, if it does what I think it does, the small fee would be well worth it. You can achieve different kinds of wrinkles with these methods. Hope that helps.

Carlos Yambao