The babies first started as setches. As you can see Femto had a much more unique body shape. It wasn't in character with her age, so she shared the chubbier shape of the males.
	The 2D sketches were turned into 3D sketches. The models were created using a metaball plugin for 3D Studio Max. What are metaballs? Well, imagine a metaball as being like a drop of water in zero gravity. By itself a drop of water will take on the sape of a sphere. If two drops of water approach each other, their surfaces will attract towards one another. At some point their surfaces will merge and the drops will appear dumbell, or figure-8 shaped. That is, two spheres linked by a thin bridge between them. If the move closer, the shape will be of an ovoid. Get the idea? If you place a bunch of metaballs near each other, they can create complex organic shapes. The skin model seen on the right is a polygon model that has about 100,000 polygons.
	The 3D sketch was then brought into a program called Maya. This is a nice application for creating nurbs models. Nurbs are 3D models described by splines rather than being made up of individual polygons. These splines describe the countour of the shape mathematically. The advantage is that very complex shapes can be created without being overwhelmed by large numbers of points. So, using the 3D sketch as guide, a nurbs head was created.
	A nurbs head is much easier to manipulate than a polygon head which could consist of ten thousand polygons. Manipulation is necessary to create the different mouth shapes as the alien speaks, or makes expressions. Eyelids, and other details were left out, since aliens don't blink, or express emotions with their eyes.
	Nurbs fingers were also created, because the polygon model lacked the fine resolution needed to make smoothly shaped fingers. In the illustration to the left, you can see the difference between the polygon model (dark blue body) compared to the nurbs objects (in white). The polygon surface may look solid, but it's acutally tens of thousands of tiny polygons. At this point the metaball model created for the 3D sketch was refined, and used as the body mesh. Notice that the fingers of the polygon model appears as stumps. The nurbs fingers will overlap at these areas. A transparency map is added to the base of each finger to allow the surfaces to appear to blend seamlessly with the hand. As a result, you will not see a sharp line that separates the different surfaces.
	A nurbs neck is added to blend the body with the head. As with the fingers, the neck has transparency maps at the top and bottom to blend with the different surfaces. Other nurbs models were created as clothing for the characters.
	The final models were texture mapped. There is a nice technique for texturing heads in the book "Maya 2 Character Animation". Next, bones were added to allow the model to bend into different poses. The bones were bound to the skin using two different methods, soft bind, and rigid bind. Both methods have their advantages, and disadvantages, however the soft bind models were so large that they were difficult to work with. Just the three alien babies required a single file size of 165 MB, and took about 7 or 8 minutes just to save the file. By contrast the rigid bind models are 45 MB. Obviously, I prefer to work with the rigid bind models. The animation for TechTV used the 165 MB files. Not only was it a difficult and slow project to work on, but it gobbled up gigabytes of storage space.

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