Like most projects in maya, my first few attempts usually fail. In this case, I’m trying to create an image of graphene, so I started with some polygon ball-and-stick models:
I thought I could combine all 1000+ tiny polygon primitives into one mesh, and then deform it into a wavy pattern. No dice: my laptop crashed four times, wouldn’t render the images, and generally all applications and the dock mutinied- until I rebooted and promised not to open the file ever again.
For reasons I don’t understand, my second try using 1000+ nurbs ball-and-stick primitives is much easier on my MacBook. And, instead of converting these into one giant, dreaded polygon mesh(mess), I had a eureka moment. Lattice deformer!
We’ll see how this turns out..
Edit: it turned out great!