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How do I make a nice smooth cat tail?
Your dinosaur works well, but I only every seem to get bumps when I try (the tail was straight to begin with).
Please help, I have spent many hours trying to do this. I want my straight tail mesh to look like the curved tail template also shown in the image.

Thanks!

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Those bumps happen because each square your mesh has its actually two triangles (Quad), and the texture deforms through the line that divides those two triangles. There are several ways of making this less noticeable, one of the most obvious one is actually adding more vertex.

Other way may be apply the mesh to a tail that is not bent over. If you apply that mesh over the straight tail when you bend it it will look a bit more square-y but a bit less deformed.

The best solution to this problem (for my taste) is actually not abusing of meshes for everything, and it's a problem of design. Work with this limitations and try to make designs that keep these graphical artifacts to the minimum.

I've been working with a friend on some libgdx test using meshes deformations aside from spine and this kind of artifacts were impossible to get rid of. It is basically the same thing that happened to old psx games in their textures.

You can find a clear example of this problem here http://xboxforums.create.msdn.com/forum ... 38416.aspx .I've been looking for another more clear and detailed example I found a long time ago, didn't find it though. I think there's no way of solving this yet (I may be wrong though).

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I have found that where you put your edges helps (from looking at the dinosaur example).

Would you say it is better to use many bones when making a tail?
Is there another way to achieve better results?

It would be nice if there was a choice to curve or/and bend the mesh.

Its not a matter of adding more bones. Its a matter of adding more vertexes, the more vertexes you have and the better they are placed, the smoother the transitions.

What is the technique to adding vertices to smooth out meshes for movement?
I could add another 50 and still not see any improvement.

The extra bones were added to give a more natural look, so how many bones would you put in a tail?

Also what is the point in being able to put blue vertices all over the mesh, instead of using orange edges?

Thanks!

Depending on the shape of the drawn image, the other option is to make the mesh really simple (ie, a quad with two tris for the whole thing) to minimize this bumpy effect. Mileage for how good it looks will vary though.

More bones won't help it look natural. This could be done with two or three bones for the whole tail and proper weights will make it bend correctly.

Cyan(blue) and orange edges are kinda the same. The orange ones just mean you're overriding parts of the auto-triangulation by defining some edges yourself.

The raptor is actually a bit bumpy in some places but since things are constantly moving your eyes don't really see it. Adding more edges makes it harder to control and also heavier at runtime.
Cyan edges are boundary edges.
Orange edges are manually added edges.
Gray edges are automatic edges.

Personally I would start out with as few edges as possible and then if needed add more vertices.

Thanks guys, the simple approach really does make a difference, over the copy the dinosaur and add more vertices if in doubt.

The raptor is actually a bit bumpy in some places but since things are constantly moving your eyes don't really see it

I noticed, but it wasn't as bad as I what I was getting and it kind of fits your type of character.

Cyan edges are boundary edges.

Does this mean outside boundary only?

Cyan edges, means the hull of the mesh. The outermost edges.

Why does it allow you to put cyan dots inside once the boundary is competete? I thought they were inside edges as well the first many attempts of trying. Just saying it can be confusing with no doc to refer to. Maybe you could change it to an orange edge tool once the boundary is complete.

Because if you only add a vertex you aren't manually defining the edges you want connecting to it. If you want to add vertexes inside the mesh you can just drag instead of click to add an edge if you want to manually define where the edge should be.

I will give you an example of what I mean:

The blue boundary is present.
Normally we click hold and drag on the boundary to the point we want to create the orange edge.

What if we could click on the boundary and move to the point we want (the orange edge following the cursor) and click again to complete the orange edge. This will only work if there is a complete blue boundary, otherwise it will be in blue boundary mode. Getting rid of the pointless blue vertex in the process. This is kind of what I was doing to begin with, while thinking the grey lines were edges