Autodesk Maya Cleanup Tool

all right welcome back to WI ax 2017 so in this tutorial we're gonna cover using the cleanup tool in Maya which helps us with geometry I'm gonna go ahead and add a polygon cube here and I'm gonna go in the channel box here and I think I'll go to the input and just subdivide it a little bit highlight all these divisions and just add a couple divisions here so this is an instance that a lot of people come into was you have perhaps selected several faces maybe you meant to extrude and you clicked on the extrude and then you clicked away and you neglect it or forgot that you extruded so if we hit number three on the smooth preview you can see there's extra faces there if we go back to number one here and yeah so you basically want to delete those faces and sometimes it's hard to figure out you know where those duplicate faces are this is one of the most common mistakes I see with new users sometimes they'll select the entire piece of geometry and then click on the extrude not realizing they extrude the entire piece of geometry all the faces so the cleanup tool is under the mesh menu go down to clean up towards the bottom here in under mesh and then clean up a little bit up this window here and there's a couple of options here so the first one is what kind of operation you want to do the clean up basically actually does the operation or you can choose to select the matching polygons and basically modify it yourself individually but this will highlight so if you have a large piece of geometry this will highlight what's wrong with it basically so I'm gonna leave it on clean up there you can apply to selected objects or you could apply to all polygon objects so if you have several objects throughout your scene that are similar and they have this leaning issue you could apply it to all of them down below you have two options you have fixed by tessellation which is basically subdividing it with edges and faces or removing geometry and so with this case we want to remove your arm tree wanna get rid of those extra faces so what should these options we choose well faces that are extruded but they didn't do anything they're right on top of each other and they sort of have zero length here so you can check this little box edges with zero lengths and click clean up or apply here if when I keep this open and now I click on this and hit number 3 and you'll see that it literally has cleaned up that object which is pretty cool another issue that can come up is a non manifold geometry and if I right click go to edge mode and select some interior edges here and then do an extrude and pull it out you'll see here we not only have a flipped edge at face but actual faces there you know basically coming out in a sort of strange way because we have extra geometry coming in which is the non manifold geometry so to get rid of this we could select our object and choose to go through that same process of clean up there is a certain issue with this let's try the select matching polygons and see what would happen here and choose the non manifold option here and check edges and then click apply and you'll see here the 4 verts that are basically selected here so what happens if we allow Maya to clean this up if I click apply here it will have cleaned it up in a interesting way if we go down to let's see clean up and I have to go back to object money to do this again and click apply so what happens is these are now their own individual planes which can be removed out which is fine and then you can simply delete them delete them there is however an issue that does occur which is this this separates out any faces that were basically connected or any verts that are connected here so if we go to object mode here and hit number 3 you might see some issues there which you can clearly tell there's some issues there and that's just basically these verts need to be welded here it's an easy fix you could select these verts and just weld them together just merging them so I'm just gonna drag a marquee selection over those four there doesn't look like I need anything so I'm gonna control drag over those and go to I think leave it Center edit mesh' go down to merge and you can go to the options here and just double check that your threshold is real low here but essentially click apply and then if we go back to object mode and hit number three now we've got nice welded verts so we're back to normal another issue that might rise is lamina faces so if I right-click go to edge mode and actually extrude this edge here and pull it out and then actually weld it to the other edge so this isn't too typical but you know issues could happen where you accidentally weld two things together that shouldn't be welded and if we do the smooth mask prove you can see what's going on here we can go to let's go to mesh and choose the cleanup tool again and again we'll do is clean up and if we scroll down here instead of non-meta fold geometry we can choose the Lemna faces here faces sharing all edges basically and then click apply and then when we go to smooth mesh you can see here everything is fine now so the next thing we're going to cover is how to fix by tessellation so for example if I chose to subdivide this using the multi-cut tool if I made some geometry here and maybe some geometry here that basically had more than if you look at it one two three four five sides polygons five sides here with some triangles if I want to fix that up I can right click go to object mode it's always important to do the cleanup with object mode I want to stress that out but down here if I want to clean up the matching polygons choose faces with more than four sides as the option and click apply and voila we now have triangles now it may not be the the interesting piece of geometry but it will fix the issue here in fact if you choose for side faces and click apply once we go back to object mode here and click apply what it'll do is a little triangle a everything here so you can do that too if you were but really there's not really a need for that you know most game engines will triangulate your geometry as it brings it in now another issue that could happen is concave faces or non planar faces so if I select vertex and grab say a couple of these verts here drag them in you can see here the geometry would be messed up pretty well I'll even repeat that action over here and kind of pull out or not pull in again on this side you can see it causes lots of issues this kind of geometry here so to fix this what you can do is select those so we can choose concave faces and we can choose non planar faces and click apply and what I'll do is it'll essentially triangulate those areas and make it you know just much nicer for the texture Maps and so forth to work with instead of you know faces that aren't working at all which would be concave faces and non planar faces so that's the basic overview of the cleanup tool what it can do for you the the one thing I want to point out before we leave here at the main thing is make sure you're in object mode when you use this tool so hopefully you've enjoyed this tutorial on using the cleanup tool in Autodesk Maya until next time Cheers

Channel: James Kleckner

Views: 22,862

Keywords: Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Maya Cleanup Tool, Maya Tutorials

Id: von6_9sowZ4

Length: 8min 21sec (501 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 28 2017