Fix My 3d Model #4 Easy Details on Curved Surfaces with No Pinching

in this maya hard surface modeling tutorial i'm going to show you a killer strategy on getting details easily on curved surfaces without any pinching if you've been around the block with hard surface modeling within maya you know that pinching on curved surfaces is a very common problem i'll be showing you a killer strategy on how to start your project by modeling all the details on a simple plane and then towards the end of the video i'll be showing you a little known my deformer to actually give it its final shape all that plus some bonus tips in the video coming up what's going on you 3d modeling beasts this is jmmusi and welcome to another maya hard surface modeling tutorial so my man back heat hopefully i'm saying his name right was struggling getting uh details on a curved surface and i think we all have been there uh where we actually go in there and not really have the right edge flow or the right number of divisions going into that can really just make uh modeling details on a curved surface somewhat of a nightmare so i told my man don't even worry about it i got your back and i'm gonna help you out and we're gonna knock out this mouse and i'm gonna show you and you guys at home how to actually create a really any detail on a curved surface with this killer strategy before we get started make sure to smash the like button it really helps the channel out i have great news about my maya hard surface modeling course i'm currently offering a free trial so if you're interested in that i'm going to go ahead and drop the link down below that way you can check out the course absolutely for free and if you haven't done so already make sure that you join our facebook community our 3d modeling beast group this is a place where i actually take a lot of these requests or a lot of these videos that you are seeing that's where i get the ideas from is from members that actually share their post within the group so without further ado let's get started well one side note is most of my tools are hot keyed so i will call them out if you don't know how to get to that tool i will have a call out card at the bottom of the video that way you could access that tool via the menus if you never have so right here i have my image plane set up uh first thing that i'll do with image planes what i like doing is bringing up the channel box here and throwing it into a different layer and then just uh set it to a reference that way i cannot select it on the viewport but i can select it here via the outliner right here all right so that's a nifty little feature one thing you'll note is that i'm going to start here with this lower rest plane and to actually get all this detail that i need on a curved surface i will need to actually have something that's pretty much this density what i'm actually going to do though is worry about shaping pretty much this perimeter i'll probably do something symmetry married over and then take care of the asymmetry right here but i'm not going to concentrate too much on the shape the main point of this tutorial is going to be how to carve in kind of this pattern here once i establish this shape on this lower res i will apply a smooth and i will get a resolution like this which is going to be better suited uh to reduce pinching on a curved surface so i'm going to start with the multi-cut so i'm going to take that right about here and i'm going to use this line here somewhat of a symmetry line um so before i do anything um i'm going to just select that edge that i just pretty much carved i'll go ahead and detach these components and anytime that you're detaching in order to delete you want to make sure that the cut is all the way through i have border edges turned on and the preferences right now i pretty much cut out this island here one thing you'll note is if you double click basically there's a leak somewhere in that cut so what you can do sometimes this could be frustrating especially visually we see that border edge right and we kind of missed it there so i know what it is but let's just say you were here uh what you could do to test that leak pretty much in that cut is you could start growing your selection and you'll see pretty much right here is the leak right so if you didn't know if you're ever trying to basically figure out what's not cut all the way through you could always do a gross selection and that'll kind of expose the area so i know the leak is happening right here so what i can do is just kind of delete that area and now i can just double click here and delete this so i'll quickly shape this and i'm just going to collapse some of these verts by merging them down like so so any of these right here that are pretty close together i just start cleaning some of this up right away but i'm not overly concerned about perfect edge flow at this point i'm just trying to establish this shape what i'm going to do is start pretty much rounding this off like this and i'm going to take it this way like so and now i can go ahead and meet up with this guy right here so that's going to quad out here i'm going to move this over so now we have this edge take these delete these and then just space that out a little bit better move that over and then here we can route it this way so again i'm pretty much just routing this one towards that corner and i'm definitely gonna have to space these out a little bit better i don't want them this close especially on a curved surface so let me go ahead and take care of this now one thing you could do is enable edge slide and you see that now i'm able to slide these verts here and i'm pretty much just keeping uh or i'm sliding along this edge and you always want to anytime that you add geometry you just want to make sure things are nice and spaced out so what i'm going to do at this point is take this edge here we'll go ahead and detach it again and we'll just double click this delete this i'll go to my brush tools here sculpting tools and i'm gonna use the grab tool which is a nifty little tool for stuff like this now when i'm using this since i had a nice grid to start with i'm not gonna go crazy right uh i'm just trying to really push a left and right and i like this at points uh you know instead of just using uh the move tool with the verts or even uh using you know soft select i feel like i have more control with this brush so the cool thing about this brush as well is if you hold down shift the relax uh functuality is built into that which is you know pretty cool now i'm not going to go overboard with that because it can give me kind of some some wonky uh spacing so i kind of like the spacing that i had but uh it is just a nice little feature to have for mirroring i do like to use malcolm's mega pack here you can use the standard shift right-click mirror right you could do that as well but this is just a handy uh little menu that in my opinion makes it a little bit easier i want to flip this in the object uh x and there we go right so i don't have to jump down to menus it's just a little bit quicker than going through the default maya menus uh one thing that i will do before i do that is i'll take this border edge and then i'll just scale flat i can take off slide and now i can go ahead and just take this and do mirror object x and i want to make sure that i have the merge function on all right from this point i'll just go ahead quickly add the asymmetry so i'll go to mesh tools again sculpting tools and i'll go to the grab tool i'll bring this up quite a bit and just start placing this a little bit closer to the shape that i want so this looks pretty good i'm going to go ahead and manually take care of this corner uh and actually just clean it up before we move to the next step so i'm just going to basically uh collapse these verts or just merge them like this and then i can take these verts again merge them and now we have kind of a nice sharp corner now i'm going to go ahead and go to the next phase which is going to be pretty much a carving in that detail uh remember in the beginning i said that i wanted to basically get closer to this because we're going to need more divisions to actually support that shape in the curved surface so before i do that i'm going to go ahead and just basically go here and take another pass of just basically spacing this out a little bit better because once we add more topology it's going to double our workload and before i actually smooth this i'm going to take this edge here i'm going to scale this flat and this is going to be pretty much lining up here and then uh from this point i think i'm ready to add this uh basically a level one smooth to this so we'll take this uh we'll go to mesh and we'll go ahead and drop this uh smooth here and i just want to make sure this is a level one and then uh you see that we're closer to this topology here and the reason i did that is because it was easier to shape this uh basically on that low res i'll add the smooth uh before moving on to the next phase from here uh what i'm going to do is basically start with the multi-cut and basically trace this and i don't have to be super precise here but i will try to get pretty much just the overall shape of this and if you want to go back and make sure your edges are perfectly straight you could always go in here take them scale them flat all right so now we kind of have this a perimeter and we want to start thinking about you know how these uh corners are going to be reinforced after i have this initial cut uh what i want to do is condense some of this try to clean some of this up do a first round of cleanup i'm not going to be too obsessed with the edge flow so from this point i want to go ahead and start squatting some of this out if possible um i will have to do a little bit of edge flow work but there is a step here that's going to take me in the right direction uh the other thing to keep in mind this is an image not a blueprint so most likely this is flat but since you're actually looking at a bent object or something with curvature that's why it looks like it's kind of flaring out this way i'll leave this line straight like initially had it i want to go ahead and give me a little bit of a topology here to help me kind of section this off we did a little bit of cleanup work and now uh we can come in here and basically just uh select this perimeter here and we can do a bevel right uh i'm gonna go pretty wide on this you'll see why in a second and i'm actually gonna overshoot this what this bevel is gonna be doing is actually giving me some supporting geometry right around here and then from here we can add one division right and then uh from this point we could just take this rebel that and that's going to be pretty much that little panel line there right so we did initial bevel get that uh edge flow going and then we added a division we took that bevel and then uh we basically uh beveled that middle edge just to give us that panel line uh let's go ahead and kind of space some of this out and we can start going to sub d mode and seeing how you know this actually starts to bend i'm not going to obsess over this as far as getting it exactly like the reference but what i will do is actually space some of this out so i'll go ahead and do uh my edge slide then we can take these guys if you want to move them down uh we can hit d hold down control orient on this edge and now if we take slide off you can go ahead and pull down this way kind of start that rounding process so these are actually holding up pretty well when i hit three let's go ahead and move down and see how these hold up so for uh these uh for this sharper edge we're gonna need a little bit more divisions right just to really hold this up so what i'm gonna do is take this guy like this i'll go ahead and bevel it and then i'll go ahead and add another division to that bevel okay so now if we go to three mode you see this how this edge is holding up right we'll clean that up in a second because we're not going to want to leave it like that but this is a step in the right direction uh with these two divisions here or these two edges this is probably going to be good enough and i think what i want to do here is add another um loop just to help compress this right now we see that we're losing a little bit of this volume so what i'll do is i'll just take the multi-cut tool control middle mouse click and add a edge right there uh we could always go in here if we want to strain this out and with etch edge slide enabled we could just scale flat and then kind of move this down and then move this down as well and that's kind of a nice thing about edge right which is right here see this transform constraint that's where it's at but it's just a nice little feature because you know once you have kind of this uh shape established you know if we're pushing up and down it's going to basically jack this up so what i'm going to do here is actually move these but i don't want to randomly move them and edge slide um it'll actually get kind of wonky here so i'll hit d orient to this edge and now i'm going to take slide off you see that i'm getting a better movement uh with pretty much these guys here now uh one thing just like before we're going to need another edge just to preserve this so same thing is multi-cut drop it do control middle mouse and then take this guy here and that's being held up a little bit better and what we can do is since we have this extra loop here we could actually use it to our advantage i think i'm going to drop that right in the middle and that's going to be held up even better right and now we pretty much have these guys that we could uh connect so this is looking pretty good the shape is being held up like i wanted let me go ahead and reinforce this edge here this is going to be a sharp corner so what i can do is take this again bevel it see how it looks right and if i need more i could always go in here and add an extra division right and now with those three bevels there or those three edges that's going to be held up rather nicely so now that i've basically reinforced all the edges and everything looks okay i need to go ahead and do a round final round of cleanup let me go ahead and take x-ray off and i'm going to start basically just make sure everything's nice and quieted and routed properly now one thing that i like to do is actually feather these so you're going to want to support here in the corner but you're not going to want these guys too close right because uh once this uh pretty much uh gets uh into place as a curved surface um this proximity to these edges um it might actually cause pinching so you want to try your hardest to actually just kind of feather these out from this corner point here so this is going to lend itself better uh to not basically giving you any issues when it comes to pinching so same thing here uh we're going to want to feather these so what i'll do here is just add another division with the multi-cut right in the middle we can do a spot weld there like that and then what i'm going to do here is just control middle mouse click with the multi-cut it's going to drop a loop right there in the middle so i'll go ahead and select this range here i'll go ahead and double click my move tool and you could enable soft select and that's just going to give me a nice little feathering effect there and it's going to kind of scoot this edge along so it's just going to do some of that spacing work automatically for me i'll just go ahead and enable soft select off and now that i have that topology added i can go in with the multi-cut and just finish this out and there we go and you could even go in here and actually just feather these out so you guys pretty much get the drift now uh of just going through here right and adding supporting edges on these corners feathering them out and then pretty much doing any reroute whether i'm adding more topology here to be able to connect uh these uh basically supporting edges or just doing some edge flow work so i'll go ahead and fast forward here and i'll clean up the rest of these corners for and here what i'm doing is actually collapsing this i'm going to delete that edge there this is going to quad out here and this should hold up fine so i'm pretty much always thinking about my spacing and knowing that it's going to be a curved surface i try to have things pretty even i think what i'm going to do here is kind of use this to my advantage so i'm going to take that uh edge here i think i can pull this off by going in here deleting this just kind of get that original spacing back and then i'll make this guy the pole all right so with the pole here i should be able to take this uh inside edge and then connect it like this and that quads out so now as usual i had a topology so i'm just going to go ahead and make sure it's spaced out properly right and really i did this reroute because i didn't really want to kill this edge here right so give me a long span without topology and that would affect my shape once i actually bend this plane into place so here's an opportunity to work on our spacing i'll go ahead and enable edge slide and just kind of nudge this down a little bit i could always deselect this guy here like so same thing here work on the spacing and all this work ahead of time is just going to make sure that we really don't have any pinching i did forget to add this guy here which is not a big deal i'll go in here and simply bevel this like so just to get that slit here for the mouse so now i'll go ahead and select all these edges here like so we'll clean this up in a second but uh i'll simply delete this now we can hit three again see everything's holding up fine and then uh i can just take these guys here and just merge them down like this so from this point it's time to actually uh deform this into place so i'll go ahead and take this shape here and actually i'll take both of these hold down shift just to clone it middle mouse out of that group and now we can hide this here take these guys and pretty much just put this into place and i'm pretty much just going to use that shape that he had there's no point in me actually redoing this now the key here for this to work properly is that this bottom shape pretty much encompasses this whole shape that's on top right or that whole grid so i'm going to make this just a little bit bigger all right so we'll take this grid here we'll go ahead elevate now one thing that we're going to do with this deformer is that we're actually need more topology here so i'll go ahead and do a mesh and we'll go ahead and smooth and i'm basically trying to almost match the topology here right so i'll go to mesh smooth and we're going to need about i'm going to knock this down to three because having more is not going to hurt us but having less will right and this might make sense a little bit more sense in a second so now from here we'll go ahead and take this right so we're going to actually use a shrink wrap deformer that's going to project uh this shape onto this so we're going to take the shape here and then we're going to shift click the shape that we actually want it to adopt this shape right and then from there we'll go to deform shrink wrap options uh and if we reset the tool it's going to be towards inner object we want vertex normals from there we'll go ahead and go to create and there it is right so we see that that got projected right and that actually looks pretty good uh what we want to go ahead and take into consideration is that if you delete the history um we're going to lose this shape right so if we go in here delete this this is going to snap back right we don't want that so in order to make those changes then we'll simply have to go in here and select both meshes edit delete by type and we'll delete the history and now we can go in here and just pretty much just get rid of this right and there is our mouse give or take right so from this point um we can go in here i'll just hide this for the time being select this go into three mode and what i'll go ahead and do is take this here get my move tool and slide tool will kind of affect that so i'll go ahead and just take slide off i can hold down shift now to extrude you see that is as we get some thickness there right we're going to have basically to add some holding edges here but that's pretty expected um we could also go in here and just to knock this out flat uh we can you know pretty much just scale flat like this right just to kind of mimic that shape also go ahead and grab these border edges here hold down shift and just kind of extrude down and then uh what you can do is with the inside edge loop tool just you know go for from this ridge right here this little gap and just add some holding edges and that's going to reinforce that and then we need to reinforce this corner here like so and same as before kind of forgot to do this guy here like this so we'll give it the same treatment weld that there delete that that should still hold maybe i'll just add a holding edge there like this so all right moment of truth we'll go ahead and give it something nice and reflective that way our any a pinching will be exposed via the blend and the high specularity make sure that i'll hit three and then i'll take off the wire frame see what we got so i think that looks pretty good right so let me go ahead and pull up what he had previously what he sent me and looks like i actually deleted the original here i want to see him side by side so i'll go back to the original he sent me and i'm actually using uh these awesome uh scripts by malcolm i'll go ahead and put the link down in the description down below but with malcolm's mega pack um he makes um he has a script here for export and import uh pretty almost like you would copy and paste onto your windows or uh mac uh clipboard right uh what i can do here is just select the item that i wanna basically import into my scene and then i'll go ahead and do uh export now it's saved onto the clipboard i'll switch to the maya file here my finished one and i'll go ahead and click import and there's the mouse and looks like had another piece there selected with it so now what i can do is just kind of move this into place so we'll go ahead and take a look at both of these right he was having a lot of pinching in areas that he shouldn't have and that was just really due to the fact that a he was just too low on resolution and that's something that a lot of beginners do including myself when i started 3d modeling uh and then a b you know he didn't really have the right supporting edges uh to really just crease uh those corners up right and obviously you know areas like this where these end guns really don't help right so if we go ahead and turn off wireframe here's what he had and then this is pretty much what i came up with and that's the great thing about this workflow um is that you know you're able to model on a plane which is a lot easier and then just pretty much apply to the former towards the end and if you pretty much have your topology right you really don't have to worry about any pinching that's all the time that i have for you folks thank you so much for tuning in to another maya hard surface modeling tutorial as always smash the like button it really does help out the channel subscribe for more maya hard surface modeling tutorials like this if you haven't done so already until we meet again folks i will catch you next time

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 11,344

Keywords: maya modeling tutorial, maya modeling, hard surface modeling, hard surface modeling maya, 3d modeling for beginners, 3d modeling maya, 3d modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling blender, maya panel lines, hard surface, maya tutorial, maya, 3d modeling, topology maya, topology maya tutorial, jl mussi, jl mussi uv

Id: dk0Ng3zAX1A

Length: 29min 40sec (1780 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020