Hard Surface Modeling Essentials: Curved Surfaces

hey guys hitting in Morton from flip normals and in today's video we are gonna talk about some hard surface stuff we did a little bit last week and so we we had a lot of requests for doing more stuff especially when it comes to inserts and meshes so today we're just gonna cover how to make different inserts of different sizes with different spans in a cylinder because the cylinder is a really nice sort of curved surface that that's the kind of curved surface that always is an issue whenever you need to do any sort of cuttings so one thing that I want to mention with any sort of hard surface at least from my point of view is that it makes it a lot easier if you plan ahead if you plan ahead how many spans you want to have or how many edges and loops you want to have that makes it a lot easier when you need to do inserts or extrusions that sort of like conform to the surface properly so anything ^ 2 8 16 32 64 that kind of stuff makes it a lot easier and if you don't plan it you're gonna realize pretty quickly why you should plan it yeah everything is just so much harder if you're planning it's kind of like like a puzzle piece where everything just kind of flows together if you don't plan it it's like you kind of gotta attach things to to possibly see you guys cut stuff off it and it's miserable so obviously all of these things aren't really an issue if you have a flat surface but curved surfaces that's where it starts to get hard this is it sounds a bit like a boring topic when you're like oh it's we're gonna insert stuff in the cylinders but this is really one one of the foundational things you got to learn about hard surface modeling inserting cylinders into things and inserting shapes into other shapes something you do so often so we're starting off with just a cylinder here that's 32 32 segments and the first one that I'll cut into here it's gonna be smaller one that has eight eight subdivisions so this one like one that has eight is a lot more simple than one that would have sixteen cuz you just need a look like fewer cuts so usually what I do is I just place my cylinder where I want my cut to be what you could do to make it easier let's just do it here it's just the scale so it's sort of roughly matches the first first three loops here obviously if you wanted a bigger you would just have to expand that but we can talk about that once we get to the sixteen one so by positioning a cylinder where you want your cuts it's just it makes it really easy to conform your cuts because now you can see okay to make a perfect circle I would just have to cut in these places right there so that that makes it really simple this is also where some people actually use boolean for this but that which which is a legit way of doing but there's a lot of clean up before it only is I gotta look better recently but it's still a lot of cleanup so everything I do or make anything is I try to not to be not to be too perfect just because I don't like if I'm slightly imperfect then my things will also look slightly imperfect and I think it's just it just looks nicer that way so what I usually do is I just there's no reason to be conservative with your with your loops here you can always take them away again just go in so one thing you could do is you could take your edges here for example and then by snapping and holding down the V key and Maya you could sort of snap it snap it to this axis here that way you ensure that it's perfect on the on the cylinder like I'm not necessarily looking to do that because I don't really want this to be super perfect but that's something I have done in the past and you you you can do that as well yeah in a lot of cases you do want this er to be mathematically perfect yeah and it's handy an important thing to note here is that if we were to cut in so let's let's make some cuts here now based on this little thing here so if I just cut up here now this using the multi cut tool yeah there and there so I'm just clicking roughly you know where the cuts should be there yeah yeah you need to control one key this isolate like you're doing ah yeah I've set it up to hotkey that's my hotkey is all cue because it's more vulnerable and confirm oneness of business all today it's this really this risk for your knowing here we would have you know a great cut for soon the problem is let's say this is the size of the cylinder or the size of the insert that we want the issue that we're gonna run into now you can hold on tab to sort of paint selections the issue that we're gonna run into now oops is once I let's say if I just didn't do this all right and I wanted to now it looks fine and we wanted to extrude this in now we don't have any supporting edges here so the supporting edges that I'm talking about is supporting it is just around the outside so once we start to subdivide we end up with a mess like this so we can't really get any hard edges you know you can try and remedy it by going in here and stop dividing again but you don't get the support on the outside this is a less of a problem when you have less spans like this or less fewer edges you can see that there's inconsistencies between the lengths on the cylinder here so this here would be smoother than here because here the edges are closer together you get some weird pinching in areas yeah and you really want a consistent result when doing this so one solution is to sort of you plan ahead and say that well this cylinder on the outside is gonna be a slightly bigger radius than my actual cylinder so you can have your your velocity you had your real cylinder in here for example what you could do then is just either take these these faces here and then you could just extrude them in let's see if we can get a slightly smaller one something like that or like that so now you would have supporting edges already in place all right so once you then extrude this down there you go now you have supporting edges all the way around and because you have supporting edges on either side the smoothing is going to be pretty consistent nice clean geometry yeah so that's a pretty that's a pretty simple way of doing it it gets a little trickier once you start adding inserts let's say so let's let's do the example where we add a cylinder with 16 sites so if you don't know how to do the magical adding cylinder sir I like this quickly we covered this in the Wacom pen modeling video where we just showed show more basic stuff we're skipping some laughs now just because we expected not to make Creek cylinders in this one yeah that's the thing when you were doing modeling all this you you never know what any of them are you just you just know what they do you noted terminology for them you know I'm matching up these edges here just to make my life a little easier you could do like this then you would just have to move them I wish that plan ahead for the sake of expedience here so we'll do this one and there's once you start getting into the into cylinders or inserts which have multiple it's just like a lot more edges than the one before then you just like it's a lot more cuts so usually I'll start like framing it in so now I know that okay I can cut around bigger and again the easiest ways to is to make your cylinder bigger than it needs to be because then you have like this buffer of where your cuts are gonna be in a way you have your supporting edges and you could go in you could do sort of where you add these predefined ones like that there no one there then you're like then you're already you know a good waste way yeah you have enough geometry not to support what's there you don't have to invent something and then you can just go in again and then you so this one right here is interesting so we have a that's where the the edges are joining together so what you can do sure is you're just cut into there and then we'll go in and fix that area yeah keep it clean for now yeah and do one cut instead of instead of two cuts for that region so the nice thing about some of the modeling tools in Maya has been for a few years now is that you can constrain two edges and surfaces mm-hmm so when I do this kind of modeling that's usually what I would do because I need to move this into place so right now I wouldn't be a very good cylinder if it's you know it's a little out of whack we've just hit the right mouse button to to commit to the multi-cut which is quite handy so here we can do now if you go to your modeling toolkit and gold transform constraint you can say add slide or surface light so it's slide would mean that if I take this vertex I'm constrained to going in the direction of an edge if I do surface slide I'm more free to just move around at the same time you see I'm constrained to the surface so this is really handy when you're doing this kind of work yeah you can just move this into and to crazy spacious now moving it it is going to stay in yeah in the surface so I really like this tool for just quickly getting stuff into place because then I don't have to worry about oh well my cylinder you know look correct because it just follows the surface and then you can go in exactly the same as before and then here you can see that as well gives using marking menus like control right mouse button for for selection menus like you can grow and shrink your selection to super quickly yeah so and then we would have another cut which is bigger so in order to code you can see now we're running into this issue again with different sizes of four links it's edge links right so what I would recommend there is go in add an extra supporting loop all the way around you can make this as perfect or imperfect as you want like I said I'm I'm a big fan of just doing things a little imperfect not because I'm lazy but because I think it gives it a nicer feel it's a more realistic feel like if you tend to do everything perfectly like math wise all the time obviously depends on your job but if you're doing this kind of modeling I like to be a little like in quotation marks loppy with it just because it tends to look a little more realistic if you work for NASA disregard and the advice I'm giving you right now if you do something which has to be perfect obviously you do it but yeah if it's more artistic in this for visual representation which most of what you do in film the games really are yeah so now you can see this here before so this outside loop here now takes care of most of the weird deformation we have in terms of sizing and now the inside the two inside loops are a lot closer together here you can see they're a lot more consistent in terms of the edge lengths nice clean geometry so one thing you should be aware of here is when I merge these together there is a slight offset so you can see it doesn't exactly follow the surface so if you wanted this to be perfect you can go in and just adjust it a little bit just to make sure that it was on the money so if we apply a pre-made phone to this you can see that looks pretty good there you see the end caps of the cylinder so one thing one issue you do run into is if you do this you can see because I've added this loop around here this doesn't necessarily conform to the amount of spans you would have here to have this extra loop ideally you would have another one run across so you don't end up end up with a little bit of pinching because right here you know you don't have anything on either side of this so you will end up with a little bit of pinching here yeah that's just something to keep in mind yeah you can see that can you see here on the normal okay so we'll do one more of these 16 cylinders just on the other side here and we'll do this just in just in a slightly different way just so just you have different ways of going about solving these issues so before I added a bunch of pre-made loops in between but this time I just want to add just the bare minimum so these loops here so this this is another way to do it like so I'm always doing cuts when I do this go in here and then I'll just I will add the cuts exactly on the cylinder of where I want it to be there's so many ways to do hard surface there really is like there are there were like a hundred different ways of doing this exactly and we're gonna have people who's like why didn't you do it like that well there are just gorgeous plethora of ways to do anything in 3d so now that thing now will have a perfect cut for this one for example now what you need to keep in mind here is that obviously now you will need to add loops to this one again but this is just it's a really quick way of just getting you get the cut in place really quickly you don't have to then make the spans first or the edges first just to make sure things there you can just cut it in to see okay well this will this work and also if you're doing concert modeling then it can be a lot more lenient with correct apology and it's all about getting good shapes out here like if you're doing hard surface console modeling yeah then it's then it it's all about the idea and not the clean modeling yes interesting you get the constant models for like for hard surface stuff it's a mess unless they're from metallic purple oh then they are the best thing in the world we've done other places go in and you can either again I would add a supporting loop so here so actually to show how to combat this thing we have over here what you can do is add some loops here yeah you should probably add those there anyway because you have an end gone yeah yeah definitely so what I'm doing here is I'm adding it to the base of this one so the loop supports this before you know add it in here then we end up with a little bit of pinching yes so we've been talking about this innovators before let n guns and triangles and all that might not necessarily be bad but if you have a curved surface you definitely don't want to angle on the curved surface it can be and it can be an areas which you aren't gonna see you aren't going to form if you really have to yeah spacing isn't optimal for this that's that's a triangle right there but aren't they the worst probably for this it is actually pretty bad actually up so you probably probably do then you would have the loop around like this then I can see that it actually follows the surface very nicely instead of instead of this here where we end up with a little bit of pinching because essentially we've added loops here without continuing them or it's over here they could have they actually followed the surface now surface mystery so there you go now this side over here is gonna look great so don't look at the other side just will ignore the other side for now but then you can see this surface here look pretty good so I think those are some different ways that you can make quick inserts mmm quick quick inserts into cylinders and if you're doing hard surface I would really recommend plan your stuff plan ahead when you're doing it think about how many times you can work with sort of the power of two within your within your cylinders eight sixteen thirty-two s that makes your life a lot easier what also helps his is definitely like getting base geometry in there like if you're doing cylinders who got insert a sphere into something or whatever it might be model the thing put the cylinder in where you want to be a new so as a basis for it it's it's gonna just make your life so much easier yeah so yeah really hope you've enjoyed this hard-surface video let us know if you have any suggestions for shapes you want to see and we can see if that's something new no promises but we hope open for ideas from our service videos so yeah if you want to see more videos like this in the future make sure to leave a comment like and subscribe you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 83,975

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character, texturing, sanden, jaeger, substance, painter, designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, cinema4d, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, drawing tutorials, hard surface modeling, hard surface tutorial, hard surface, hard surface maya

Id: U7HG6XJsKoQ

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 23 2018