How to Quickly Model a Wire/Cable using Maya 2018

hey guys is Monica at academic Phoenix plus and welcome to another episode of tutorials there were several requests about how to model cables and wires so I thought this would be a perfect time to show you so this is a desk with a couple of assets you guys can actually model these in a previous tutorial actually you can model you view map and texture this in a previous tutorial but in this case let's say I want to make this look a little bit more realistic and add a cable or a wire coming from the lamp all the way down to wherever I don't have a wall but you can use your imagination that's what I'm gonna be doing so I want to show you guys how to create a wire and cable you may be tempted in just creating a tube like this and then adding geometry to it and then start curving it which is the long way all right so here's my you can use this and I know you may be tempted to doing this especially if you're new at modeling and then you can just kind of grab edges or vertex and start moving things down so that's gonna take forever and I'm gonna show you a much more efficient way so we are going to be extruding from a curve so it's important when you create a curve that you are using a perspective window so hit the space bar go to this perspective window whichever you want and let's say that I want to create a curve that's gonna come down all the way over here so let's go to create curve tools EP curve tool if you guys I always get worried about this so ap curve two options you might want to reset your tool it should be in 3 cubic you can play around with this some other time but make sure it's three cubic and you're gonna start here I'm gonna go ahead and click and drag all the way down maybe go over here and maybe I'll go to the top view and do a little curve like so just to demonstrate how cool this is and then press Enter all right so then we have this long incredibly long curve so once I extrude from this it's gonna be an incredibly long cable just keep that in mind all right so since I used a front view to create the curve it does it places it on the axes so make sure you squeeze that over here to the side and then here we are now this isn't set in stone let's go ahead and control vertex right-click control vertex you can manipulate this if you want to so for example maybe I want this a little closer to the table maybe I actually do want this to be significantly shorter so let's go ahead and do that so we're not stuck in stone okay so feel free to manipulate it at your heart's content I may want to increase this just a little bit so that [Music] when it extrudes its gonna go around like that cool all right so next what we need is something to use to be able to extrude with now I could potentially use one of my faces and actually extrude from there but if I want to move or manipulate the curve it's gonna be a little bit more challenging so let's go ahead and create a cylinder I am going to the inputs over here on their right Paul the inputs change my let's change our subdivision to 12 let's change our capped is zero and then I'm going to grab these faces and delete cool okay let's modify center pivot easier to control scale it down and I am going to hold down C middle mouse and snap it to the curve if it lets me there nope maybe if I get a better angle C middle mouse it there we go it should be able to C stands for curve middle mouse and drag and it will snap to the curve so this will be really easy to place F our focus let's go ahead and scale this down to a reasonable size something like this kind of scooted really close to the geometry and what we want to make sure is that this is basically centered to the curve something like that cool okay so edit delete by type history just because modify freeze transformations and we're ready to this might be a little thick we'll see let's go ahead and grab a face the first thing we're gonna do select this front face shift select the curve control e to extrude now this is what we get it's not very pretty and it's also black so let me undo that because that means a normal sorry I could reverse the normals or I could just rotate this so let's go ahead and rotate this 180 degrees let's see if that fixes it so one more time face not you lamp face okay let's get closer Wow there it is face shift select the curve control e to extrude all right much better so it's a pole but if we go to our divisions and drag you're gonna see that this pole starts to wrap around a curve now notice that we are limited we are only limited to 25 actually we're not type in 50 and you can increase your curves so very quickly we I've created this cable now it's really thick right I mean I don't know about your lamps but my lamps did not look like that so let me go ahead and just start from the beginning let me focus on my little guy here and the nice thing is is that I can always just go back and scale it smaller let me delete by type history let me go ahead and phrase my transformations let's go to face like the face shifts it like this control eat there it is increase my divisions to about 50 and that's looking a lot nicer it could probably still be a little thinner but it definitely looks better so let's take a look at the mesh it's pretty low if you want to keep increasing this you can always go to your inputs of this new cable and increase your divisions further it really depends what you are looking for so that's how you do it now I wanted to show you the plus side so again academic Phoenix Plus this is the plus side of the tutorial oh the cool thing about extruding from a curve is that it's not limited so that what I mean by that is if you have not deleted the history of this piece of geometry you can still manipulate the curve inside now it's a little tricky because you got to get in here but let's go into wireframe so press the number 4 in your keyboard select a curve right click control vertex and you can see that we still have those curves so what's cool about this is that I can still manipulate this if I want to so for example let's say that I want this to maybe be pointing downward for whatever reason maybe the outlet is on the floor so I can force it to come down or let's say that I don't like the fact that this is like so I wanted a little bit flushed on the geometry itself so I can close in here and get close and then that way I have the cables really close to each other so which is probably a little bit more realistic so now I probably will add some geometry here to make sure it doesn't break but a quick tutorial on how to create wires you can use the same theory on cables wires anything that's Ellyn gated snakes some people use it for hair I've also used it for creating trees and vines and all sorts of things that tangle so hopefully you found that helpful let me know what you think if you appreciate or like my tutorials and want to see more please subscribe check out academic Phoenix plus com to download this file so you can follow along there's also a lot more information there sign up for my newsletter so you can get pre-release content and also sir all sorts of cool stuff and also feel free if you have any questions don't hesitate to leave a message or a comment below so again thank you so much I really appreciate all of your support it really motivates me to create even more so thank you again and I will see you next time

Channel: Academic Phoenix Plus

Views: 171,725

Rating: 4.8948307 out of 5

Keywords: maya 2018 basics, maya 2018 modeling, maya 2018 modeling basics, maya 2018 tutorial, maya 2018 extrude, maya 2018 3d model, autodesk maya, extrude, wire, cable, 3d modeling, 3d model, desk, ep curve tool, 3d artist, cg design

Id: 4igTVJOEJw0

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 22 2018