How To : Use Sweep Mesh in Autodesk Maya

hello everyone reza here welcome to another how to video in this one we are going to introduce a brand new tool in autodesk maya 2022 sweep mesh tool [Music] now the sweep mesh allows you to generate an editable mesh from the length of a curve that you already have in your scene you can model a variety of objects such as tube pipe ribbon cables all the way to flat surfaces such as roads or even horns or hair cards to locate sweep mesh tool you need to make sure you're in modeling under create you have sweep mesh tool there is no option boxed in here this tool is intended to replace some of the tools that we can find under surface and curves menu set for example if i go to surface extrude option box basically you can create 100 clear about what you want to create there are still something that may go wrong and i always have difficulty explaining that to my students so i'm actually quite excited to have this sweep mesh tool which can completely replace the old surface extrude tool now you can see in my scene i've got the whole scene in a group all the nurbs curves in a separate group and i've got my lights in another group it's always good practice to stay organized i even if i go to the channel box and display layer i put them all on a display layer so i can turn on and off the geometries without selecting the curves let's put that in the simplest example possible creating cables out of curves you won't believe how simple this is so i'm going to zoom in i'm going to start with just one of these cables let's say the first one with the curve selected i'm gonna go to create sweep mesh and as soon as you click on it you'll be like hold on what is this it may look a little bit chunky a little bit low resolution but there's nothing to worry about that's why we have this sweep mesh creator one node in our attribute editor so basically the first thing that i'll think about is what sort of profile am i looking for do i want a cylindrical or do i want something rectangular do i want a flat surface or a wavy surface and that's why we have these sweep profiles available to you since that's a cable then i will go with circular profile now after that then you need to think about all right how many sides do you need you need to have and this will add to the resolution of the pipe the default is eight i can even lower it down to 6 and it's going to be all good now one thing that i would check right after this is not distribution or alignment but rather transformation so i'm going to go to scale profile and just reduce that ever so slightly so i get a realistic looking thickness for my cable something like that i can even reduce it further more to something like .05 in my case but still the curve or the cable rather looks very low resolution and chunky that's no problem at all that's why if you scroll down in interpolation when set the mode to precision you can increase the precision and that acts as your resolution look at that in no time i'm getting something that i really like usually precision set to 100 is a little bit of an auricular we'll go and set it down to probably 99 even 98 should give me a good result now if you feel like okay i don't need some of these extra loops around my model something that you always get with surface extrude method you can just click on this optimize button and maya is going to optimize the curve without having an impact on the silhouette or the flow of the curve very very useful so look at that in no time we are getting a really good looking cable i think this is still a little bit too thick for my taste so i'm just going to reduce it to 0.035 and i think that looks good already you can select multiple curves and assign one sweep mesh node to it so i'm going to select all three go to create sweep mesh and i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to reduce this slide to 6 i'm going to reduce the set profile to 0.035 and increase my precision to 98 percent and look at that in no time i've produced all the cables for this bit right here but of course you can do more than that for example i'm going to select another one press f to zoom on it and you can select create with the curve selected go sweep mesh and then reduce this i can turn off my lighting so you can see what's going on exactly so that's the mesh that we have i'm gonna go in here reduce the profile increase the precision to get something that i really like you can even enable optimize i can bring this down to something like point zero three but you can make use of distribution to even multiply the number of cables that you have for example scale profile to something like .01 i can go ahead and add to my number of instances and they're not copies they're instances and the good thing about instance is i'm sure you know it it's not going to create or generate an extra shape node which is fantastic so with that i'm going to go and just change the coverage and you can see changing the coverage if i zoom closely changing the coverage can actually reposition this to a circular pattern with that i can go under transformation and twist these cables how cool is that i can even increase my resolution here and increase my size to a higher value if you think they're breaking up the cables are breaking up i can even get rid of the optimize and get a much higher resolution result you can see how organic this looks and creating this again out of a surface extrude can take a very long time you can play around with that make it a bit looser or neater you can it's totally up to you and at any point of time you can go and tweak all of these values you can even overwrite the twist and go something up to five and get more twists for your cables remember keep that in mind all of these attributes are keyable so you can even create animation for any attribute that you want i'm gonna go all the way back since i'm very happy with this bring my lighting setup back and go into this part where i use a different profile so i just want to create a very flat ring for these barrels so i'm just going to go under create and sweep mesh but this time i'm going to use rectangle obviously the height is too high the resolution or precision is too low so something like 99 i'm gonna scroll up change the height change the width a little bit now here's one attribute that i really like when i select rectangular profile and that is corner radius which is your bevel look at that i'm just going to get a really neat looking bevel and that allows me to even make the surface thinner i'm going to reduce the bevel to something like .05 for this model will work just fine i can just reduce this all the way down to get something that i like again i'm using now this as my modeling tool how cool is that once you're happy with it you can actually duplicate your model you can go to modify center your pivot and just move this forward and that adds to your model now for the base i have another one ready to go and for the base i am going to use rectangular again so sweep mesh rectangle and changing it to rectangle now i can change the width to something like 3.6 and height to something like 8 to give me something like this with a little bit of bevel actually so 0.09 very tight bevel is something that i'm looking for but now in here i can actually distribute and create instances i'm just going to have three instances i'm going to um probably keep the scale instances the way that i want and i can rotate them so i'm going to go and probably rotate that and you can see once you rotate it you can get really interesting result and again think about how cool would that be if you were to animate it and i'm gonna change the coverage and that is gonna give you sort of the platform that you want i can go all the way down and change some of these attributes too for example with rotate i can actually create a really nice looking sort of platform in here you can align that to the original mesh that you selected and that kind of can see a line outer from the original mesh to the center and sort of top bottom and even right so these are really really handy and useful um alignment tools just going to keep it at the center for now and with that look at that i just created a platform out of this sweep tool now i can even add to the details i can shift right click go to extrude keep faces together off and just scale those faces ever so slightly pressing g to repeat the um the last tool and just push them down and see how a combination of different tools with the help of this sweep mesh tool you can create all sorts of crazy stuff in no time at all these two are still there so i can go and select these two curves go into create sweep mesh and now you know how this works now you know how this works you know that you need to reduce this profile to a low value go into precision and crank it up and there you have my curves so this is a really brief quick example on how you can use sweep mesh tool to your advantage and expedite and improve the workflow that you have modeling workflow and just add to your model in almost no time at all i'm very excited about this new modeling edition to maya's modeling toolset and i hope you guys found this video also useful alright until the next video see you guys soon

Channel: SARKAMARI

Views: 12,776

Keywords: Maya 2022, Sweep Mesh, Modeling Sweep, Making Cable in maya, Making Pipe in Maya, Maya modeling tutorial, Reza Sarkamari

Id: q4WiT-jlxjY

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021