How to Use The Modeling Tools in Maya

hey guys henning from flipnormals here and in today's video we are going to take a look at some of the most common modeling tools in maya this is perfect for my beginners or people who just want to have a refresher on the general modeling tools first off we're going to go through marking menus and then we're going to go through actually all of the most common use modeling tools on these guys here so let's get started with the marking menus marking menus is a phenomenal system for modeling in maya and instead we having to go through the shelves to create primitives like this and going through the different shelves of finding the modeling tools you can instead use marking menus by default if nothing is selected and you hold down the shift right mouse button you're going to great you're going to get a selection of primitives so if you want to make a cube you just hold on shift right mouse button then you hit cube if you want to have a sphere instead make sure everything is deselected you can also hit the alt d key which deselects everything then we can hold shift shift right mouse button and choose a sphere and now we have a sphere as well if something is selected then shift right mouse button is going to give you different modeling tools based on the context currently we are in object mode which means that we're going to get object mode features which means if we shift right mouse button we're going to get something like the scope tool target weld filled holes more object oriented tools so for this multi-cut so now we can start to cut away and do these kind of things if we have an edge selected it's going to give us edge tools if we have avert selected we are going to have vert tools if we have a face selected we're going to have face tools if you have something selected then when you hold down control right mouse button then you're going to get selection tools which means now we can grow the selection and you can shrink the selection so this is a very handy way of working so it means in practice if you want to model fast we will cover everything i'm showing you right now in a second just more in depth if you want to model fast you can just hold on shift right mouse button cube you don't even have to wait for it to show up you can just do this then we can right mouse button and choose get to this menu which has the component modes and then you can just start to model right away you can start to just extrude stuff out you can select everything you bevel things now this is going fast but that's the exact point of this it means that we can with marking menus model really fast and really efficiently just using simple marking menus without really understanding hotkeys so in short marking menus you will use shift right mouse button as the main tool as the main hotkey if nothing is selected you will get primitives if something is selected then you will get the appropriate selection or the appropriate menu based on what's selected in object mode you get these tools edge mode you get these tools face mode you get different tools and vert you get different tools so this is how i model it means you can model really fast you can create tons of stuff really quickly without anyone really knowing what's going on and it's just a really effective way of working in maya it means you can work in full screen mode it means you don't have to use any shelves or really customizing hotkeys to a crazy extent and it means if you're working on different my computer or computers with my installed maybe you're working as a student and you're changing computers all the time or you're working in a studio this means that you can work really fast without really having to customize maya so with that said let's look into the modeling tools the first modeling tool we are going to take a look at is going to be the extrude tool extrude simply works based on you have averts or you have a face selected and then you will extrude this out you can do this in two ways well in many ways we're going to show you two ways now first one is you have it selected and now you simply use the move tool and hold down the shift key and this is going to add an extrusion to this which makes this really nice and easy second way of doing it is if you hold that shift right mouse button and you hold a new good down you go south here you have extrude now these do the same things but if you if you see with this menu now we have more options so now for instance we can we can move it around we can we can just we just have more options for it like so we can also change the divisions of this extrusions and we can change the offset of it so this is more handy if you need something precise but if you just need something fast then just using the move tool and this is streaming you can also do the same with the scale tool and you can do the same with rotation as well so this is just a really quick way of working extrusions is something you're going to be using a lot then the next we have merge verts merge verts is based on you have two verts selected or more you can just select them by dragging over like so shift right mouse button merge verts and then we merge words to center and now if you want to redo this you can hit the g key g is for repeat last action so if you do this if you need to do these kind of things a lot you can just hit the g key a lot and this will speed up your work so much so that's shift right mouse button merge verts and merge verts to center then we have multicut multicut is one of my favorite modeling tools in maya and it feels really modern it mean what i mean by that is that it has many use cases and it's something you're going to be using a lot we access this by being in object mode simply nothing selected if something is selected hit alt and d now nothing is selected click on the object now we're in object mode then shift right mouse button and multi-cut the way this works is that you can just simply cut where you want to cut and then you hit right the right mouse button and this is going to commit the cut you can also just drag from one side to the other just through through the model like this so you have a nice clean cut going through it you can also hold down the right uh you can also hold down the control key and this is going to insert a loop like so this is how i do use a lot i i very rarely use the insert edge loop tool i keep using the um the multicut tool for this and then if you hold a control and shift right mouse button you have multiple settings such as edge flow what this is going to do we'll talk a little bit about this later on as well is that we it will now preserve the edge flow so if you insert something like this it will preserve the edge flow really nicely so multicut really handy this is so useful that when i'm doing professional level modeling that i'm not just keeping it here i actually have it set to a hotkey because it just saves me one click this is a little bit easier instead i have to go out of edit mode click here and then go here because this is something i use all the time then we have average verts average words will soften out what we have in this case you can see that we have all the words like this and they are crazy messy so what i want to do i just want to hold down the ctrl key ctrl right mouse button shrink selection and then shrink selection now we only have the internal edges like this and we want to relax these guys we want to average them out so shift right mouse button you can see it's always shift right mouse button for anything we're doing if it's vert selected we do shift right mouse button if it's polygons shift right right mouse button it's all the same thing then we do average verts and now you can see that this softens it out like this and you can also set the iterations here as well if this is set really low it's not going to do a whole lot and the higher they are the more it's going to be relaxed you reach off you reach point of diminishing returns here though like 10 is good so what you can do instead you can hit the g key and that's going to add more average verts nodes to this if you don't know what i'm talking about when i mentioning nodes you should watch one of our most recent videos on how maya is node based and this is all going to make sense then we're going to show you target valve weld target weld is fantastic and it's similar to merge verts but target world will allow you to specifically target a single vert and weld it together so be in object mode for this one shift right mouse button again same hotkey target weld just go straight north and now you can see that we can simply drag from one to another like so this is going to weld it this is crazy useful if you're doing general modeling it's one of these tools i use all the time and also one of these tools i have set to a specific hotkey like i said before you don't have to have set custom hotkeys and because marking menus make it really fast and easy but if you do this all day every day it's worth just having a few hotkeys it just makes your life a little bit easier so target world fantastic then we have fill hole the fill hole is going to do exactly that if you have a hole in the model like this it's going to fill it so in this case we can select an edge and we don't have to select all the edges around you can do the double clicking but you don't have to simply select the single edge right mouse button and with the edge selected meaning you're not going to be get tools for edges and then go down here we have fill hole and now this fills the hole so now you can also use this with multi-cut and we can just start to cut this end like so and now you you've basically bridged these like so we can also fill the hole up here as well simply select one of the edges in the hole then shift right mouse button and then fill hole and now we have filled the hole and now you can use for instance be in with the scale tool selected hold down the shift key and then we can just scale this down by extruding it in and now you just have some more resolution here and then you can for instance use the multicar tool to cut over like so and now you can start to quad this up if you if you want to do that the next up we have bridge bridges is a bit similar to what we just did with fill hole just that you don't have to cut them you don't have to like use multi-cut to cut in the segments so what we can do now is we want to bridge this to this so what you can do you simply select this edge then it's like this edge then we use bridge and in this case this works sometimes it doesn't work so what i'd prefer to do when i'm bridging in my um this tool is just a bit wonky sometimes is that i first select one polygon and a bridget in this case we hit the g key to just repeat the last action or we can shift right mouse button and we can do bridge and then you can select the remaining so now just double clicked it which is a problem because now we we will we need to just select the polygons we want to bridge so deselect these ones by holding ctrl and drag over and then we can do the same thing again hit the g key and now it's done let me just show you real quick what it might look like the issue you might have is that it might look something like this where it's twisted and easy to rectify you can simply just change the twist amount to something else but just be aware that this could be an issue and just to avoid that i prefer to bridge one and then go from there you also change stuff like the division as well which is pretty cool then we're going to look at append polygons pen polygons tool is one of these really old school tools you're going to see this from tutorials around 2001. select the object in object mode again alt d to deselect everything click on the object and then shift right mouse button and append to polygons tool and this allows you to simply bridge individual polygons so select this polygon and select this polygon and hit enter hit the g key to get up the modeling tool again and then we do the same thing here just click on one edge click on the other edge and hit enter and there we go now we have we have appended these up like so i don't use this a whole lot but once you do need it it's a really handy guy most often though i find would be to be replaced by the bridge tool or the fill holes tool then we have combine combine allows us to simply combine these two if these two are separate objects we want them to be one object shift right mouse button with both selected go down a little bit you have to an object mode for this and it combined now you can see these are now one object and you can also see you get more nodes here as well you get like two transform nodes this is just so this in there might be some use cases down the line for you with this but in all all practicality you should just delete history shift alt and d and now you can see these groups disappear this is more explained in the notes video we have which i just talked about then we have separate separate is a nice tool this simply separates out every single indiv every single model which is its own model like this you can see they're not connected anyway and they will just turn them into individual objects select the object shift right my shift right mouse button and then separate and there we go now these are two objects and you can see here as well there's a transform node so select both of them shift alt d or you can go to edit delete all by delete by type and history then we have a guy who is similar to separate but this is this is based on a polygon level if you separate in this nothing is going to happen because it's all one cohesive polygon or one polygon mesh but if you want to separate out from this cap here on top we can easily do that as well so we wanted this to be separate into one clean model you can simply select this piece shift right right shift right mouse button and extract faces and there we go now these are two separate pieces they're not duplicates of each other nothing like that they're just two simply two separate pieces like so then we have smooth smooth is not doing exactly what you assume it doesn't actually smooth the model it doesn't relax the model that's a job of the average verts tool what smooth is doing is rather subdividing the model if we shift right mouse button on the in object mode and click smooth you can see it now subdivides it if you hit this one if you g now you can subdivide more or you can simply just drag the slider on the subdivision right here so really really handy if you need to add more resolution to your models this will add four times the resolution each subdivision will add four times this used to be one polygon one polygon and now it's four then we have edit edge flow edit edit edge flow is fantastic you see we have this edge here and this doesn't really conform to the curvature this is supposed to be something like out here but it's not and if we use added edge flow on this it will preserve that curvature so we can shift right mouse button on it edit edge flip and now we can see that this is now great another example as well is if we use multi-cut and we add a loop just to this guy let's say it's right there and we just disable edge flow so we just add a loop right here and we just mess it up a little bit like we just go in and we just completely like screw this loop up this this is something you're going to see a lot when it comes to just your general modeling it might not be like a cartoony example like this but it might be a case which is similar where you have a you just have some resolution or you just have some an edge somewhere which doesn't behave everything else around it is nice this edge is nice this is nice but this one here is just misbehaving so select this guy select this loop by double clicking on it shift right mouse button and then we do edit edge flow and now you can see as by magic this now goes back to where it's supposed to be the thing is it doesn't it doesn't know where it was it doesn't even matter where it was it doesn't there was no memory here but what it's doing is it looks at this edge and looks at this edge and it puts it right in the middle so shift right mouse button on this and edit edge flow this is something i use a lot you can now just click on this edge hit the g key hit the g key and now you can just start to soften off the entire model this is something i keep doing when i'm doing i'm just modeling particular organics because you want nice evenly spaced models then we have the slide edges tool slide edges is phenomenal if you want to slide this we want to move this from over here to here but you don't want the shape to change what you can do is you can select the loop shift right mouse button and then we can do slide edge tool just hold down the middle mouse button remember to read the little text which pops up and now we can just slide it and you can see it preserves the shape this is more prominent if it's a more high-risk model what you can do as well there's a little bonus tip if you hold on the shift key now because you can also move this up and down on as normal so this is kind of like a way i'm often just scaling based on the normal so if you want to move all of this out like so on the normal i just use the slight edges tool and just hold down the shift key and then i'm just scaling it up and now everything will be scaled up based on its normal so that's a really nice little tip for you just hold down shift key with the slide edges tool and it will just scale up and down then we'll look at the bevel tool the bubble tool is something we can use a lot as well what it's doing in this most simple form is you have one edge selected shift right mouse button to the right and now we have a beveled edge if you check if you click bevel and what you can do you can now change the fragment of the fraction here you can see that by default it's going to go really fast but what i'm doing is hold down the control key and now it goes really soft like this so now you have increments you can also change the segments change the depth so this is a really useful tool we can also just undo this and then we can do this on the whole thing as well select all the edges shift right mouse button bevel edges and you can see what it's doing now if we just change the um the fraction of it now we by holding a control key now you can see that we can just bevel the entire thing here though we're getting n gone so we can do we can just change the segments from one to two and there we go depth so bevel tool is really useful then we have circularized circularized components that's one mouthful for you so here we have a square shape we have this guy and we want this to be round what we can do is we can select the polygons and then we can go to shift right mouse button again same menu as before and then we can go to circularize components and i can see that this turns into a circle we have a lot of options here as well we're not going to go too deep into these ones but you have for instance twist which is really useful and then we have then we have normal offset which is just going to offset like this radial offset which is going to offset like this but in general i stand to i tend to just use this for the default settings which is just circular circularized components and now you can see if we were to for instance now scale this in with the using the extrude tool hold down the shift key with the scale tool active now we can just extrude it down and then we can hold down shift key with the move tool scale it down or move it in and just move it in and now you can see if you subdivide this we have nice clean a nice clean hole which is circular in our model this is a crazy crazy useful tool if you are doing hard surface this kind of stuff is surprisingly tricky to do if you don't have a circularized tool because now you have to you have to put in an actual cylinder you have to snap it or you have to select these guys and you have to kind of scale it based on scale it based on just eyeballing it and it kind of works but it's much better to use the circularized tool then we have the connect tool next connect tool is great it allows us to simply connect things up if you have these two two selected and you hit the shift key and you hit shift right must button now we have connect and now you can see we can keep connecting things up if we hit the g key now and we can just keep connecting these things up really useful stuff this is something i this is also a tool i tend to keep on a hotkey as well another way of using the connect tool is if we select some some edges here and we want to have a loop going through this we can select them like so just simply by dragging on top of them shift right mouse button and then we can do connect connect components now it's going to be the edge connect and i can see that it's going to simply just connect to the right in the center then we have delete edges this one is a bit obvious but i just want to make sure you you get this one as well if you want to delete edges you have to use a specific tool for this you can either hit control and backspace on your keyboard i don't like this because i have to move my left hand well as i have to move my right hand so much i have to move it away from my mouse which is inconvenient so what you can do is you can hold down the shift right mouse button again same menu and they can do delete edge if you want to delete any more of them you simply double click it on edge hit the g key double click and hit the delete key if you want a little bonus tip for this as well if you select an edge and then we hold down control and right mouse button then you can see we have a lot more settings so we haven't talked about these before we have edge ring utilities which are stuff like edge ring collapse which can do this is selected into our edge ring collapses them or on the other side we have edge loop utilities and here we have edge loop and delete so what this does is selects the whole loop and then it deletes it so instead of double clicking and deleting like so we can simply select here control right mouse button edge loop utilities and edge loop and delete so this becomes quite quick after a while because as you can see it's a it's gesture based so right now what i'm doing is you don't actually see me selecting the menus you just have to gesture it so the gesture is down here and then up so now you just do this so it means you can work really fast same thing here as well if you want to add ring and collapse do the opposite you do it this way and then do this way and then this way so you can work really fast if you get used to working with marking menus like this and then we have the last tool which is insert edge loop tool sometimes you just need good old insert edge loop tool you can access this by clicking alt d first to go out of every any selection clicking on the object so we go into the object mode shift right mouse button and here we have the good old trusted insert edge loop tool the reason i don't use this a whole lot is because we have the multi-cut tool which has this as well but this has a few interesting settings if we double click on the tool then you can see we have some settings for it let's just dock these over like so and now we can just click we can just click it and then it's going to be allows you to drag out the loop so we can do for instance now we can do multiple edge loops and this is where i find this tool to be useful sometimes you just have to insert a lot of loops very quickly and this is where you can go i want 27 loops click it and there you go this is actually quite hard to do if you don't have this tool because otherwise you have to kind of go in and just with multi-cut just go in and add them and that's really painful so by using the insert edge look tool you can very easily do this so that's it for the modeling tools we have gone through a whole lot of them right now and if you ever need to have a refresher on this make sure to just check out this video again again i highly recommend you use marking menus for everything then you don't have to remember all sorts of hotkeys and you simply hold down shift right mouse button and that's your hotkey for anything you will start to model a lot faster this way and if you can't remember exactly where things are it's fine you will just get used to the gesture approach as you do it more and more also if you are interested in learning more about maya i highly recommend our exclusive introduction to my tutorial as well recover this what we just covered in this video and plus way way way more it's 73 videos with over 12 hours of content where at the end we show you how to make this helmet from scratch from the modeling to the texturing all procedural arnold to arnold arnold render settings to the extreme groom and just everything you need in order to get started with maya so i really hope you enjoyed this video and if you have any suggestions for other maya videos you want to see any modelling videos please please let us know down in the comments below and we'll be sure to get back to you on that

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 129,071

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, modeling tools maya, maya modeling, maya modelling tools, maya 3d modeling, 3D Modeling, 3D modeling tutorial, learn 3d modeling maya, how to 3d model maya

Id: zSr8i6yT5Ek

Length: 25min 24sec (1524 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021