How to Use the Wedge Tool in Maya - Part 1

hey this is Malcolm 341 in this video we're gonna look at how to use the wedge tool the wedge tool is super powerful but it's also kind of tricky to use so let's get into it okay so let's look at the most basic use of the wedge tool and what it does like I said it is super handy and can speed up a lot of your workflow so I just have a basic cube here and basically what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click and then go to multi select and in multi select I can select edges faces verts all at the same time so what you want to do is you want to select a face and then you also want to select an edge by holding shift and then clicking the edge so I have a face in an edge selected and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down shift and hold down right click to get the marking menu to appear and I'm just gonna enter the wedge tool and boom just like that so you click it and it takes the face and extrudes it and wedges it down to the bottom edge that you had selected in an arc like this and then you can just tweak the angle if you want to have multiple divisions however many that you like and of course that works on any edge so I'm just gonna hit undo here and then go again here holding down right click going to multi and same face but this time I'll choose this edge instead and then wedge and same thing you can adjust the divisions and it wedges it in whatever direction that you want to get to the wedge tool from the default menu it is under edit mesh and then just go down to wedge right there so we've wedged our faces there but the thing that's kind of lame about this is you often don't want it to pinch here in a single point that's like if you were building an air duct right they've got these kind of right angle curved corners but an air duct doesn't paint you like one edge there so for example I'm just going to extrude this this face here and so like if I was building an air vent well that kind of sucks I actually want a little bit of curve in there too right I don't want like just a hard right angle edge there it's not realistic so to do that let me just undo this crap that I just sit here okay so we're back to a cube and what I'll do to do that is all model myself a little 3d jig and what I mean by that is I'm going to model a cylinder here and I'm going to use it to actually determine where the wedge goes so the really cool thing about this tool is that you can select a face on one object and an edge on a secondary object so let me just T there and and 16 in there okay so now I need so I want to go from this face and then I want to kind of go extrude it down like that so we need to move the cylinder into the right spot so let me just actually I should have just gone in here and set this to one just so we can see what's happening more easily with the jig so I'm just going to Center the pivot and then I'm gonna snap it up here and then I'm gonna snap constraint snap that to this plane and then I'm gonna snap it there so now we have our actual like little jig so you know we can scale it from this point and we can assume if we're gonna go from that edge to that face that it's going to follow this curve trajectory so I believe we will just need to have these guys and snap them so the edges are the same size as the box and let's try it out so select both the box and the jig that we made and then again hold down right click and select multi and then grab the face and then grab the edge and then do the wedge and go minus 90 this time and what the what is going on here this is not looking good this is not what I wanted it's doing some wacky here instead of wrapping around to that edge and that is because the wedge tool doesn't work on like curvy surfaces or whatever but there's a workaround luckily so we'll show you how to deal with this so I'm just going to hit undo to get rid of that don't need that stuff don't need that selected be their lips go so basically we want it to follow this so we know this is the flat plane that we want to get down to but like a box going to a curvy shape doesn't work with the wedge tool so we've used this to determine the circumference basically of where we want the curve to go so what you can do now is you can actually just select the face on the box and extrude it down and snap it to that same plane that we care about and then from there we can go multi-faced edge in there and then wedge and then again I don't know why it's going in reverse but doesn't matter you can just go - and then boom we've got our perfect wedge see it actually lines up perfectly with the cylinder so first you use the cylinder to determine how big you want the curvature to be basically a 3d jig you kind of trace it out and then you can use this secondary box based on the jig to get a perfect wedge that you want there you go change the divisions and then let's look at another super time-saving one which is like wedging a pipe right because you might have to put like a right angle elbow in a pipe that you're modeling maybe for a plumbing pipe or something like that so let me just get the pivot of this guy so same thing we're gonna use this as the jig we're going to snap it to here and then we're actually let's just Center this up I'm just going to quickly go into the multi cut tool and then ctrl + middle mouse click to add Loup right in the center and snap that over and you might think that this would work because it's a cylinder but that's not actually lined up they do there there we go now you might think that this will actually work because it's a cylinder to the cylinder so let's just try that out go here right-click multi whoops what's going on here Multi face and let's go that and then let's wedge and same thing it's all wonky and it didn't work for whatever reason so it's actually the same trick on a curved shape as well let's just undo that so you use this to determine the circumference our little 3d jig here and let's say I want to go with like a tighter one or like maybe a wider one here we'll just do them both just for fun so all you're really using this for is to determine the number of the kind of the size of the curvature that you want to extrude the pipe to so what you need to do here is the same thing you need to select these faces here and then do an extrude down snap that guy to there go back into here I'm just gonna go into this and then multi-faced on its same object and then I don't know why it won't get that edge there we go edge edge and then do a wedge and boom there you go you've got your perfect cylindrical pipe extruded exactly on the number of segments of this guy here and you can always go and make it smoother if you want you so then let's just hit undo and then if we wanted to change the size of this guy like maybe I didn't want it to go that far I just wanted like a really tight like corner so you scale this guy down because in the side view here this is that still snapped yeah it is so in the side view here just going to go into wireframe and is it snap up you know it snapped up we're using this guy it's kind of weird doesn't look like it snapped up there we're using this guy to determine like how big that this is going to extrude along the edge so if we want it to be smaller just scale this guy small really tight one there and then again we'll adjust the bottom plane of this to be the bottom plane of that what's the center of that sorry not the bottom plane and then again quickly go into here and then let's go multi-select and then grab these two edges here and then shift right click hold and then go which and then so same thing see we can use this circle that we made here as a 3d jig to determine where the wedge is actually gonna happen so super powerful we could even do something crazy like this to could grab this guy here and just move him over here hold down see and middlemost drag - whoops you snap that along the curve and just drag it down there and let's just move the pivot here and constrain snap that to that edge and that edge and let's try this out as well so again grab these faces here I'm just going to hold down shift and drag out to extrude and then I'm just gonna hold down V and drag along red to constrain snap and same thing as before and for the multi selection grab these edges whoops grab it and then go in wedge it and boom got a perfect wedge exactly what you were expecting to happen and then I'm just gonna isolate selection here and then you just have to go and clean up these little other like jigs that you've made and it's pretty easy to do there's multiple ways that you can do that I'm just going to grab those guys and to expand my selection and just delete them and then I'm just gonna select that edge and hold shift right click and go to the fill hole and then you could use Harald seiz the multi-cut tool to get these you could also use the connection tool there and then you know just clean that up however you want to do it the wedge tool is super handy when I started using my in the beginning this tool did not exist and you had the hand model all that and it was awful try hand modeling this it's so painful like you have to it's just it's it's terrible like there's no way I would ever want a hand model this it's it's disgusting so just wedge it and enjoy your day there's another trick that you can do if you don't want to do the cleanup afterwards on your initial model you can actually just build the jig as a separate model that little extrusion that we were doing and snap it into place and like I said it works on multiple objects so you can go face and edge and wedge -90 and then when you're done this object just goes away so you can actually just go and reuse it again on another part of it if you like this video want to see more game art tips and tricks please click the subscribe button as usual any links will be in the description if you've got any questions post them in the comments area thanks for watching everybody have a magnificent day

Channel: malcolm341

Views: 64,700

Keywords: Maya, autodesk, time, saving, tricks, secret, secrets, tips, 3d modeling, 3d modelling, easy, fast, tutorial, workflow, pipeline, best, mel, script, malcolm341, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, video, quick, free, beginner, learning, how, to, learn, polygon, polygons, hotkey, hot, key, use, save, wedge, tool, shapes, extrusions

Id: 59lSHM8aIBA

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 18 2018