Introduction to Poly Modeling in Maya - 3D Tutorial

hey guys hanging in morton farm food normals here and in today's video we are going back to the past to teach you everything there is to know about polly modeling a face we'll be using maya for this tutorial but these are timeless concepts and you can use literally any software as long as it's made before like after like 1997 i think you know the most popular way to do any kind of organic modeling nowadays is starting off in c brush or blender do a sculpt and then re-topologize it but we believe that poly modeling still has its place in this world it teaches you a lot of important concepts when it actually comes to doing actual modeling i think the advantage the biggest advantage of actually trying to do a head like this is the practice there is there are so many skills to learn by doing this which you can take with you with in all sorts of organic modeling in the future so with that said let's get in to it now this video is going to have two parts the first one is where we talk a little bit about how to approach poly modelling and the second one is where we have a video where we actually go through this guy here start to finish now the first thing we have to talk about is you have to get reference that is probably one of the hardest things when it comes to pure poly modelling one of the differences between poly modeling and using something like pref and just using your eye for observing is that here we need accurate reference because we are now projecting stuff directly onto reference or we're using the reference directly so the first thing is you need to find some good references and in this video we've cheated a little bit since we're actually using a scan here what just a little bit which means that we know that these are going to match up perfectly these are also taken from zbrush with an orthographic view so there's no perspective distortion or anything that is pretty tricky to find because all your photos will be taken with different focal lengths from different angles different weather and lighting conditions so overall that is a bit of a challenge but regardless of that you still have to line them up here you can see that we have lined them up using the rulers so we can just hit ctrl r and we can drag out the rulers here then you can control an h to hide these now the reason you have to line this up is because you're really using these images in maya or are you modeling in so you have to make sure that the nose lines up with the nose the brow lines up and a few different key markers line up so spend a little bit time on this before you get started with modeling now obviously using orthographic images allows us to have the perfectly aligned references but typically you would see this with maybe you're doing modeling for a stylized character where it's been drawn from the front the side and the back or maybe if you're doing it yourself this this is where something like this is really handy to use so once we've done our once we've found our reference and we've aligned it we are using image planes now we have put our image planes into a group called image planes and we have made a layer and we have set this to not be touchable so you can select the model here but you cannot touch and select the background planes which makes this a lot easier so make sure you do that make sure you have image planes which you can't move because if you accidentally move an image plane then you are in trouble so the second thing i want to quickly talk about is the the tweak tool in mind this is a tool a lot of people don't know exist so if we go to the front view now you see the way we are doing a lot of this is by first selecting invert and then moving it around so it fits the image plane behind but this is time consuming because first you have to click and then you have to move now you could enable a mode called tweak mode which you can do simply hold on utility and now you simply just click and drag and that makes it significantly easier now what you have to be aware of is that this does it in orthoview like this purely moves it up and down on in two axis so you can't really use this in 3d view and expect to have a good result this is more to line stuff up perfect to your reference images but i mean half the clicks you know it's that's a lot of clicks saved a lot of click save and a lot of rsi save for you as well the second thing we want to talk about is really that once you get started with doing the actual polar modeling you are doing the loops at the same time as you're doing the shape that's one of the advantages of sculpting retuple and that is the fact that you can first focus on shape and then you can focus on the topology but now you're doing both at the same time so while you are doing the loops like you know you have the loops around the uh the mesolabial the eyes and all that while you're doing that i recommend that you aren't too concerned about the topology because then you're going to be locked into a really hard workflow for instance what you're going to be seeing a lot is that we have cases like this where we have just n guns where we have loops we're lining up and then we will just fill in with a giant end gun and triangles and everything and this is simply to resolve this shape then once you have some topology here once you actually have an end gone then you can go in with something like the multicore tool and you can start to connect this up i find that this is actually one of the best tips i have when it comes to to poly modeling is don't be too concerned about the actual topology in the beginning because you can always go in and delete your loops and just redraw the loops like this i know a lot of beginners have issues resolving the shapes especially if you have big open holes a question that i've often gotten is how do i actually you know redirect my topology and how do i actually fix my topology and unfortunately the i guess easy answer to that is just a lot of practice like after a lot of practice you start getting more comfortable with where you can redirect loops how you can terminate a triangle and how you can convert you know a try or an n gone into a quad yeah that's something you will become comfortable with just by doing a lot more but here you can see now i was able to delete it and and patch it up again quite quite quickly so if you do have to just delete whole sections of your model just do that and just rebuild it the next step we have before we get started is that you should first work really low poly this is not the starting topology whatsoever this is after we've done a pretty decent level and then we're adding loops to it what i recommend is you keep this as low poly as you possibly can this makes it much easier to actually direct the edge flow as well as shaping the face up as well it's very hard if you're like this density here to actually change the loops around and changing the shape just because of the density of the model and then i recommend that when you're building out your loops try to think about how stuff connects up let's say you have some you have some loops for the lips here and then you're you're blocking in the loops for the remaining of the face like this try to keep in mind how many edges there are on this side and how many there are on this side because then at the end you can simply bridge these polygons together this becomes pretty important if you're dealing with like the eye here for instance now obviously these are bridgeable but if you do one loop around here now you can select this you can select this and then you can bridge this up and then it's simply going to work it just makes connecting stuff up much much easier so those are really our tips before we actually get started with polymodeling again let me just reiterate that i highly recommend that you work as low poly as humanly possible when you're blocking things in and that you focus more on the actual shape of the model than that you do on highly specific topology also one little bonus tip i suppose is find some reference find some reference for the actual topology not just for the shape it's hard to get this kind of topology down if you are purely free styling it so find some good references for topology and try to follow those guides as closely as you can so with all that said let's jump into the video so we're now starting out in maya where we have our reference lined up and we will be using the create polygon tool where we can now quickly just block out a polygon for the different shapes we'll be doing this first for the eye and then we'll do this for the mouth this is obviously a crazy old-school way of doing it but it works pretty well you could also use a different primitives as well like you can use a cylinder and shape that up or you can use a cube whatever you do it doesn't really matter ultimately what's important is that you get some main polygons down and you're lining them up to your reference i think regardless of technologies and where we are in the modeling world i think it's a good skill to have i can allude to earlier as well when you do this type of modeling you get very comfortable with the different modeling tools in the different you know whatever software package you're using for example maya here you just get really comfortable with the modeling tool kit and you get faster at using that for everything else you do yeah when it comes to doing general modeling now like even if even when you're sculpting there's also a lot of re-topology work involved in that and i feel very comfortable with um actual retopology now one of the reasons is because of this when you're read apologizing for instance you can't in most cases you can't just go in and just read apologize you actually have to go in and um and cut a lot of things just because it's not probably not going to work the first time and instead of having to then like snap it snap the retop mesh to the background again and basically redo the whole area you can go in and just cut in a few loops and you can drastically simplify your approach i think it's also important for people to understand that this is a important part of any character modeler's job you know you don't just sit and see brush all day long and sculpt characters the majority of your work is actually outside of cbrush it's a lot of technical work it's a lot of tweaking shapes and doing topology and making a bass mesh fit your character yeah as a character artist you really have a solid blend between like the actual cool part which is obviously c brush and all that and between the more technical parts of it which could be you have to retrofit the polish of one character to another or you need another loop in one area or i had to do this for a movie many years ago where i had to like attach some wings from one character to another and there was a pure topology job very important to do but if if you're being asked to connect up topology from one character to another and you're like yeah cool let me just take it into c brush and dynamesh it up and then i'll take it into topogun to return it like you're already like half a day behind it because you could just bridge it in in maya directly which is what i was doing it didn't take a lot of time at all so now we're trying to get the topology which we blocked out from the front view and getting this into the into into actual um space because you can't just do everything in the in the orthographic views you can see here we have a we have a split viewport where we have two ortho views on the on the right and then we have a 3d view on the left it's really important to use all of these views if you you can have a case where your ortho views are matching perfectly and the model looks like crap because the shapes aren't good and you can have a case where the model looks awesome but it doesn't actually match the reference that well you just need both of them you need good solid shapes and then it also needs to match the reference the same thing really applies if you're sculpting you know i've seen this time and time again where people are sculpting from reference they have a side view or front view up and they're able to match that pretty well then as soon as you start looking at it in actual 3d it's completely flat like you can have the front view here you can have that be spot-on it's perfect topology wise but as soon as you start going into 3d space it just doesn't work anymore yeah what you're describing here would work really well if the camera is only ever from the front yeah exactly deformation but you're you're not making a character from the front or side you're making a real three-dimensional character you can see how simple the topology is here again alluded to in the beginning this is this is the way forward it's the same thing we've been teaching you when it comes to retopology for example this is the same approach right now we're just re-topologizing in mid-air you know there's nothing to snap to but this is essentially re-topologizing just off of a reference and that's why that's why the sculpting and retopology workflow is so awesome because what we're doing now is actually quite hard the topology here isn't particularly hard like if you had if you had a scam in the background it wouldn't be that hard to actually do this because then you you focus on one thing at a time the reason this is tricky is because you were actually shaping a realistic character and for that you just need to understand the shapes of the character and that's that's legitimately hard to do that's why you also you can't rely on the orthographic views for like vertex and edge placement in the end like when you're starting out yes you know you need to rely on those to get it to match but once we get further into the video you'll start to see the orthographic views the topology looks very skewed like vertices might even look like they're on top of each other because there's overlaps especially with the nasolabial fold and and the lips so that's something to keep in mind when you're re-topologizing or modeling this way and for the love of everything that's holy do not work in the smooth mode when you hit the three key on the keyboard work in polygon mode like we're doing here if you try to work in the subdivision servers mode then you are in for nasa surprise whenever you unsub divide your model it's a great sanity checker to enable once in a while you know enable it look at it and then disable it again yeah you will do irreparable harm to humanity and your own model if you if you work with subdivisions enabled especially if you work in a production environment right like if you're just doing something for yourself you're not doing uvs you're not doing texturing i could maybe forgive you if you did that you know that would be like okay fine that model is never going to see the light of day it's never going to touch anything else okay sure but if you need to hand this off to someone else or it's going further down the pipeline even within your own little freelance pipeline don't model that way or maybe worse for your own portfolio yeah you can tell yeah and especially if you're going in as a modeler they will want to see your wireframes they don't want to see them subdivided necessarily you know they want to make sure that you're able to do it cleanly and have the supporting loops in there that are necessary so we're starting to connect some loops up but don't connect stuff up before and like until it actually works in terms of the shapes because then you're just creating more problems more topology just means more problems for you to fix later on and that's why we were just recommending keeping as low poly as humanly possible for as long as possible like you saw right in the beginning of this video the model we have there the final model is is pretty dense and it just means it it's very hard to actually change something without deleting a significant amount of loops but that's also where you'll start to transition you know right now it's more individual edges and vertices that are being tweaked towards the end of that then you start going in you know with soft select or a sculpt move brush type of thing and then start moving large parts and you can also see now that how deliberate we are at actually keeping the loops having the same amount of of verts so for instance the brow we're doing now is gonna bridge pretty well with the eyes it's not perfect yet but i'm highly cognizant off of that whenever i am at adding anything and only add loops when whenever you need to like don't just add loops because you're trying to i don't know bridge something or whatever just add loops when you need more more polygons do you need to describe the surface more if the amount amount of polygons you have currently supports the shape you want awesome go for that here you can also see what we talked about with the whole like just delete the thing in this case we aren't filling it in but we're just deleting it and we're redoing it just because sometimes it's just much easier to delete something and redo it than it is to to try to fix it my approach when it comes to fixing topology or redirecting topology is i don't really have any like fancy techniques i delete the crap what i have yeah build it you have all these guides online which teaches you how to how to redirect loops and all that and i'm sure these are very nice in theory practically i i just can't keep that in my in my head it's just practically much easier to just delete what's there and then fix it up the problem is also once you start doing real modeling re-topology whatever it might be you're not doing it on a flat plane like doing things on a flat plane that's where you have like you have an amazing overview and it's really easy to see where loops can go but if you're working on a flat plane then you don't need need nice topology anyway um most of the time it can just be kind of shoddy yeah that's something that like that's like a good discussion uh when it comes to to what is good topology because now we're we're making like quotation marks here like universal good topology like we're making the loops around the eyes and all that i mean obviously there's a much bigger discussion what is good topology but like in in short good apologies to pology that that gets the job done if you are making this kind of character and it needs to deform well then this to bold here is great if it just is going to be a still render it's not really a huge concern exactly what loops are then the shape is important i think i tend to think of topology as this functional topology not necessarily how pretty does it look yeah yeah don't be obsessed about the vanity of it like maybe do that if you're making a show reel or something but how pretty the lines are matters very little and you can see as well like we had some areas which were they they were just big open gaps so what did we do well we just filled them in just capped those um those areas and uh now we can just use the multicut tool to connect them up here's this is also a thing for when people have been talking about you know c modeler in zebra is replacing whatever you can do in a traditional 3d software doing this type of modeling is actually impossible because of our n-gons here um you can't work with this in in zebra so you it's a lot harder to redirect loops because you have to redirect it through something that's a triangle um whereas this gives us a lot more freedom you we have we have polygons here with maybe eight ten vertices connected to it but it doesn't really matter yeah that that's a a discussion right are n guns good or bad well they're just they're just enguns they are what they are n-gons are simply polygons with more than uh four vertices and for final topology here obviously that's not going to be great because you're not really controlling the topology but as a temporary tool for for filling things in there they're fantastic but yeah you really want to have end goals in your final thing and particularly if you want taking a c brush like zebras will straight up convert it to a triangle so uh don't even don't even try to have it and then your vertice vertex order changes every time and it's it's just bad it's a complete mess and here you can see as well like i'm just cutting in like with quite a few cuts in there because now i'm kind of trying to bridge the the lips and the parts around it and going in on an end gun and just going crazy with multicut is it's a really good way of doing it very uncomfortable when you're first getting started though just because it's it's very out of your comfort zone because you're you're actually going in and you're just brute forcing in the loops you want but uh it it becomes quite comfortable after this a little bit that's also where going low risk really helps because it's a lot easier to readjust whatever else is going on in your topology and the end gone compared to if you have something super high res you know making changes at this stage is still fairly still fairly trivial yeah and while making changes at the end or rather what you saw in the beginning the final result it's very tricky it's the same thing if you're doing retopology like more than just mention here we this is essentially read topology just without any scans or or anything in the background supporting you it's like read topology on hard mode yeah and and for people who who are more fresh to cg and they didn't know a world without zebra shadowy topology this is how you used to make characters yeah look for slow and painful very slow and playful if you look at tutorials for 2007 or maybe 2010 on how to do character modeling they're all going in like you know we're starting off with like a box and then we're cutting in the box or you had you had like um the whole discussion is box modeling or plane modeling better and it's like who cares today that's not really a discussion even i can't remember gollum he was made it was just poly model wasn't he yeah like the first version was i think they build him and clean scanned him yeah and then some did some stuff on top but i mean yeah every single every single character from back then was poly modeled that's also why they tend to not look as good as today because it is just harder to solve two problems at once you know yeah you really shouldn't underestimate how hard it is to actually solve shape and topology at the same time and now you can see that actually going through and just um softening off a little bit but um still takes quite some time just even to get to a level the best tool in the world for for softing stuff up here is edit edge flow it's um it's called something similar in in most sort of software it's where you're you're essentially averaging out the the edge the edge loop based on the edge loops around it it's it's a completely magical tool but just makes you everything better it was a fairly late addition to maya actually and i remember when it came it was it actually changed the way i i did modeling yeah it meant that you can be much sloppier yeah before you had to be so precise that was the case when i was uh re-apologizing in moto it didn't have um didn't have any uh like soften tools or anything like this so i had to place down every single loop exactly where it had to be and i mean hell is what you had to do in maya 10 years ago as well when you when this is this was the popular approach to it my modeling line was very different it was very old-school so uh now we we have the the luxury of nice added edge flow tools and the sculpting tools and all that within maya but uh boy we did not have that before and it's not like for me at least this isn't like a thing of oh you should do the shitty thing that we used to do because that'll teach you whatever no no it just happens to be that poly modeling can still be relevant because it teaches you a lot about the modeling tools you know if you're in a production you'll never do this you know just be aware that's that's not going to happen yeah the way the way you do it in production is you already have a basement which you can refine for like 10 years and then you use something like wrap or crap to just conform into a scan or a zebra sculpt or something like that but i still do recommend that if you are if you are serious about doing characters that you spend like i don't know a day or two just sitting down and trying to do something like this don't just don't do ears ears should never be done bottle modeling that is that is the worst thing you can ever do that's just that's pretty hardcore maybe you should do ears that's the perfect exercise the way people used to the ears uh was that they didn't do them and they stole it from something else and you can almost see the topology around old school models around the ears is always super wonky because they would never match the density was always messy a different ear either that or put hair or a hat to cover it or something it's like drawing feet no one wanted to do it and now we're actually getting into a slightly more modern version of uh of the poly modeling this is when the the shape is in an okay spot it's not perfect but it's in an okay spot and then we're going over with the the sculpting tools where we can use the grab brush and we can use relax and smooth just to just soften off a lot just to average out a lot without really destroying the shape i think that's one of the biggest advantages to more modern modeling tools is being able to actually smooth things out with sculpting like tools makes it so much easier so if you're trying to do this kind of polar modeling and you're having a hard time with it and you're serious about being characterized maybe maybe try try one more it's it's it's genuinely a skill that will help you improve as a character artist just don't build your whole don't build your portfolio around it or something it is like you're doing push-ups you're not going to show your push-ups to somebody but it is it does enhance your skills as a character artist one of the ways i've been learning polymer modelling is by teaching character modeling like not even teaching polymon but but just teaching a general uh character modeling and then having the students have a really hard time with um retopology and ending up just having to delete big parts of their model and just redoing it with polymodeling just because even though they're supposed to only retopologize they are they're still struggling with that and we just have to go in delete areas go in with multicut and just fix those by hand my approach was starting cg 15 years ago where the tools didn't exist and just you know cry myself to sleep every night yeah don't do cg 15 years no yeah cd used to be just really terrible it was just hard it's really i mean it's still hard i guess it i feel like it's actually become harder because the competition is better you know so so being able to make something that looks truly fantastic now you have to make something that looks indistinguishable from real life if you're doing you know real characters for example yeah i heard like like kind of the way to get a job in the 90s in vfx was do you have a pulse even if you didn't you know you still had a chance but today you're talking about you while it's easier to get to a high a high level result it also means now everyone can get to higher level result and you have to be that much better now you can see we're not really doing that much in the orthoviews anymore now it's more looking in the um in the three-quarter view in the actual perspective view we're still lining up a few things just to get more of the lightness going but this is really when you want to to properly get stuff into the 3d viewport we go in with the move brush and we don't really use any other brushes for it like we don't use the sculpt brush or anything we use the move brush and just move the polish around and then i'm trying to figure out where to place that star where do you place the pole it's always that's always the question around the mouth right you know where where do you want it i was using the edge uh the edge slide tool as well which is really handy it also has an added bonus to it as well i think if you hold on the shift key and the edge slide tool then you can push it in and out on the normal so i'm using that on this label fold here just to uh just give it a bit more volume we can see here the reason we're talking about how like you can do this literally in the software made of 1997 is that the tools here are very simple the the only new tools we're really using would be like edit edge flow and the scrolling tools but you could honestly do that with soft selection as well that wouldn't really change a whole lot it would just make it a bit faster but fundamentally you could do this in every single tool when i was preparing for this video i was actually doing this in blender i ended up doing it in maya obviously now but blender is just as good for this are you even arguably even better because it's a bit more immediate when it comes to polymodeling and now just still trying to figure out where to place that and this is where you're just trying out a few things you don't really necessarily know it uh just by heart like this is not like poly modeling it's not a skill i just or the perfect topologies on a skill i just intuitively possess this is where i i have some some nice reference on my second monitor and i'm looking at it and i'm trying out a few different things also because perfect topology is an illusion you know it changes from character to character not everyone not every character will have the star placed there maybe they'll have it underneath the chin or maybe in the cheek somewhere like it just again like we talked about it's just about the functionality of the topology what do you want want it to do really yeah as as a character artist if you if you're building your portfolio while of course it's important to have clean looking topology like don't obsess over the specifics of it obsess over it if it's going to be rigged and you actually have a good face trigger who's going to rigging and it's very particular about where they want their topology then you can do it but if what you're doing is purely visually in the end just focus way more on the final result meaning the sculpt and the textures and the fine details and pores and all that and focus way less on quote-unquote perfect apology yeah one misplaced star is is not going to make it or or break it no i don't think like i if you're going for character modeling position today i don't really think you would in the interview or in the review process really be that concerned about topology at all to be honest i've never been asking interview about my topology really they're just going like yeah this looks fine it's not like you have a topology test it's like a driver's test i do remember that in school though when we had one test at one time where we had to draw out topology on top of an image yeah that was i had a severe pneumonia then and i basically have no memories of that good times good times and now we're just adding loops adding loops and uh going over it with um added edge flow and softening things out and just adding a few loops here and there density i'm going for now is it's a pretty like that's like a medium high density it's to the point that you can you can get a lot of shape into the model you can get a lot of good lightness with this density but also at the same time it's not that dense now we're just looking at end guns it's always one little sneaky end gun which has been able to disappear so triangles i'm not too concerned about simple because they don't actually cause any technical issues while end guns in the other hand if you were trying to bring this into zbrush which you are you're let's face it you're not going to be going full old school there's no point in that then seabirds will not accept and guns and now we're just speeding up the video because we are good it's going through and just i have this set to a hotkey uh where i have an edge flow on alt a i believe it is and then you just go in and you just click your hotkey constantly and then you can really quickly soften off your model you can see how much edit edge flow gives you for free like especially there with the nostril or the eyes there it actually follows the curvature so just you know if you have 10 edges you don't have to go in between each of those 10 edges and line them up just click once and it sorts it for you and this is also a good argument for doing a clean result early on doing putting on clean loops because then it becomes so much easier to add future loops as well so we're getting to the end here now and this is where we're just going through it and just just making sure the loops are getting nice and clean and i'm just going back and forth over the same loops just to soften off then we'll um we'll mirror it over and then we'll do a little bit of like shape refinement off screen where we're just using the scope brushes just to make this a little bit cleaner and a bit more similar to the to the actual background but we really aren't now after mirroring now we really aren't changing the topology at this point it's it's uh we're talking about just changing the shape of it and once you have a generic mesh like this as well you can easily reuse this for all sorts of different cases like now you can you can turn take this to the c where should you sculpt on this so yeah now we have our final shape or final mesh and now we have our final shape and you can see it changes a fair bit between these two but it's purely a shape change which also just shows how much you can actually do with this shape shape but yeah i hope you liked our 1990s keratin modeling tutorial and make sure to leave a comment below if you liked it or if you want to see any more of these kind of videos so thank you so much for watching thank you guys you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 19,472

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, learning 3d, cube brush, cgi, b3d, maya modeling, maya tutorial

Id: gT5W4GNtXF0

Length: 34min 27sec (2067 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021