Manually adding an outline to a model in Maya

so there's like a thousand videos about this that you can find but I'm gonna make another one because it's fine and it's just for you so we have this character it's bounded the rig it's animated just needs the outline to add the outline we're gonna use this technique where you reverse the face normals of a single sided mesh so let's do it let's select the mesh and let's duplicate it ctrl D let's rename it outline so now we have a second mesh it's not animated it's not bound to the Ray it's just dead and lifeless cool let's isolate this and now it needs collar let's let's add a new material for this to add the collar let's right-click assign favorite material and the surface shader the surface shader is not gonna interact with light on its own so it's always gonna be like a flat light you can add texture but for now we just need black black color so let's leave it at black let's rename this to outline so now if you were to go inside this mesh you would see that you can see inner faces and well as well as the outer faces this is because this mesh is double-sided for this outline to work we need this to be single sided so let's change this by selecting the mesh going to the second tab render stats and unchecking the double sided so now this is single sided if you go inside you can see that the interfaces are see-through or invisible that's how we want it so what we don't want is what we want actually it's just to reverse the face normals of this single sided mesh to do this we're gonna go to the modeling tab right here mesh display and reverse so now the outer faces are gonna be see-through while the inner faces are going to be visible great but now we need to expand the a little bit so that we can see a little bit of outline so the way I do this usually is by selecting all of the vertices and using the normal manipulator you can switch that one by holding down W and left-click then go into axis and normal and then you can grab this end handle and drag it left and right to grow it and shrink it let's just disable this so we can see and that looks good let's go back okay so now we have an outline whoo but this is not bound to the rig yet so it's not gonna follow let's find it let's select the outline shift select the rig and go to the rigging tab skin bind skin and the default settings should be enough so let's just apply and now it's gonna follow but you're gonna see that it's not gonna follow so well because the body mesh has different weights because I painted the the weights of in the body mesh so that it deforms better and the outline has like the default weights so we need them to have the same the exact same weights so we're not gonna like redo all the weights on the outline CH on the outline mesh which is gonna transfer them from the body to the outline so let's just make sure the the meshes match perfectly and let's select the body and then ctrl select the outline go to skin and copy skin weights this is gonna transfer the weights from one mesh to another and you can see now that's gonna follow without issues and beautifully you can see that's just gonna it's just not gonna have any issues with the weights and yeah it's gonna be fun so that's how you do the outline now if you were using like unity or Unreal Engine there are shaders in there that then that are gonna rent the outline automatically like you don't you won't need a second mesh to work as say as an outline because the shaders just gonna automatically render it for you but this is the easy and the cheap and compatible way of of creating outlines and you can do this in blender you can do this in cinema you can pretty much repeat these same steps a little bit different maybe but you can do it in whichever software you want 3d software that you want so that's about it and I hope this helps and thank you for watching

Channel: BudgetMelodies

Views: 25,372

Keywords: maya, outline, cartoon, 3D, modelling, normals, reverse, flip, shadeless, flatlit, tutorial

Id: awHQ7KNvI2w

Length: 5min 5sec (305 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2019