Maya 2016 Hard Surface Modeling Part 1

okay so what we're going to be doing today is we're going to be making some hard surface modeling as a little tutorial and what I want to explain to you guys is how to build all of these individual shapes that we have over here so it's going to be a few things that you're going to have to work through but importantly I don't want you guys to be intimidated by what you see on screen over here because all of these shapes I'm pressing one on my Maya keyboard over here are actually very simple Ligon or shapes that have just been subdivided in a specifically interesting way this smooth mode that Maya has allows me to not have these harsh 90-degree angles over here and that's really what's going to help my modeling look a little bit more realistic so by pressing three on the keyboard or one we can reveal the unsmooth version of a model and reveal here the smooth version by pressing three and you'll see that when I smooth an object out what happens is that it creates these very nice highlights around the edges over here because these edges are slightly curved very much like they would be in reality and if we had something here that's at ninety degrees you're going to notice that there's not really many objects in the world that have that specific shape so smoothing things out is what's going to allow me to go through all of these different shapes over here and you'll see that even though they're very blocky to start off with we can create curves and areas that have hard corners and areas that have smooth curves inside of them as well and we'll go through and we'll learn how to cut objects which are rectangular in shape and objects that are round in shape into different pieces and you'll see that if you manage to pick up this hard surface modeling technique it really opens you up to be able to take any a 3d model and create the shapes that you want to make importantly all of these starting shapes that I'm giving you we're going to turn this plane into this over here I always want you to think that these little planes are like components to your models they're just pieces that could be of bigger things so what I'm going to do is just go ahead and show you guys how to make all of this now the reason why I've made this video is because it's a resource that a guy called grant Warwick has a video tutorial called Haase service essentials and it's a great tutorial but I found a lot of my students they find that they can't follow it especially as beginners because that tutorial is actually made in 3ds max so really what I wanted to do is just make a my version of pretty much the same tutorial but show you what tools we have in Maya to actually make this you know quickly and effectively and I'd recommend also for people to check grants tutorials out as well and I'll leave some links to them on the YouTube page below as well so that you guys can chase up on some things so first of all if we have any simple 3d plane we're always going to want to start blocking out the rough shapes and that's something I'm going to do right the way through this whole thing how can I do that well there's many different tools but I'm going to go into edge mode over here for a second and I'm going to start using today this new connect tool over here and the connect tool inside of the modeling tools if you don't have your modeling tools it's this little button that's up here at the top allows me to create a segment perpendicular to the line that I have selected there I just tap enter and then that means that it will create a new edge very much like the insert edgeloop tool' would do that as well if I come over here and I select a single edge and then I double click on an edge to make a ring selection over there and I'll just hide my grid so that you guys can see that a little bit better again I could go through and I could make a selection just by clicking and dragging as long as I select all of the correct edges like that turn on my modeling tools and I will over here to the connect tool and you'll see that it will draw a perpendicular line to the ring selection that I've made there I press ENTER to confirm it and I can switch to face mode select that face over there and do a simple extrude upwards by clicking on the extrude tool and just pushing on the blue arrow over here and just lift it up like that there we go okay so this is very much what I mean by blocking things out rather than being too concerned about smoothing things from the start what I want to do is just make the basic shape that I want to do in this low poly block because this and this they resemble one of quite closely now the next thing that I want to do is if I tap 3 you'll see that by default Maya smooths everything out in this kind of like blobby type of way and what we need to do is add some more subdivisions into these into this block to make it actually have these nice rounded edges like this the way we can do this is we can do it many different ways we can use the connect tool but we can also use the insert edgeloop which I go into my mesh tools and I'll just click here so you can see the similarity between the pc version of maya and the mac version of maya here you'll see that there's this little tool which is called insert edgeloop and if I click on insert edgeloop it will allow me to click and drag a new loop wherever I want that to go and I know that if I put two edges one here and another one to this side over here now if I press 3 you'll see that that blob eNOS goes away and I start getting this weird cylindrical look over there which is not what many people would associate would happen if you just add more subdivisions into an object again if I press ctrl-z and we undo these you'll see that I'll go back to my blobby type view and if I tap 2 on my keyboard as I've done now you'll see that this one is solid 2 is in between where you can see the cage and this smooth version and 3 is just the pure smooth version of the object so if I click on an and I put it close to another edge I'm going to start defining one part of that object which again if I go into something like my move tool and I select that loop and I move it up and down you'll see that what happens is as I move this towards the top edge the top of this blob gets sharper if I move it to the bottom it's going to get rounder at the top we're going to start adding an edge down here to the bottom so by subdividing what I'm doing is I'm controlling the shape of a curve but I currently don't need curves right now I'm just going to go into insert edge loop tool click up here and you're going to see that two edges like this I'm going to produce this cylindrical effect like that again so again if I look at it in unsmooth mode you'll see that it actually looks very different but when I smooth it out it looks in a very very very very different weight like this now I can apply it this type of thinking to the whole object and what I'm going to do is go over and go to edge selection mode and I'm going to use a ring selection so I'm going to select a ring all the way across the top face of this over here and now instead of using the insert edge loop tool I'm going to show you a different tool which is called the connect tool over here which we've seen for but using the connect tool I can also create a different number of segments so I can type in two with my keyboard or I can middle mouse button drag to create more or less subdivisions as I wish and what I want to do is create two subdivisions like this and then I'm going to use this pinch tool over here and the middle mouse button and drag will allow me to move these edges further apart again for effect I'm going to go over here and go into this in-between mode over there and you'll see that what will happen is that as I use the pinch tool and I leave this over here and press Enter what's going to happen is boom it's going to stay creating the edges of my rectangle like this so again what I'm doing again shaded mode on shaded mode it's going to scale that out a little bit further like that again what I'm doing is this time I'm going to make a ring selection this way so I'm going to select those two by clicking and shift double clicking like that to create a ring selection and I'm going to come in over here I'm going to hit connect again and again connect should actually save the previous setting that I was doing over there so now what I'm doing is I'm adding this little pattern over here of three edges one next to one another here three edges one next one over there there's three edges across the side as well there I'm going to press ENTER and then I'm going to smooth that out and you can start seeing that I have this beautiful type of shaded smooth edge corner there so again I'm just taking this low poly object and I'm subdividing it so that when it's smooth it has these nice rounded corners you can see down here that this isn't very sharp you can see that the base of this cube is actually looking fairly curved so what we want to do is add another subdivision there and I'm going to keep using the connect tool but this area over here I'm going to show you why it's probably better to use the insert edge loop tool in a second so again I could do the same thing as we did before just shift and click make a ring do a connect leave that like that and then shift and double click this way press Enter and sometimes you have to press ENTER to confirm that with another connect there we go and you'll see that now when I smooth that out the corner here looks a little bit sharper if it's not sharp enough double click to make a loop selection and if we push this towards the actual edge like this you'll see that that curve will get shorter like that and again if I grab this one over here double clicked on it use the arrow tool I can sharpen up that corner there just a little bit more now the reason why maybe would have done this with the insert edge loop tool instead of the connect tool is because there's something that I don't need here and this is the tricky part because every time you guys make a 3d shape you should always be thinking about a certain level of cleanup and the cleanup is this very specific thing here I look at the smooth version of the object and this edge that my connect tool added for me because I was making two connections every single time if I come over here and I look at this edge here I'm just going to delete it on my keyboard so I'm going to press ctrl backspace and it's gone and the important thing is you notice that the shape of the object does not change if the shape of the object doesn't change it means that that edge there was completely unnecessary so sometimes it's worthwhile going through your model and again this one that's here on this edge by itself when I smooth it out I'm going to press ctrl backspace again I delete it it didn't change the shape my object this is still a plane if you can get rid of edges that you don't need get rid of them all the time that takes a little bit of experience for example if I grab this edge over here and I double click that and then I press ctrl backspace you notice how this changed now that change can be very subtle sometimes but if it changes even just a little bit there's probably something that means that that edge is important to define this shape now hard surface modeling you can make many different mistakes but it's important for you guys always to be very comfortable with your selection tools and also be very comfortable with using some of the other tools that we have over here so what we're going to do next is I'm going to go back into object mode leave this one is complete and we're going to go and I'm going to look at the next plane that you have over here which I've already subdivided for you guys and we're going to try and build this shape over here and it's a lot easier than you might think let me move those mush tools out of the way I'm going to come in here and I'm going to go into edge mode and a tool that allows me to take in and split it into different parts is the bevel tool so what I want you guys to do is in this plane over here the one right next to it I want you guys to grab an edge and go to bevel and just click now this bevel over here has been a bit too wide all it's done is taken that one edge and it has split it down the middle like that which leaves us this odd shape over here now this is going to be the basis for my little dent over here and I've made it a little bit bigger than the other previous one that I made but that's not too much of a problem now if I wanted to take this and actually start making a curve down here some of you guys might think that you can extrude downwards over here and that would not necessarily be a bad way of approaching it again for being kind of like consistent with what we're doing I'm going to select these two edges by themselves and use the connect tool and the connect tool again I can come into its segment bring it down to there and now that segment there is right in the middle like that okay so the reason why I want to do that again is that the connect tool does not only work with a long selection as well I don't need to select all of the objects I can do connections between any two edges that I select as well or any three edges or any combination of the above always these perpendicular lines are going to be very useful and I grab this over here and I push this down like that and the y-axis you're going to see that this is the basis for my curve always feel free to turn on the smooth mode as well by clicking three and you'll see that this again is starting to create a curve on my polygons but there's no definition to a hard edge at the top of it and we're going to put that in there so this again is the basis for my curve and importantly as I added that edge there you see that that is a four-sided face and that's a four-sided face so we're always trying to model everything in quads do very smart you'll notice that these faces over here and not quads but we'll fix those as we go along so what do I need to do well this design forces me to think that this edge over here has to be a hard edge and what do I mean by that is again if I have three edges and they are very spaced apart we will get a curve and if I have three edges very close together I will get a hard edge like this so what I'm going to do is repeat the bevel tool to make this a hard edge I'll go into devil and again bevel might be quite exaggerated in its application as well you can also type in values here so if you need to be much more precise you can just type in a number that's smaller than 0.1 but that'll do the trick for us quite simply and you'll see that that selection there of edges will give me this little rim here now what I'm going to do just point out something that if I click three here you're going to see that that is still fairly smooth I need to increase these segments to two so that there's actually three edges again that pattern of three edges together give me a hard edge is something that you just have to keep in the back of your minds so if I look at this in smooth mode and I pull up the segment's like that instantly that edge there now pops into life and you start seeing that there is a hard rim around this object like that I'm going to press ENTER for a second and if I just deselect this and go into object mode you're going to see that we've introduced a hard edge around the top of the plane and then that there's a smooth edge coming through here and again if we wanted to manipulate this edge in any way again for me it's quite easy to go back into my edge mode grab this go into the smooth mode and if I just move this down I can make this much much much much much deeper and much more pronounced and it's always going to be nice and smooth here now I might need to change some of the shapes to make it feel a little bit better but this is a really easy way of getting this type of shape done over here the next thing that normally we will do anytime we finish one of these shapes is just finished with a little bit of cleanup it's a bit of an advanced but it's something that you should keep your mind working on all the time while you're working in hard surfaces if I come over here and I go back into either my edge mode or vertex mode one of the things I want to do is I need to finish these phases I'll just go to face mode for a second and here we have a five-sided polygonal face if I want to fix this in any specific way I need to make it a four-sided polygon shape preferably you're going to see that the shape looks absolutely fine even if it's got five Polly's but if it's got four it's going to be just a little bit better for me down the line so what I'm going to do is introduce you guys to a new tool which is called the multi cut tool and the multi cut tool is like a surgeon's tool which allows me to create cuts randomly across the surface of an object now you've got to be careful with the multi cut tool because you can cut as I tap across the screen in any direction that you want and that's completely crazy but that is actually a surface that has been cut completely dependent on the shape of my camera so instead of doing that I'm going to press the escape to go back and I'm actually going to undo a few times two times to just get back to my original shape the multi cut tool be careful when you use it because you have to be very precise when you use it you might think that you're clicking on a vertex and you're not so anytime you're doing any type of cut work make sure you zoom in to the area that you're working in either by zooming in with the mouse wheel or press F on your keyboard to focus on the view that you've got or frame it as you prefer and what I want to show you is that as we roll over the vertices we get this little red dot and the scalpel shows a little dot if I mouse over an edge it shows us an edge and if I mouse over a vertex face sorry you have a highlight of the face so again we're always looking for what we're cutting so I want to go from this vertex here the last one of this face and click and click on an edge over here and what will happen is that I will get this line if I click and hold like that or you'll just get a quick if you tap and there we go we have the line for that Cup once I'm happy with it I can press ENTER and that confirms my cut and that will mean that right now in face mode I've got a four-sided face and now hey presto another four-sided face solving that little problem that I was showing you guys just before so again the multi cut tool always be sure that you are clicking on a vertex so wait for it to highlight and then go to the edge make sure that the edge highlights red and either just a quick click or a click and drag will allow you to place it there like that and again I can now have everything in beautiful quads press ENTER and there we go everything is now smoothing perfectly like that and also this allows me to model things later on now why am i working in this way over here if I just very quickly take this object here I'm just going to isolate it for a second like this as well imagine I just modeled a small part of something that I want to be much much much much bigger I'm showing you this technique so that you can build things in parts you can come here again and what I'm going to do is just come here shift and click just to select that edge over there and what I'm going to do now is actually just use the extrude tool for example and you'll see that I'll be able to make many different segments of this like that over there so I can build an entire model based on sections like this and just extend them as and when I need them like that the other thing is that if I wanted multiple versions of this as well I can actually duplicate these as well either inside the mesh will duplicate them as an object as well and I can actually start putting these together and welding them very quickly so you can see I can build an entire grid panel in no time whatsoever so I'm just going to undo that again to go back to where we were before to keep these examples simple but I wanted just to point out to you guys that these small little pieces they can be parts of something much bigger so let me go to show isolate select and turn I select select off which is hidden up there in the show panel just in case you ever need it and let's come over to the next one over here right so I'm going to grab this box over here is this plane over here I'm going to turn it into this box with rounded corners over there and importantly with a little square cut out in the middle like that how am I going to do this well first of all I need to make again the appropriate selection so I'll go into face mode double click to select all of the faces on this top side over here make sure that you're working in face mode and then press extrude and with extrude I'm just going to move it up in the y-axis like this I'm going to switch with my keyboard shortcut R to the scale tool and I'm going to scale from the middle like this and then I'm going to select only the inside face that's going to give it that tapered look that I'm looking for and then I'm going to go into extrude and I'm going to whoops push the down arrow like that just so I have my face extruded like that and this again is the blocking for this piece over here I'm fairly comfortable modeling this and I might still not have this smooth and hard surface kind of my egg mentality built into me but I know that if I can get to this stage here I'll probably be able to build everything else that I need ok so after we've done this let's just hit three and you'll see that you know this creates this smooth doughnut type shape if that's what you're looking for great jobs done but what I want to do is build this shape over here so to do that what I'm going to do is just come over here look at these shapes over here and I'm going to again start adding subdivisions now when you're doing this type of work I always suggest to you guys do one part at a time if you want to do the inside of the actual gap over here in this little box work only on the inside of this if you want to work on the roundness of the edges around the outside of the box work only the outside edges in mind okay and you'll see why in a sec now I can use the insert edge loop tool so what I'm going to do is use the connect tool for the outside and I'll use the insert edge loop tool for the inside so you guys can see but you're going to see that there's going to be a lot of parallels between the starting shape this little box shape to building this over here right so because I don't want this what I'm going to do is start off with connect tool inside and for that I need to do again some ring selections I'm going to come over here that's a ring selection I'm going to go in to connect and again connect is going to save me a lot of times because I need to make many many many of these little selections here so I'm just going to go into pinch might have to scale it a little bit with my middle mouse button and just switch between the radial buttons over here on the side to get that done so there we go we've got our edges set up like that so press ENTER over there to confirm and I'm also going to do another ring selection through here as well and again I'm going to hit connect and everything's already set up so I just press ENTER and then I'm going to come here to the side and again shift and double click on the next edge over there always check in that it's gone all the way around like that so even if I can't see it I'm looking at it like this and I'll press connect and that is all the subdivisions that I need for most of the Interior these edges here they're still going to need a little bit of work and you'll see why in a second so what we're going to do is again preview this and now you'll see that this square shape is coming to life again thanks to that pattern that I'm always telling you guys to look out I know that anything that is an edge if it's got two edges at either side it's going to give me one of those nice rounded 90-degree surfaces which hopefully you should be noticing that there are some edges which are missing here and there are definitely some edges which are missing down here so we're repeating this pattern again and again and again and again so let me do the other half this time with the insert edge loop tool which is a great Maya tool to do this so I know I need another set of edges here so what I'm going to do is I'll turn on this half way mode and what I'll do is that I'll just click and drag that's the edge and here we go that's where the in my box is going to get a little bit sharper you can see that this is a very rounded edge there I'm just going to click and drag here and there we go that sharpens that one right out what about over here I'm going to look again on the outside here I can always go to the lower resolution one by pressing one and I see that how many edges do I have here - I need an extra edge in this part over here so again I'm going to show the preview mode I can add an edge there and anytime that I'm doubting I'm always looking back to the low poly version of it just to double-check that I'm going to have to add another edge there 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 all over lots and lots and lots of repetition it ends up being something that is quite second nature because you know after a while where it is you have to place them so let's very quickly place all the edges that we need on the outside so we'll need an edge here we'll need an edge here we'll need an edge here and we'll need an edge here and what you need two edges on the height as well so all the way around you're going to see that pattern going all the way like that and when I smooth this off let me go into object mode and you guys can see there we are beautiful rounded edges very hard and a hard cut of little black inset a square inset inside of our box now there's also one more thing that I want to point out to you guys which is a little bit of clean-up on these as well because after a while you can subdivide your models so much that again there's a lot of redundant things that we might not need for the whole model so let me just show you very briefly what I mean by that take this these edges here for a second and I'm just going to go into this low poly version of them and I'm going to go into vertex mode this time and you'll see that there's loads of three subdivisions three subdivisions and three subdivisions all over the place let me show you this little tool that's called target weld and target weld will allow me to take vertices or groups of edges as well it will work with as well and I can actually take this edge and I can weld it hence move it to fuse with that point there I'll just grab this one over here and I'll move it in like that and I'll just again target well to take one vertice and glue it effectively into another like that so what I'm doing is very gradually reducing the number of vertices and edges that are in side of my model like that so I'm taking these three edges and I'm combining them together into a single point and if you ever have this pattern where there's a triangular shape three-sided polygon face and another three-sided polygon face is probably that there's an edge here that we can select and just delete so that now is also a quad a four-sided face even though it looks triangular there's one two three four sides to that object over there so again I'm just doing a little bit of clean-up on these two edges here and that's reducing the number of lines that is going through my object if I smooth this out again this unless you see the wire frame is completely indistinguishable from the original thing and if I spent a little bit of time actually doing that clean up across the entire object as this one over here that I've done before you're going to see the major difference that if I look at the bottom of this object at the bottom of this object that this one has a lot more of empty used faces there's so many polygons down here that I don't have over here and this is going to be very easy for me to model new parts well this is going to be slightly harder for me to model so it's a bit more of an advanced technique but later on when you get good at this you're constantly reducing the number of polygons that you're using and you'll get very air capable at being able to make things like this okay so that's all we do with cleanup over here and don't be afraid if you don't have time to do it again if this shape looks right it is right and this is pretty much the effect that we want to look for nice smooth faces no pinching no problems with surface normals no trash of any sorts kind of like looking out there so let's take this one over here and this one is a little bit of a challenge because it combines a few things it takes a rectangular shape and it cuts out a circular hole inside of it so before we were doing a rectangular hole and this time we're doing a circular hole because doing this type of stuff is going to be important to us as well it's really important that the shape that we use for making these is actually an octagon if we have a surface shape that is an octagon so if I come over here and you'll see that here's my low poly version of this and you'll see that that is just an octagon that's been cut into this shape over here I smooth that out again what's going to happen is that that octagon when it is smooth is going to be a circular hole like that so what I've done is I've created this little curve inside of my up to serve as a guiding point and all of that is is just spline that is set in space and that I've placed in there and what I'm going to do is now use the multi-cut tool to cut this face open what I'm going to do is just come over here and I am going to look for my top view so I'm going to go into panels orthographic top view over here and I'm going to press F of my keyboard to focus on that individual face because good chances you appeared somewhere over here or in another part of your spec of your of your viewport so if I press F focuses on the edge that I've got over here and now what I'm going to do is use the multi cut tool now when you're cutting what I suggest you do is start off by an edge and click fairly close to where you think this hexagon is going to this octagon is going to start so I'm going to click here click here and just click on every one of the points of the hexagon and of the octagon don't worry if you don't get it a hundred percent right because I even find that if you're you know not even perfectly octagonal Maya will do a lot of the rounding off for you but the more precise you can get the better that is after you've finished all the way around press ENTER on your keyboard to confirm that cut and then to finish everything off in quads we're going to grab these corners and I'm going to press ENTER grab this corner press ENTER again I'm checking that it's going from vertice to vertices so even before I'm tapping it I'm Mouse overing it and waiting for those vertices to highlight red so save me so much time because it's so easy just to go off and tap something more than once and there you go I've just cut something in there just because I did it quickly and not really thinking about it so again always wait for the tool to highlight before you could live them from your cut with the left mouse button click so we've got all of this done and I'm just going to go into object mode over here sorry and we're just going to have a look at this for a second back in the perspective view so I'm going to back into perspective there we go and now what I'm going to do is make a little extrusion for us as well so when you have a plane if you have faces like this it's very easy it for us to do a face extrude and just go down like this this is what people are always used to however if I have an edge and I just double click on the outside edge and this will go all the way around my object like that what's going to happen now is that I can take this edge and I can also use the extrude tool on an edge like that I can take it down like this press R on my keyboard to bring up the scale tool and do a little taper like that as well so it's a little bit thinner at the top than it is at the base and again this is the booking for this piece over here however when I smooth this guy out we've got this little kind of like dog tray type of thing which again that's what you're looking for that's absolutely brilliant however we're still looking not only to have smooth surfaces but have some hard surfaces in there as well so what I'm going to do is come over here and again I'm going to apply the same type of reasoning that I was doing before with you guys where all of this here is just a collection of edges that I need to in cert into here so I need to subdivide this a little bit into this blocking part now let me show you a few ways of doing that again when we're grabbing these faces over here if I really want it to I can actually create these edges as I extrude so if I'm very comfortable knowing that I need to have an edge up here and I use the extrude tool I know that I can draw downwards like that and there's my other edge that we were seeing before and I can extrude downwards a little bit more like that and I can extrude and this time scale from the middle like that and again that's going to add my three edges there my edges here and that again is going to start creating this shape over here some of you guys just might have been very comfortable you know just doing a simple connect as well so if I came into here and just deleted these very quickly as an example again there isn't a right or a wrong way of doing this grab this double click go into the connect tool press Enter job's done not a problem and again if you went to the insert edgeloop tool' they all roughly do the same thing but here let me show you something interesting that happens with the insert edge loop tool I'm going to come into here and again I'm looking at this pattern 3 edges for the inside 3 edges at the top here when I look at this from the top I can really tell that the insert edge loop tool is not giving me a regular octagonal shape because it's a bit confused with dividing these lines over here so you can see that this octagon shape looks really good over here and it looks really bad over here importantly we will not panic at this stage and what I'm going to show you very briefly is another way that we can use the scale tool but using something that we call edge or surface constraints if I scaled this normally you'll see that I'll be able to push those edges into the actual exit octagon like this I'm going to say hexagons a lot of times in this video but it looks of things and what I want you guys to know is there's these little options over here called transform constraint which I'm going to turn on edge slide will do this a few times with this edge constraint turned now when I move this edge you'll see that I can't move it outside of the shape if I took a more extreme tool like the rotation tool over here I went into E on my keyboard and I try to rotate this edge you'll see it's in part of the shape of the edge does not change however again if I turn edge constraints off you see so the edge constraint just means that I can only move it along existing edges of the object and this is really useful if I want to conform something to a specific shape what I mean by that is let's turn on edge constraints let's turn on the scale tool and let's scale this down until it disappears it's still there I still have a selection made but it looks like it's just disappeared into the edges there and after you stop clicking on your screen and now you drag now that hexagon is going to be perfect again I'll do it from the top view we have a irregular shaped object and I want to conform it into an existing shape I scale it down with edge constraints until it disappears I stop clicking with the mouse and then I scale it out so just that simple act of stopping to click allows me to make my object just perfectly regular again and now that I've got these three edged type of three edges again when I smooth this out now I've added a little solid rim into my dog bowl type of construction over here as well again what we want to do now is inset this edge over here to make it a nice rectangular shape so what I need to do is add a little bit of hard surface to the top edge and I'm gonna have to add a little bit of hard surfacing to the edges as well now there's multiple ways of doing this but if I just did an insert edgeloop tool' it's just going to go round in the circle and it's just going to keep making things round and round and round I need to change the way that the shape works so what I'm going to do is grab these edges over here and here and here and here and here and here I should be able to double click as well but again working in low poly it's very easy to select everything and with all of those edges selected let's go back to our handy bevel tool and I'll hit the bevel tool I will make a bevel of 0.1 and I will add again two subdivisions like that so you see that I've got one two three edges to round those corners off again just repeating everything like that so now I've got an edge that goes all the way around the top of this shape and it has that rounded edge to it perfect so I confirm that and what I'm going to do now is go ahead and add a subdivision here now what I don't want to do is the following I don't want to grab all of these edges okay and I don't want to apply bevel to the whole shape again because what that's going to do if I smooth it out is it's going to start creating a break over here and this part here is now going to start looking more hexagonal so if you see over here nice smooth curve and here these corners because I've added too many subdivisions this over here is going to break that circular shape so I can't allow that to happen so what I'm going to do is go back a few steps and I'm going to show you how much you need to select so if I come over here and looking at the corners of my object I'm going to grab one two three edges like this just up to the top there and then I'm going to come around and hit shift one two three and again shift one two three select all the edges up to the end of this bevel that we made over there and again we're going to come into here one two three if you need to do this one at a time by all means do it as well I'm just very used to making multiple selections to speed up what I'm doing because now when I hit bevel it's going to apply the bevel to every corner at the same time so I don't have to worry about it later on so what I'm going to do here is grab my segments add another subdivision over there you'll see that there's a few extra faces which have been added up here but as soon as I do that again this whole thing about rounded segments and now I've got this lovely hard edge as soon as I add one two three edges to every side it's the same pattern again again and again again I'm looking for those hard edges and I'm making sure that you guys figure out where they go as well okay so that there is my rounded edges right again there's a little bit of cleanup that you should attempt to do as well because you can see that here we have one two three edges one two three edges and again this is a matter of choice now you could delete this edge over here and that would make it four-sided thing as well but also sometimes it's just easier to take this vertex and go into the target weld and just weld that there so that's four faces four faces everything should be fine let me just double check that or again you know I think I have actually cut in a five-sided face there so actually that's probably better to just take this edge over here delete it if I can actually select it move this one here delete that edge and then grab this vertex over here and let's just push that out a little bit like that again my edge constraints are still turned on so that's actually quite handy because it means that I can move it up and down here without worrying where it's going and again I can look at this in the side view as well but you'll see in the smooth view that edge there even though again it's a five sided face because it's on a flat surface it's not really causing any type of distortion at all and still looking fairly solid so again this here will be our next object like that really easy again any time we're trying to cut something that's circular just make an eight-sided shape cut it into a polygon with four faces and you can create circles inside of anywhere and again the purpose of all of this is that if we wanted multiple objects which are circular in nature again we can duplicate many many many many of these objects and we can start combining emerg them together so again we can come here and if I wanted to create multiple copies of this again and just weld them together I might have to delete a few phases here and there but I can very rapidly make all types of different designs like that as well okay now this one over here is a corner object to an extent and again one of the things that we could do is that we could multiply a duplicate this three or four times and we could have you know sinks and all other types of paneling done as well what I want to try and demonstrate with you guys here is just a simple way of being able to change the flow of the edges that we have as well so you guys hopefully you can see how that works what I'm going to do is come into here and I'm going to start adding a few more divisions so I'm going to come into here and again I'm going to do a ring selection there I'm going to hit connect and this time I'm going to take my segments down to one and press Enter so I'm going to subdivide it like that and then I'm going to grab here another ring do another connect press enter again and what I'm going to do is again instead of an extrusion this time because I've subdivided it first I'm just going to lift this lip up and after that I have to turn off my edge constraints again if they're not off they might be glued to the surface so be careful sometimes you'll just see this little slide icon that appears on my 2016 which is really handy and again that will help me know if my edge constraints are turned on or off so I'm going to come up here grab this edge like this and what's going to happen now is that I have again this little shape up here which is the top of my ring over here and what I want to do is just create a solid edge along these this side of the object here and I want to create a hard sorry soft edge in the corners and a hard edge around the rim here and here so how can I do that effectively well sometimes you're going to take things that are in quads already and sometimes it helps to subdivide things again so I'm going to show you how to take these edges here and actually cut them in a fairly fairly fairly easy way so to improve the curvature of this so I'm going to smooth it out for a second because now it's all blobby again by pressing three I'll go back to one what I'm going to do is start using the multi cut tool let's say I want to introduce another four-sided face that followed this edge that I'm just about to cut there I'm going to go here and grab myself an edge azaria vertex go to an edge over here following roughly that line and then I'm going to push this edge over to this side here actually I'll just move it like that a little bit like that and I'm going to press ENTER like that okay so I've taken a cut and I've moved it over there I'm actually going to take this vertice over here and just move it a little bit back again working in multiple views and then I'm going to do the same thing again so I'm going to go to multi cut again follow roughly the angle of that edge there and then I'm going to come here and again I'm going to try and put that roughly there okay so with these new cuts here I'm subdividing this into four faces four faces four faces but I've introduced two triangular pieces over here so if I grab this edge and this edge here and just press the lead on the keyboard now you'll see that I've taken that's a four-sided face that's a full sided face and that's a full sighted face you could have modeled this right from the start and again this would be an accurate way of doing some blocking which I would recommend people to do as a starting point but it's so much better to actually take all of this and be comfortable to be able to make changes as well so the much as I know might work all the time remember that if you're adding edges they always have to go in specific directions you need to keep that flow going because as soon as I've done this cut over here you're going to see that it's very easy for us to create hard and soft edges again if I come over here into my edge mode and I double click and double click over here you'll see that I can select these edges don't select these two up here and with that edge over there if I want to add a hard rim to there again I can select those edges and I can do a bevel with a very small point one over here and again add two more segments over there again we're that smoothing again that's going to give me like the top of my sink over there and then what I do is well the same thing at the bottom you can grab these two edges over here again I can show you in the low poly version and just smooth that out again and again I'm going to hit bevel I'm going to bring bevel down to point one again because I know that's a number that is going to work reasonably well and if my mouse cooperates with me I'll be able to get there there in a sec there we go point one and then the segment I'm going to add two segments and there we go we've got a beautiful curve and some beautiful hard edges as well right so the last thing we do again checking that everything's in quads I just want to show you what's the difference between here and here so what happens is at the top if I grab these three edges over here right sorry let me just grab their holding amount shift I'm going to grab these edges and these edges here right these edges at the top allow me to see what type of curve this is creating at the top like that and if I grabbed any one of these curves and I just moved them further apart this curve is going to be affected it's going to become effectively rounder / smoother like that again doing this in the low poly version allows me to look at the placement of those curves a little bit better and then what happens if I grab these three down these four down here so all the edges there up until the end of the bevel there and what happens if I bring these a little bit closer together again I'm going to show this in smooth mode so if I come over here you're going to see that while before we had this curved shape at the bottom if I bring this closer together again that's going to start looking much more like come over here and go back into shaded view to select that by bring these closer together you're going to see that we get a tighter curve something that's going towards more 90 degrees like that so again I'm going to come here I'm going to grab that and I'm grabbing only this section or this section so that the curve on the top is different from the curve at the bottom over there so when I smooth it out you can see that although they are very closely related that's a very tight polygon curve there and this one is a much broader curve at the top over there and that again allows me to design things with different curvatures purely depending on how far away these subdivisions actually are so we're going to also look at these three shapes at the back as well right now but again even if you manage to get to this section over here of the tutorial it's a great starting point for you guys to be able to deliver all of these four pieces for the assessment because we're looking at very specific problems of how to create hard and soft edges but let's take a look at what happens to the next set of shapes where you can see that some of them are easy but this one and this one are just going to be slightly more challenging

Channel: yone santana

Views: 42,702

Rating: 4.9274926 out of 5

Keywords: 3D Modeling (Film Job), 3D, Yone, Santana, Maya, 2016, Maya 2016, Hard Surface, Generalist, Tutorial, Modeling, Modelling, edge loops

Id: CHCypd9NcFM

Length: 51min 21sec (3081 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2015