Maya 2022: New Features for Modelling

so uh we're going to shift gears here and we're going to talk about modeling so uh we've got another i say 20 25 minutes or so and then we're going to open up the q a but there's a ton of stuff actually to talk about on the modeling front so again i've already introduced myself at the beginning but if you came in late my name is steven rozelle i'm a product manager on the my team and i just realized my my video is not going so here i am um i i've been working on the my team for quite a while now i'm working with mia for quite a while now and uh i've been working across maya in different aspects but i i have a particular interest in modeling so i'm going to cover that uh for the next uh for the next bit so we have some cool new stuff to show uh one is just a really great new feature that's one of the most common feature requests we get on the modeling side over the last many years and then something brand new to maya called create vr for maya which is is a vr application a fully immersive vr application for doing sketching and building up of geometry um for for kind of design and concepting and i'll talk more about that we'll get into some more granular features there's a lot of kind of lower level you know kind of nuts and bolts type features i like to call them on the modeling front which we'll get into uh so we'll start with sweep mesh sweep mesh is a great new tool it's a lot of fun to work with i think for the modelers out there you're really going to appreciate this it's something that uh it has been needed in my for a while and that is basically just a one-click solution for converting curves into geometry so here you see i take a curve convert it to geometry and i've got all these sliders all these bells and whistles for controlling the output of that geometry so you can change the profile you can have a circle or a square or a line or an arc you could set this to be a wave pattern or you can even do instances or we're calling elements basically similar to mask or you're repeating a pattern in that case spiraling to create a coil you can create custom curves uh for the profile itself either use the pre-built ones or the custom curves so you can create things like architectural uh details and crown molding and get really really fine control over over the the shape of that extrusion so it's again one click solution uh it's one node that has all this stuff built into it it's super intuitive it's really really fast to iterate on you basically you don't set a lot of options up front you just click apply and then you just start going to town tweaking the options um it replaces the old legacy nurbs workflow so the legacy nurbs workflow has been around for a while it's still there you can use it but as a lot of modelers know it can be a bit cumbersome for creating this kind of mesh in particular you know one of those things was this nurbs tessellate node without going into too much details it it was really complicated and unintuitive and hard to use so this no longer requires any of that you're not using nurbs at all you're just going directly to polygons which is the more common use case now and like i mentioned before you don't need profile curves so you can actually just use some of these presets which you see up here like these preset shapes with a lot of procedural attributes associated with them performance is actually very good as well it scales linearly so you can create one sweep mesh or you can create 100 and then have that node control all hundred of those and it accepts multiple input curves so you can have one node per curve or you can have one shared node for all the curves so that they all be uniform and consistent so it's pretty flexible in that regard and the problems it's solving here really have to do with the the quality and the results not just the ease of use but the actual like quality of the results so you can see here what would happen with with some of the old nurbs workflows where it just really just didn't handle things very well so one example is hard edges or corners or right angles you know linear one degree curves the old extrude tool just didn't know what to do with those as you can see from this image uh and and also volume preservation so when it comes to actually like creating pipes for instance you want to have a uniform volume across that you want proper edge orientation when you're doing the elbow bends the old extrude tool just again didn't really handle that the new sweep handles it quite well it also handles density quite well so it does a smart topology so it only adds detail where you need it and it's used for lots of different shapes so i mentioned earlier on this kind of a swiss army knife type tool where you can just create all these different shapes it's not just tubes it's not just robes um it's pipes it's spirals it's coils it's twisted cables it's architectural detail crown molding uh muscle shapes uh hair cards you know you name it you can create all kinds of different things with this so i'm going to do a demo now um i'm actually just going to let this play but i want to do a quick plug to an artist that we've collaborated with his name is roy bennett uh he created this awesome kind of sci-fi futuristic car garage scene uh and he's was kind enough to let us use it for the demonstration so i want to give him a plug you can go to roy bennett.artstation.com if you want to check out his work really talented guy avid my user of course so i'm going to pause my talking and i'm going to let the video play the new sweep mesh tool in my 2022 is a really versatile curve based modeling tool basically works with nerves or bezier curves allows you to select curves and then just in one click quickly create a mesh so most common example would be of course tubes and wires but you can create different shapes based on these different profile presets so we have the ability to create rectangles rectangles for the rounded corners you can control things like the width and the height obviously you can control things like the subdivisions along the length but it also does a really good job of dealing with things like elbows and things like corners which the old nurbs surface tool just could not handle so what you'll see here is we're creating a pipe and it maintains the constant volume all the way through the length of the pipe including the elbows so it creates really nice elbows so i could basically select these and extrude them and get essentially like what looks like an actual plumbing elbow in a pipe uh similarly here we can take a edge around a shape and create kind of frames and architectural details so something like crown molding and you can customize that using a number of different methods so you can use a simple polygon shape and then define that shape as your profile and the perimeter of the plane in this case or it could be any any arbitrary shape but the perimeter will define the profile of that extruded or that swept path then you can go in and interactively adjust that so as you change the shape of the profile input that will change the shape of the actual sweep mesh and you can also do this on top of other surfaces or on top of other geometry so here we're basically taking some edge loops on the fender of this car we're converting those to curves we're just doing a quick combine to turn that into one curve and then we're creating a sweep which by default is just going to be a simple circle we'll tweak the divisions here a little bit and then we'll actually use another edge loop from another piece of geometry as the profile so we're using one edge loop from one piece of geometry as a profile another edge loop from another piece of geometry is the path and we're basically able to construct geometry on geometry with sweep so here's another example of that we're basically taking the edge loop around the collar of this character this piece of armor and we're going to sweep that and by default we'll get a tube we can switch that to a line or to an arc we have these other cool pattern tools like wave you can control the alignment so you can basically say a line to the left or to the right or to the top or the bottom and then you can expand out from that here we're creating cycles in the way of tweaking the amplitude tweaking the orientation and then now it looks like we basically have kind of a beveled extension of that piece of geometry and then lastly we can create instances or patterns so we're using distribution feature here to basically create instances of tubes or any profile shape and then repeating that in a pattern the circle or square or linear pattern and then we're tweaking things like the twist and the twist is going to give us coils basically so a wound cable something like you would see on a suspension bridge and we can also change the taper so the taper can just taper uniformly or linearly rather or we can use this nice profile this curve widget to define the taper so you as you can see sweep is a really versatile tool for creating lots of different shapes all right so the news moving on uh we're going to talk about something completely different and that is create vr from my you may have seen a couple of teaser videos by now showing this off uh it's uh it's an immersive conceptual design tool application that is it's kind of kind of like a sidecar application to maya so it doesn't actually ship or bundle with the installer for maya so what you have to do is actually go to the app store the autodesk app store to download this and once you install that you get a plug-in that will basically connect maya to this application and i'll just kind of talk over this this is a video that was created by uh the lead designer on this project lina lee that's her there uh not only did she design the the user interface and the ui associated with graveyard but she created some amazing demos uh she's a great concept artist as well and this is showing her kind of in in action creating a concept from scratch using a reference image as a kind of a background um these are basically just curves she's dropping down curves and then you know in an immersive kind of space she's able to navigate around those curves uh you know that look like brush strokes but they're actually represented as curves she can move them manipulate them after the fact she creates them gesturally but then kind of modifies them after that to kind of reform them and reshape them but just to kind of go over some of the highlights um again this is a sidecar application so it doesn't load up you know directly in maya you do have to have a vr headset you have to have something like a vive or or a uh or an oculus but you can you can also send stuff from maya to create vr so through fbx basically you can export data geometry out of maya including curves including nurbs including uh polys or sub d polys and then those can be loaded into crate vr and then vice versa you can actually start from scratch and create vr you can create curves and geometry and then you can send that back to maya so you there are simple tools uh i'll show a demo here in a second that actually shows the interface in action but they're just simple curve and surface tools just built right into the heads-up display of the ui and then like i said you can kind of explore the form explore the shape while you're in vr and then ultimately you can end there if you want to and just generate images or you can actually send that geometry back to maya so i'm going to play a quick video here that shows it in action once you download and install the app it will basically piggyback on top of maya 2020 so you'll get a a movie a movie uh a uh a menu is what i was trying to say that will connect to create vr and then you go to town basically you start freeform drawing curves so if you want to work in a more conceptual kind of gestural way you could just start dropping down these curves and then like i said you've got curve tools to then manipulate them and she's showing a couple of different examples here with the dragon and the girl's head but you can also do more hard surface type stuff as well as well as the freeform type stuff we'll show some examples that in a bit but once you drop down your curves or your strokes then you can start to manipulate them with other tools so you've got these nice kind of pre-selection highlighting features built in so you can easily see like where your sub components are so you know unlike in my you're not constantly having to convert back and forth between object type and component type you actually kind of have the component type built in with this kind of pre-selection highlighting you can use reference images so you can create these images somewhere else you know in 2d and then bring those in as equivalent of image planes that you would have like in maya and then start to build and construct geometry from that so once you get your curves laid out then you can actually jump generate geometry from the curve so we've got you know basic extrusion uh and and things like stitching and merging tools built into this so here we're basically taking the gestural curves that were created and then extruding out you know the body of the camera in order to create the actual geometry uh of the the shape so you're you're constructing in this kind of vr space like i said it's it's fully immersive and you're you're basically just exploring with shape and form and then you get these heads-up displays that pop up that allow you to access the different tools and so you kind of just stay in this in this flow you kind of just continue to work without being interrupted by like necessarily having to switch between tools because a lot of the tools are kind of built into this kind of one workflow so you could do things like extrude and stitch your edges and manipulate your edge loops and manipulate your vertices all kind of in the same context it's similar to bringing in reference images you can bring in reference geometry as well so here's a piece of geometry that could have been created in maya or it could have come from somewhere else through fbx you can load that into crate vr and then you can build on top of it so you could snap your curves and snap your other objects on top of that and then like i mentioned also it does support sub d so these are poly based sub d's essentially so you could create a cage in maya and send it in or you could just build the cage from scratch and then you get these cool pre-selection kind of highlights of the the the sub the edges where you can then apply creasing and and hard edges so you can by default of course have these rounded smooth edges that you would expect for the sub d but you can increase that at any point at the vertex or the edge level and then as far as manipulating i already mentioned this but you've got these cool free selection ways highlights for your vertices and your edges you've got quick menus that are associated with a controller so you have your controllers and then you can pop up these these context sensitive menus that allow you to quickly activate different features and then ultimately like i mentioned again you can export this all back to maya so here's an example of a shape that was completely started from scratch in create vr that was then ultimately exported into maya for final laying or for rendering or animation or whatever you're going to do with it again you go to the app store to download this actually if you just go to the audits app store and just go to the my section there's a little link for my at the top this should be the the top app that you'll see and then of course there's full documentation that explains how to use it that's it's really in-depth and detailed these are just a few examples of some things that can be created like i said it's pretty wide range you can create hard surface objects you can create more gestural kind of freeform objects you can create realistic you can create more cartoony um a pretty wide range of different types of objects you can create in here so with that said i'm going to go into some additional modeling improvements and this is where we get into kind of some lower level more granular things there's a lot of little things that aren't necessarily related some are related some aren't but but things that are useful from a modeling perspective now this first one that we're going to talk about is targeted specifically for game asset artists people who are building assets for games and they want to see those uh kind of the uh the the budget count the polygon budget count that they're they're going to deal with in maya before they ever get to unreal or to unity so it's called the game vertex count hud uh hud for those of you that don't know stands for heads-up display it's just a quick way of saying it but it basically gives you information in the viewport so for this one i'm gonna also stop talking and just play a pre-recorded movie just to kind of walk you through how this works and why you would need it in previous versions of maya it could be challenging for game artists to predictably meet their game asset budgets based on the vertex count in maya which is often used as a metric for game assets so what you'll see here is the triangle set or rather the vertex setting under the standard polycat heads-up display uh says that there are 20 000 in my scene this is a couple of different meshes but all together this object is around twenty thousand vertices or so maya says however when we take this into a game engine like unreal or unity we're quite likely to get very different results so we have created a game vertex count hud that will give you a much more accurate representation of the vertex information so what you can see here is that when i enable that now my vertex count goes up to 41 000 a little over 41 000 from 20 000 to 41 000 so as you can see the discrepancy can be quite dramatic now in addition to that we have also added evaluators for different game engines so we have the default kind of simple evaluator which is just general purpose but if you're exporting to unreal or unity we also have evaluators for both of these and these will be slightly different based on a few settings such as tangent mode as well as some normal settings this includes settings for mkt tangents for both but if i apply this now you can see that my unity game vertex count is 34 000 if i switch this to unreal and apply now my game vertex count is very similar but it adjusted slightly so just depending on various subtleties with your geometry and the target engine you will get different results but either way this will give you a much more accurate representation of your vertex count in order to budget your game assets to make it a little more clear about what's actually going on here i've set up a very simple example you can see i've got a simple surface which is that is basically made up of uh three by three or essentially nine faces which equates in maya to uh 16 vertices so a vertice for for every intersecting point you see here which makes sense however depending on the geometry this could change with different situations so for instance if i were going to grab this edge and convert this into a hard edge but what you'll notice is it actually splits the vertex normal at each of those locations and essentially doubles the vertex count so now you can see that even though maya is still seeing this as 16 physical vertices the game vertex count is actually 20 because it's taking into account those split vertices another example would be with uv editing so you'll see here i have a single uv shell so if i take this larger shell and i scale it down a little bit i'll move it off to the side and then i take a single face within this and i simply unitize that which will basically separate that out into its own unique separate uv shell as soon as i did that what you can see is the vertex count went up again because of the uv borders so the uv borders in conjunction with things like hard and soft edges can really have a big impact on the game vertex count that you should expect to see coming out of maya and again with the game predicts count display you can now get a much better approximation or calculation of of what your vertex count is going to be when you send it to a game engine so again this was a real pain for for game artists in in the past because you know they have to actually send it to the engine to get any idea of of what their actual count was and now of course you can just do that on the front end in maya a lot a lot more easily without having to go back and forth so we're going to talk about a few other kind of low-level changes um we've got a few related topics or few related updates i should say around pivots and transforms and it's not the most glamorous thing to talk about i mean pivots and transforms are kind of boring frankly but they're important because it's something you touch literally you know every day so uh one example is interactive pivot snapping so we introduced interactive pivot snapping where you can go into this interactive mode and snap to different points but it was super limited because you could only snap to the points on the object you were working with now you can actually snap that interactive pivot to anything in your scene so we've opened it up so that any object that's visible in your scene you can align or snap to the vertices or the edges or the faces you can control the just the orientation or just the the position and so on all the stuff that you would expect but now it's going to work with all the different different assets in your scene uh without having to constantly juggle your selection so little change but you know one of those things you pretty do pretty frequently uh another update to transforms uh and pivots in particular is the bake pivot option so in the past when you went into interactive pivot mode and you edited that pivot it would temporarily set the pivot but if you went back to object mode it would basically lose that offset so now you can actually set it to bake there's just a simple setting on the transform tools where if you rotate that pivot for instance it'll automatically bake that rotation of the pivot to the underlying transform under the hood so that you don't have to constantly go back and forth and reset it so that's optional you can turn it off if you don't need it but oftentimes you you you obviously would another thing that we've updated is match transforms so match transforms it's been around for a while but it used to be kind of an all or nothing proposition you could match x y z and that was it like you couldn't control the individual axes now you can match just x or just y or just c or some combination of them so if you just need to match the height of a transformer or you just need to match uh you know left to right or whatever uh this is applicable to modeling but also things like rigging if you need to align things like uh controllers to a skeleton or something like that you can obviously use it for for non-modeling purposes another option that we've added for uh for matching transforms is the bounding box scale match which is super cool because it it's a simple little thing but it allows you to match the scale of an object independent of its actual transform values so in a lot of cases uh if you set scale to be two to two then it's not going to be the same for each object i'll actually let this one play again but as you can see here each one of these has a different scale uh kind of relative value so if you set them to 0.5 or 2 then they're not going to scale the same way here we can go into match scaling set it to bounding box and we can have these exact match the exact scale regardless of what their underlying scale values are so again little change but super useful when you need it this is something that has been kind of a long running request on the the modeling front and that is the ability to add thickness to an object so um you know max has been able to do this very well for for a while and uh we we basically just needed to go in and rewrite some old code is what it boiled down to so we went in and we we basically rewrote the extrude thickness algorithm to allow it to work on a complete shell that is of complex kind of structure and shape so what you can see here is in my 2020 if we extruded on an entire object depending on the shape of that object you'd get these wacky results so it wasn't really easy to do and it would require a lot of fixing now in my 2022 it just works so when you extrude on an entire object just because you want to add a little bit of thickness to that object now it extrudes in a very predictable very uniform very even way so there's nothing you have to do you don't have to change any settings it just works now in a way that it didn't work before as simple as that but it's again this is one of the things that people are confronted with on a pretty regular basis when it comes to modeling so uh one more improvement actually got a couple more faster selection basically we we've actually improved low level selection uh crown up across the board but it shows up particularly well around lasso select which you use oftentimes when you're dealing with like scan data so if you have really really high resolution scan data in the millions of polys you sometimes need to isolate parts of the geometry so it's almost embarrassing to show this but in my 2020 this actually took a really long time to do this is an almost let's say 7.5 billion polymesh you can see in 2020 it's still going and i accelerated the time so it actually took almost a minute to select the head on this object in my 2020. again not great but in maya 2022 that same exact scene you select the head and a second later it's selecting so this is what you would expect again this is one of those cases where you know we had old code that we basically just need to go in and refactor so we went from again a minute down to about a second and a half so whatever that is 45 times faster if i did my math right target weld has improved to incorporate preserve uv so on the uv front you know you've been able to preserve uvs when you manipulate a vertice or when you move edges around for a while but there's some tools that just didn't support that and target weld was one of those so now when you target weld and and uh you're you're stitching between like different shells it'll actually merge those uh it doesn't even have to be shells but to say a hole or something and it will kind of recalibrate the uvs under the hood so it will actually correct the uvs uh to avoid texture stretching or texture distortion um or at least minimize it as much as possible and that's just a setting basically on the tool on the uv front also we've made a few incremental improvements to the uv editor so common request was hey we need feedback on the uv coordinates and be able to subtract those easily so we added a uv heads-up display so you can actually see the uv values and then also from an editing standpoint when we introduced the uv toolkit we actually lost the ability to directly edit the uv values we've we've added that back in so now you can go back in and you can select one uv and you can edit either you or v or both and or you can apply that to multiple uvs if you need to do like an alignment or if you needed to kind of copy and paste values around between uvs so very low level kind of simple change but you know when if you're doing uv a lot that's obviously going to going to be a factor and then lastly we want to talk about some updates to the paint vertex color tool uh again this is kind of low level but if you're using vertex color to store data which is often done with with game development like alpha times you'll you'll use the rgb channels uh to store some sort of a game data that you would then use in game for some other purpose you couldn't really visualize visualize that before so if you were going in and you were painting r on one part red on one part and green on another part in blue on another part you couldn't really tell because it would always show you rgb now if you look in below here in the display settings we have channels r g and b and we can toggle those on and off so that you can see exactly where your r is exactly where your green is and exactly where your blue is so you know where that data lives and how it's applied and then one last thing it doesn't show up in the demo but some people are using alpha also to store data this is a simple channel and so now we have the ability to represent that alpha as actual alpha in other words actual transparency or you can toggle into this grayscale mode so that you can actually see it kind of as a grayscale value if you're using it for other purposes so those are some nice again kind of low level improvements but you know if you're doing this kind of work then obviously it's gonna have an impact

Channel: Annex Pro

Views: 11,147

Keywords: autodesk maya, vfx and animation, vfx workflows, maya 2022, maya sweep mesh, maya vr, maya modelling, vfx modelling, animation modelling, maya tutorial

Id: RgxWp1ctw-Y

Length: 27min 2sec (1622 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021