Maya- A modular approach to creating an environment

hello everybody in this video we're going to take a look at how we can create an environment in maya but we're going to take a different approach we're going to take a modular approach by taking this modular approach we'll be able to create a bunch of different sections of our environment that can be configured in lots of different arrangements now what we're looking at is a tunnel system and i created the geometry in maya and then brought it into the unity game engine so let's go ahead and go into maya and get started modeling to get started i'm going to create a cylinder and i'm going to make it eight-sided and then i will add some segments on the height i've just deleted the caps and now i'm going to duplicate this three more times so that i can start figuring out where the other tunnel segments that i'm going to be creating will need to connect to create a turn in the tunnel i'm going to use a taurus and i will also make it eight-sided by making it eight-sided it'll easily connect to the straight tunnel segments that i've already created and as you can see this will allow me to create a nice 90 degree turn to connect any of these tunnel segments to create a t intersection i'll take this uh turning segment duplicate it delete some of the faces and combine the two meshes and then weld the verts together as well as using the bridge tool to complete the piece and going into component mode i can adjust the vertices to get it just right next i'll be making a four-way intersection once again duplicating the straight piece deleting some of the faces combining meshes and then extensively using the bridge tool to create a dead end i'm going to make a sphere which i'll make eight-sided so that it'll easily connect with one of these straight segments i'll combine this half sphere to one of the straight tunnel pieces and then we'll have our dead end piece i need to combine the two meshes obviously and merge some verts but that will complete the piece to make my tunnel system more three-dimensional i will add an incline i'm simply going to duplicate one of the straight tunnel pieces and then using my soft select i'll create an incline making sure that the move tool is set to retain component spacing and then either using snap to grid or snap to point makes matching up the openings of the two segments very easy i think i'll flatten out the floors for this tunnel system this time i'll use the move tool but without retain component spacing checked this will make it easy to flatten the floors on all of the segments at once now that i've flattened out the floors it'll actually be easier for me to just recreate the incline tunnel segment again with that flat floor once again i'm going to use the soft select to do so since these tunnel pieces will actually be experienced from the inside and not outside i'm going to reverse the normals on these meshes now that i've created the modular pieces i will test them out i'm using snap to grid to quickly and easily get them placed as you can see this modular approach to creating in this case a tunnel system can be quite powerful as it gives us the ability to create lots of interesting and unique new configurations so now that we have all of our segments created we'll need to move on to creating the uvs or laying out the uvs so that we can properly apply textures to these pieces later on right now if we take a quick look at the uvs you'll see that they are in fact a bit of a mess so i'll go ahead and get started on working on those uvs now when uv unwrapping complicated three-dimensional forms it's always a balance between seams and distortions you want to have as few seams with as little distortion as possible generally i generally do camera-based projections oftentimes from in this case the top viewport but oftentimes from the front viewport as well depending on the three-dimensional form and then i cut and sew edges to make sure that the whole model that everything has its own unique uv space so here i've completed my uvs for these segments here and we'll just take a quick look at each of them along with their uvs so here's the straight piece here the tunnel turn the dead end my segment for going up a level or down a level this t section and my four-way intersection tunnel piece now i'm going to be using these segments to create a cave system and i think to make it look a little bit more like a cave system it'll be perhaps better to make it look a little less regular so to give myself a little bit more geometry to work with the first thing i'm going to do is do a mesh smooth on these this will give me a little bit more geometry to work with a little higher resolution and then i'm simply going to use my soft select tool to create some uh variations now one thing i'd like to point out is so that these pieces will still fit together well so they'll still fit together exactly i'm going to make sure not to touch the ends here these end pieces i'll leave those exactly as they are but anything in between the openings of these pieces i can pretty much do whatever i want so i'll be using soft select for that to make these segments more cave like i'm almost exclusively using the soft select one thing i need to be careful of though is not to alter or adjust the vertices at the ends of these tunnel pieces because they need to continue to join with all the other segments seamlessly so i spent a little bit of time using the soft select to roughen these up to make these pieces here look a little bit more irregular or look a little bit more cave like so we'll take a look at how that works as we try to piece these together a little bit later in a future video i'll go a little bit more in depth on creating materials for these segments here but for the time being we're going to keep it very simple i've already created a normal map and a color map just very quickly for these but as i said i'll probably be revisiting that in a future video now just a quick reminder i want to um just remind you i mentioned it before that with these objects here the normals are actually pointing inward rather than outward uh just to give you a little bit better idea of what i'm talking about i'm going to create a polygon sphere and i'll just scale it up and you'll notice that it's shading looks quite normal here while these other objects are black out on the outside here and then they look more normal on the inside here let's just take a look at what's happening here so i'm going to go to display polygons custom polygon display and i'm going to turn on normals here and apply so that we can see this a little bit better i'll make the normals a little bit larger actually and we'll apply so you can see that the normals for this object for the sphere are actually pointing outwards if we were to do the same to one of these segments here you'll notice that its normals are pointing inward and we'll go ahead and make those normals a little smaller so you can see that a little bit better you can see that those are actually pointing inward so the thing to understand here is that polygon objects actually have the faces actually do have a direction another way that we could take a look at this would be to turn on back face culling which i can do by coming over here to shading and turning on back face culling and now you can see through the meshes here but if we go on to the inside here you'll see that these surfaces are in fact just one-sided we could take this sphere for example and go to mesh display and reverse those normals and now it is similar to these tunnel pieces that we have in that the normals are now pointing inward instead of outward so let's go ahead and create a new material for our tunnel pieces here go to my hypershade i'm going to make a lambur although perhaps it might be nice to have some specularity on it but again as i said i'll probably be revisiting the materials for this in a future video i'm going to go ahead and rename my material and we'll go ahead and apply the bump map to these first so that you can see those before applying the color map so i will go to the bump map click on the checkerboard click on file and we'll assign a map that a texture that i've created for this purpose here is what it looks like this is going to apply a normal map which is a fancy kind of bump map so we'll go ahead and apply that and we'll press 6 on our keyboard so that we can see textures although i don't believe i have actually applied it yet to these objects so let's go ahead and do that as well i'll select the objects and apply my new material to them and now you can see that the normal map has been applied to our tunnel pieces actually i almost forgot something currently we have our normal map applied as a regular bump map so bump maps are typically black white and gray values a normal map works a little bit differently so let's go ahead and select our material we'll look at its up and down stream connections and i will select its bump node here and then in the attribute editor rather than telling it to use it as a bump map we'll change this to tangent space normals and that'll change the look of it a little bit but this shell this will work better it'll work better to set this as tangent space normals rather than a regular bump map now that we've applied the normal map let's go ahead and apply our color map as well so i'll return to the material and under color go to file and here is the texture that i have created for this this is my rock texture i'll go ahead and apply that and now we have our color texture as well if we wanted to perhaps quickly test this we could create a light and turn on the lights in our scene here i'll also activate shadows although we don't really have any objects in here to cast shadows we can of course create a polygon primitive if we want test that out but there you go there's what it looks like right now if we move the light around you'll see how that affects the interior of our cave i'll now spend just a little bit of time testing out the segments making sure that they all join well together and without any seams so using this system of creating uh modular segments that can be pieced together i created this very complicated tunnel system here in my next video i'll be taking these pieces into unity and setting them up so that i can use them in the game engine so thank you for watching this video and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Vad Almafa

Views: 271

Keywords: autodesk, maya, cave, modular, cmt 123, cmt 232

Id: Hlto3wS2O_k

Length: 28min 8sec (1688 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021