Maya Auto Retopology

if you want to know how I created this hard surface model Maya using Autoroutes apology yes you heard that right Autoroutes apology then you want to stick around for the video coming up what's going on you through the modeling beast this is Jo musi and today I have another hard surface modeling tutorial for Maya and in this instance we're gonna be using autoroute apology to create a object that would be too hard or too time-consuming to model in a traditional way with regular edge flow so we're gonna combine boolean's and then we're also gonna go ahead and script some Autoroutes apology into our model if you're new around here please consider subscribing as I do Maya hard-surface tutorials like this all the time and if you want to get better and fast our heart surface modeling download my hard surface modeling cheat sheets which is a great companion piece to all my videos in the guide you'll find bookmark links to my videos which will provide more resources and explanations shall you need them so without further ado let's get on with the video before we get started I want to give a big shout out to my man Justin Barrington for correctly guessing most of the puns the Maya puns that I had in a route apology skit so I'm gonna go ahead and link the skit right here it was the intro to a real apology tutorial that I did and on a comment I basically asked what are all the Maya references within this skit and Justin got the most a number correct therefore I'm giving him a big shoutout for that as usual I will go ahead and show you guys some of the tools that I use how to access them within the Maya interface the ones that I don't since most of my tools are hockey I will go ahead and drop a call-out car at the bottom of the screen that way you'd know how to access that tool so I'm gonna go ahead and start with the cube here and I'll select here on my channel box and just bring it over and what I'll do is I'll make this five by five by five and just move it up here should be two point five there we go so we're nice and flush here and then what I'll also do is take out my multi cut tool and I'm just gonna add here some symmetry lines and I'm basically to get these lines I'm doing ctrl middle mouse click to a drop in the middle with the multi-cut enabled I'm gonna go ahead bevel these edges here so I'll select them so with all my edges selected I'm gonna go to the modeling toolkit here if you don't know how to access that it's this little option box here we can select double and let me move this out the way you'll see that we have segments enabled we middle mouse click left and right you see this is gonna update we could also play really whatever field you have selected you can middle mouse click and actually change the parameters if this looks a little bit different you probably have fraction enabled which should be the default and I actually just took that off but if you put the fraction here you can play with the fraction as well and you could middle mouse click as well so whatever you have highlighted here middle mouse scrub left to right you'll be able to basically affect that right I'm gonna go ahead and just bring the segment's down it's about 6 or maybe we'll bump them up to about 8 so I think that looks pretty good so from here we'll go ahead and get a cylinder it's probably hidden so I'll bring that up I do like to work with my wireframe on shaded so I'll enable that and then from here what I'll do give my rotate tool hold down J to constrain to 90 or 15 degree increments so one of the things about creating this initial geometry is that we roughly want to approximate the divisions right so since we have this nice smooth bevel here we probably wouldn't want to use a cylinder that's like this right very very low rest that's not really gonna help our end result so we kind of want to match visually doesn't have to be exact signs but just eyeballing it we roughly want to approximate kind of the divisions here for this shape right so let's go ahead and start out with thirty-two that's maybe a little bit too dense so I'm gonna drop this down to about twenty-eight and one of the things about divisions are whenever you work I do like to have lines of symmetry so I try to have even numbers so if I drop this to 27 you see that we don't have a line of symmetry so always when using these primitives and divisions you know just try to keep things nice and even they'll give you kind of these symmetrical lines down the middle alright so that looks pretty good I'll go ahead and scale like this because we're gonna be cutting out so we want to encompass the whole shape and then with the move tool I'll go ahead and start dropping this down and I'm gonna scale this up a little bit more before we actually cut this out we'll actually want to go ahead and create a copy so I'll do duplicate this object and then I'll hold down J it's a constraint to 15 degree increments again and there we go so we'll take this shape first and then this one second here that's the order that you have to basically select in order for the bullying still work right so you want this to cut into this this should be the first selection this is gonna be the second we'll go to mesh boolean's and then we'll do a difference and then we'll do this again so we'll select this hold down shift select this one and then since this was the last operation that we did mesh boolean's and difference we actually don't have to go all the way through Maya will remember the menu command so to redo the last menu command all you have to do is a middle mouse click and it'll redo that menu commit so now we get this nice result and we're not going to worry about topology right now because we're gonna fix this with the Autoroutes apology so we're gonna go ahead and create one more cut in this case we'll need a sphere so we'll go here and create polygon primitives sphere we'll go into a wireframe here and I'll go to the side view and I'll scale this up move it up a little bit I'll go back to a wireframe here and I'm approximating pretty much this spherical cutout right and I want to make it quite large but obviously we want to contain it within the volume here so I'm going to select this face here a double click to select this ring and then over sorry this edge loop and I will grow the selection and the grow is right here under select and grow that's how you could access it and I'm gonna keep growing this so from this point I'm gonna go ahead and extrude and usually I like to just do the extrude function and then just use the Move tool to pull up and we can just scale to flam that it this out if we want it right so this is pretty much gonna act as another boolean shape and I like how this is looking so what I'll do from here is same thing as before we'll select this shift-click this and then we'll middle mouse to redo that last bullying command and if you're getting issues like this it's probably the scaling so we might be able to go here to the sphere and you see how it's kind of walking out and that's because we have a little bit too much clipping going on so we mathis adjust that shape a little bit and that's one of the things about boolean's is you know the shapes are off or the volumes are off you will you will get those issues so what we could do here just kind of scale this down that's why it works and let's see this on the side so I think this looks pretty good I'm just playing around with the shape here and you could either do this or so you can go in here and play with that sphere and I think I liked it right about here so I'm just adjusting this so from this point let's go ahead and delete all this history so I'll go to edit delete by type and then history and we'll clear that out I'm gonna duplicate this so I have these two models side by side this is gonna serve as an example this first one so I'll select it and I need to be able to access my Mel scripting right so what I'll need to do is change the workspace from modeling standard it's a classic and now we could input some mel right here make sure your object is selected on object mode and I'll type in poly Ramesh and I'll hit enter and this is gonna triangulate our mesh so this is the first step of the routes apology process from here we need to actually put in a retopo right so we'll type in poly retopo and I'll hit enter and you see that it basically reads apologize this match for you the reason I did this on here is because we have a little bit of an issue right essentially we're gonna add some holding edges we're gonna clean this up if we take a look at this we don't really have any clean symmetry lines right so here this is alright but you see that this gets a little bit wonky and if we go here to edge mode and we double click you see that we kind of have this weird spiraling going on right so what we could do is actually tell the routes apology our nodes to respect certain edges and the way we do so is by setting a hard edge to whatever hard edges we want the routes apology to respect in the first place we're gonna do something similar here but instead of just jumping right in we're gonna establish hard edges first what I want to do is double click this guy here this edge here and basically I want to establish symmetry lines by making these edges hard so I'll select this I'll select this this so that looks pretty good and I'm not really worried about going all the way through because if you watched enough of my tutorials you know I like to work with symmetry so we're really just gonna be focusing on a four for this we're gonna clean it up after the roots apology and then we'll marry it back to get a whole piece right so this looks pretty good and now we're gonna go here to messes play and hardened edge and if we go here and we disable wireframe on shaded we should see that hard edge right there particularly right here it probably won't show up much here cuz it's a flat face but here you could definitely tell that you know it's it's a hard edge here and that's pretty much what we wanted same thing here you could actually tell it on the vertical part of the inside so with that established I'm just kind of looking at this and making sure that we don't have to set any other hard edges which I don't think we will I think this was the only issue right the symmetry lines so from here we'll go ahead and repeat the process so on object mode I'll type in poly Ramesh to triangulate our mesh and even it out and then again we'll type in poly retopo hit enter and now we should have better symmetry lines so let's see what we have and if we go here to the top we see that the sphere actually looks a lot better in this one right so those hard edges are gonna make our life a lot easier you know basically cutting this up into symmetrical planes to be able to just work with the model now one thing we can do is we can go here in object mode and if you want to tweak the resolution of this we can definitely Dow that so I'm going to select this and I'm actually going to go into the retopo settings and the node and maybe Dow down the resolution of this mesh so for that we need to look at the history stack here so we can click this icon here we can go in here and actually lower this down if you actually want to look at the attributes just more of an expanded way I'll hit ctrl a to bring up my attribute and we'll just find that poly retopo node and under topology we can bring this count down so let's try a thousand and see how this looks so with this sets a thousand what we can do here is edit the lead by type and history will delete the history we'll select this one delete it we no longer needed here so I'm looking at which section I want to work with like I said we are gonna be just working on 1/4 and then copy this over and I think I like this section better here so what I'll do is take this edge here and select it and then I'll select this edge and hold him down shift go here and then we can detach the components so these are no longer connected so I can double click here this polygon island just make sure that you're on face and then we can inverse the selection hit delete and you see that it's taking this with it so let's actually delete the history again and now that should work alright so I was able to inverse that selection what I can do here is we need a little bit of cleanup I like how this was handled better than this so what I'll do is I'll take out this edge here and then I'll go ahead and with the multi-cut just connect these guys like this so with this writer like this we have a couple options probably don't want to leave this edge as is describing this shape so what I want to do in this case is leave this edge so I'm gonna take my multi cut prop this over here right and now we should be able to take these delete this right and still keep this edge and then delete these guys right and we can delete this edge and you see it's not really affecting our solo white at all all right so if we will go to this guy out you see that it would have deleted our or affected our solo right here so sometimes it's just a matter of you know figuring out what edge is doing what and you know that's gonna give you a clue on what to the lead and what to keep what I'll do is I'll take this and I want to slide it on the surface so here what I'll do is I'll go to this little hammer modeling tool kit and just make sure that we're on surface which we are now we can just slide this along the surface and this looks pretty good and then here what we could do is do the same thing here but I actually want to use edge slide in this case and then just get this edge a little bit closer just to even things out and at this point I think I want to hide the grid so I'll go to show and get rid of the grid just uncheck that just move this guy over like this bridge still there so let me go back here and yeah I actually unchecked the wrong thing so make sure that I'm doing grid and then I'm gonna take these edges here and move them so I'm gonna select this vert here and just kind of strain that out a little bit and I'll do the same thing here so anytime that you run anything automatic in Maya like this routes apology it's gonna get you there quicker but just like most things that are automatic at some point you will have to go and do a little bit of manual work to get things exactly like how you want but ultimately this did save us a tremendous amount of time so if you want to strain out some of these edges you could just double click one scale it flat and then we can just probably select the rest of these here delete so now that we have two of flat edges we can get the multi cut do control middle mouse click add a one in the middle and then just drop two and now we have some nice straight edges so now the last order of business is to just reinforce all the hard edges here so I'm just gonna go ahead and make this a large selection here and everything that should be hard edge I'm just selecting it and then I will apply a bevel with basically another division here and now I'll go to object mode right click assign new material I'll do a blend and the blend will expose any pinching I'll subdivide this I'll go I'll hate the 3 key to make this a subdivision mesh and then I'll take off wireframe on shaded let's take a look here basically what the blend will do it it gives us these nice specular highlights so the pinching if we add any would be a lot more evident and this looks actually pretty good so one last order of business before we mirror this is to fix this right we don't want this pinch here so we'll delete it and then I'll go ahead and take the move tool and I'll just enable a surface slide again you could access a via the tool kit but I just have this ha keyed so I'm just sliding this down with the multi-cut I'll go ahead and just connect this edge so we're ready to mirror so I'll do shift right click mirror options and I'll make sure that my settings are reset here first we'll do one in the X and you want to make sure that cut geometry is off if not you will get some weird results it won't actually mirror correctly and then from here we can do a mirror in the X but before I do that let's make sure that this is on a low threshold so we don't get over pinching and then I'll do a shift right-click mirror options and we'll do this in the Z I'll take this off again one zero one so this is our finished result and we did have to do a little bit of manual cleanup but overall we saved a lot of time by using the Ramesh and retopo nodes within Maya thank you so much for tuning in folks to this Maya hard surface modeling tutorial please let me know how I did in the comment section down below don't forget to like the video and please share this with another 3d artist that might find value in the information till we meet again folks I will catch you next time

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 36,458

Rating: 4.9195328 out of 5

Keywords: maya retopology, maya retopology tutorial, maya retopology zbrush, 3d character modeling, maya tutorial, maya tutorial 2019, maya tutorial modeling, 3d character modeling blender, 3d modeling tutorial, 3d modeling tutorial maya, blender character modeling, retopology, quad draw maya, remesh, auto retopology, auto reto, auto retopology maya, auto retopology zbrush, hard surface modeling maya, hard surface modeling, maya retopo

Id: FwU2Za17-og

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/skutsky]

Hey my man JL thanks for constant upload man really good video... Can you make next video about how much poly is low poly I mean if I make a car which is important to gameplay how much poly limit is there vaguely speaking and likewise all other props and stuff anyway thanks for the video...!!

[u/LilStrug]

Why not cut the object into a 4th, retopo to get the symmetry you like, then rebuild the whole object with a series of duplicate and combine objects?

Thank you for the tutorials, while my workflow on things may differ, I always learn or am reminded of cool tools to simply my workflow. Much appreciated!