Maya Environment Modelling Tutorial | Medieval Lighthouse Part 01

hello guys and welcome to a new week with more 3d more tips more tricks my name is abraham leo most of you already know me for those of you we're here to do 3d i'm here to show you some of my techniques some of my workflows and hopefully it teaches something new we also have a great community so make sure to leave a comment say hi if you're new and uh make sure to hit the little like subscribe and like button that's gonna keep you updated and make sure that you always get the alerts when we upload a new video we upload a video every single day and today it's a very special day first of all let's go through some announcements we finally hit the 17 000 subscriber goals so congratulations guys thank you thank you very much for all of your support throughout this month throughout these years even and uh yeah we're at 17 000 subscribers so that means that we are due our majora's mask animation uh tutorial that we're going to be doing in the next couple weeks this week is main project week so i have something very very cool for you guys uh this time around but we're gonna have we already we we also have the majora's mask on our to-do list okay now um this is project week and for those of you that are unaware we sometimes do this or like long projects where it takes us several days to go through a in a specific exercise and in this specific or in this particular occasion i want to do something that a lot of you have been asking which is environments and i was doing some research and i found this one i i don't remember who did that suggested a lighthouse for i think that was a serious course i i think he meant like the super like complex like hard surface thing inside of a lighthouse uh but that kind of inspired me and i found this very cool concept of a lighthouse in in a cliff which i think it's a really really good exercise to go over certain principles that we take into consideration when we're doing environment pieces now i'm going to pre pre-face this by saying that i'm going to be using some simple techniques i want this like tutorial to be as accessible to anyone uh as possible so we're not gonna go with like crazy you thems and crazy like modeling and kid bashing techniques uh we're gonna we're gonna keep it simple we're gonna be using the basics and i'm gonna be teaching you the the secrets and the the main things i consider important for this sort of things now it is definitely going to be a challenge uh i'm looking this way but i know that the image over here it is going to be a challenge because i'm not sure if i'm going to be able to do this in five days which is our like um the time that we kind of like organized for our main project so i'm gonna do the following i'm gonna start like recording making sure that you guys learn all of the cool things and trips uh tips and tricks but if we see that we need more time i might have to do only like let's say modeling and uvs for this first section and then on a second like uh exploration or a second phase we'll do like texturing and rendering okay so let's see how we'd go and how it goes and and yeah let's just just start working so uh before we do that though thank you to moon hau i know he doesn't know about us or probably does not know about us but he's a concept artist from seoul uh south korea and he posted this uh thing three years ago uh there's not any any other like recent works this was uh three years ago as well so i'm not sure if he's still active but if not um he left us with a very great concept that we can use for our own uh learning um elements so as with everything you're gonna go into your maya project remember we have this maya project with all of the of the assets here for those of you that don't know how to create that it's super simple file and you just go project window you create a new project call it whatever you want mine is called uh next to live and every time you open maya especially if you're working on multiple projects you're gonna go here and set your project so that everything that you do scenes that you save images that you use are saved onto this particular project right here okay now uh for environments one thing that i always always always recommend is to do a little bit of study before before you jump into maya and start modeling because we tend to overlook a lot of stuff and it then becomes a little bit difficult to uh to like properly find everything so as you can see right here this is a very complex uh object we have a brick wall we have uh like this wood frames we have the cloth we have objects like the barrels and the lamps um nets like there's there's a lot like this could be if you really put your time into this and spend like i don't know like a full month like full on time working on this this could be a perfect portfolio piece because there's so many things that you can use so we're gonna again keep it sort of simple just to get the the basics there and uh and we'll go from there we also have the cliff which is also something that you would need to sculpt or or build and it's uh it's also important so uh what we're gonna do now is i wanna draw a plane okay so here in my in my photoshop image i'm actually gonna go and grab like a very bright color i usually like using red and i'm gonna try and find with my brush tool what the perspective of this image is this is gonna save so much time in the in the camera matching section because as you can see this is not a perfect front view this is it's a sort of like a like a just a perspective view so we do want to match this thing in a way that makes it uh easier to match everything so if i draw a line right here you can see that that's one of my perspectives and then if i just like project this line over here i know that if i match this corner inside of maya i should be able to just like match everything else okay so i'm just gonna go here which is the line that i can see and this kind of it's giving me my like my ground plane for the base of the of the whole tower right uh now another thing that's going to be super super important is the scale because this thing right here looks like it's uh well it's supposed to be for humans right so that means that this store right here and this door right here they should be about 2.3 meters i think that's the the standard size for a door let's check it out like door standard size are you going to say that it says it's 80 inches we usually work in centimeters so let's go uh two to two point zero three centimeters so maybe this was a little bit too tall so let's say 2.1 i'm gonna go 2.1 i think two might be a little bit too low um so i'm gonna go with you now i'm gonna save this image as well here i'm going to call this lighthouse reference and again the only thing i want is that plane because i know if i can match that plane everything else is very geometrical so i should be able to match everything as well so here instead of maya what i need to do is i need to create a new camera so i'm going to go rendering camera i'm going to say panels look through selected and now i'm inside of that camera okay so panels are selected and once i'm inside of this camera i'm going to use my image plane and i'm going to create or attach my source image which is lighthouse reference right here there we go so now as you can see here when i move this thing around it it kind of looks like like the image is remaining still but it's not that the image is remaining still since we have the image and the camera no matter where we move it's always going to be like static uh however if we were to go into perspective view you're gonna see that this camera right here i'm not sure what am i not selecting this uh there we go i mean there we go so it seems i had like like a mask or something so yeah so if you move this camera you can see how this image is attached to it now i don't know how big this thing is but i do know how big the door is so if i had to estimate like the size of like the the overall area it's at least 10 meters i would say at least 10 meters probably like 20 meters across so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a plane here and i'm going to change the options here to 20. however one thing that you need to understand is in maya units are set to centimeters so this means that these are 20 centimeters that would be like like a miniature house and i want this to be a real scale so i'm gonna go to 20 and instead of 20 centimeters if i go if i go to 200 centimeters that's going to be 2 meters right and if i go to 2000 that's actually the 20 meters that we're going for so this is the base of my element so i'm gonna go back into my camera panels look through selected i mean i'm not sure if it's exactly that one but it kind of looks like it and i'm gonna start zooming out but you see that we have a problem the image is really close to the camera so i'm gonna select the camera go into the attribute editor and in the image plane shape i'm gonna use this thing called depth to push the image back like this i'm gonna say 10 000 units it's going to be really really far from my camera now i should be able to place this a little like a square i might even have to go like more there we go now if you go like here we went from let's go 10 000. let's try 20 000. if at any point you stop seeing your object which is very common that's because there's something called a clip plane in your cameras that you need to fix so here on the image i'm going to add two zeros to my clip plane so that we can always see the camera so the the the limit at which the camera sees is going to be pushed back okay so that's the that's the far clip uh so now as you can see i should be able to very closely match or match this as close as possible to that red plane that i have right there again it doesn't have to be perfect but as close as possible and there we go so now i know that this thing right here i mean 20 meters might be a little bit too much for that front view let's take a let's take an educated guess so usually this steps would be i would say like a meter uh and then we have this one right here we have one like two three four five six let's say six meters there and then we have like an extra three here so that's nine meters that's 10 meters across which doesn't seem like it seems a little bit small so i'm going to say 12 meters across again just uh just an estimation so it's going to be 12 12 uh 1200 no uh a hundred of this once so it's it's it's not 12 volt it's like this right wait wait wait we want uh 12 meters and if there's gonna be if they're gonna be centimeters that means it's a hundred so two more there we go so that should be it right i think my math is right there i'm really really mad at bad and math but i think we're in the in the good here so let's go there and now uh you're probably not gonna see your your image planes anymore on the on this view which is totally fine um and the best way i can check if this is like working properly or not if i create a cube and i say 180 and then 50 and 50 that's roughly the size of a human uh just like the standard size and yeah that this seems like proper i i do think this looks uh quite nice so if i were to place my human right about here which is on the corner of the stairs and i go back to this camera which we're by the way gonna call shotcam we should be able to visualize let's say panels look through selected we should be able to be sure yeah the size of a human which to me right there it looks perfectly normal because that's where the that's where the thing is going to be now here's where things become tricky i'm going to grab my shotcam and i'm going to lock it i'm going to right click and lock selector so that we can't move it anymore and over here on the plane i'm actually going to remove all of the division so let's say a super basic plane and i'm going to try to find where like the corners of the volumes for this thing is and again it's gonna be a little bit difficult because of how far we are from the camera uh so i'm gonna grab my cut tool right here grab the object object mode grab the floor plane cut tool and if we cut that's roughly the one on the on this side right there and then there's one right about there so you should be able to grab this point right here extrude it out and just like push it up to the second level which is where the door is going to be and again this is where you you kind of have to go in here and see and take a look and say okay does this look like it's it's properly going where it should be going and i think that this is a little bit too like to this side so i'm going to push it over here and i'm again going to go into the shotgun panels look through selected and again i'm just going to have to kind of like eyeball where the corners of the things are and that seems about right now this line right here and this line right here should be right about there actually again let me take a look at the concept now see like this guys right here at different depths so that means that we're gonna have another line let's go here right about here and then from these two edges we're gonna grab those two little edges oh this one and this one and ctrl e and with w push them out so as you can see now we've been able to create like sort of like the vase of where my lighthouse is going to be in real scale which again it's tricky this is why why this is one of those projects that makes things a little bit complicated but now we have this like sort of like base i'm not too worried about this little thing right here because that's like an extra thing that we can add later on i definitely do want to have my main building block here so now what i'm going to do is i'm going gonna create a cube very important that this looks square like you shouldn't have any like skewed edges or anything so i'm gonna build a cube and i know that this cube or i'm gonna use this cube as the base for my for my lighthouse so i'm gonna snap this to the um to the corner here like this and i'm going to try to find this line right there the line where this thing uh snaps another way to do this is you can just shot cam panels look through selected you can say panels tier of copy and that way you're gonna have a copy of the of the image over here which is gonna be even more difficult to see because it's uh it's so small but again here's where i like to use a little bit of my like common sense like okay that's what we see in spanish let's see what do we have here so i know that there's a little bit of a distance here so i know that the tower won't start right here because otherwise we wouldn't have the distance so i will push it back roughly about there maybe a little bit more and then i'll push this so that it can match the corner right there so i know that this corner matches with my main building i'm gonna grab this face and i'm gonna push it over here now if i see the concept i can't really see if there's a little bit of a gap but i wouldn't expect this tower to go all the way to the border that looks kind of weird so i'm going to stop it right about there and i'm going to do something similar to the to the back side so something like this right and uh and that way we create like the bases of our element then we grab this face right here and we're going to push this up right about there but you can definitely see that i missed the mark on this one actually so let's let's bring it in and that's about it it seems a little bit too thin at that point i think that looks a little bit thin so i'm gonna i'm gonna keep it a little bit forward because i do want to have a little bit of space here to walk through but not super super thin and then this one it does seem to be to become a little bit like smaller like i can definitely see that this is not square it's more like a rectangular shape which is fine uh but it's gonna make it a little bit weird here so i'm gonna i'm gonna make it smaller than this side and probably a little bit smaller on this head as well because we do seem to have that sort of like effect going on and that would be my like my blocking for the for that element um then we're gonna do the tower which as you can see it's a six-sided like a cylinder so i'm gonna create a cylinder and if i want to find the center of this face to line up the cylinder perfectly one quick way to do it is grab this face and say mesh or edit mesh poke and then grab the cylinder that we just created and with v we snap it to that point right there so now when we scale it up it's going to scale from that specific point we of course change the divisions here to six and the there seems to be a front-facing uh like wall like perfectly aligned with this thing right here so i would like make this bigger probably like that and we would have this sitting right there now the only thing i'm a little bit concerned about is the fact that um this thing seems to be like maybe i made a mistake and this thing is not meant to be a square and it's more mentally like a cylinder i think that makes a little bit more sense so i am gonna move the the edge here or the your vertex here to where this thing is supposed to start which is about there and then i'm going to duplicate why am i duplicating and not just extruding because eventually these two things are going to have like different materials and uh and that's going to be and it's important that we that we have different models for different materials so here i'm definitely going to make this a little bit bigger so that it kind of like holds or or becomes like the the nice little base there grab all of the vertices here and i know that by just moving them down i should be able to match or like land right here i am going to make this a little bit thicker though just to again have this rolled like base and that's it now we grab all of the projects over here we're gonna push this all the way i'm actually gonna go all the way up to the little tower right here and we're gonna scale this down a little bit to to kind of match the the perspective now here's again here's where were where we are in in a constant battle with concept artists being a conservative is hard like i've had i have friends that do it and i know it's difficult and i know perspective is difficult i know form is difficult so it is very common that you will find certain like mismatches in perspectives uh when you're copying and concept being it could be a character or it could be like this sort of things and you're still going to find those sorts of uh irregularities so whenever that happens i strongly recommend that you follow what makes most sense so in this case i know my brain tells me hey push this thing back but if i do that it looks like it's tilting and i don't want that i know that my sense or my common sense says this should be completely straight so here that that means that the the conservatives might have made a small mistake small inaccuracy which is again not a not to blame because it's very difficult to do this kind of thing now i am gonna duplicate this guy again ctrl d and then let's make it a little bit smaller definitely shorter because this is gonna be the little live house that we have over there this actually is not as that and the fact that we're using this building blocks doesn't mean that these are gonna be like the final um elements that we're gonna have later on we can't change them these are just uh what i would call like a blocking as this is the blocking stage right some of the blockings will become the the actual final mesh it's very weird i'm having i'm having issues like snapping like properly snapping it's weird anyway so there we go so that would be like my little lighthouse lighthouse tower over there and then we have a little cone that we're gonna use so again we just grab the cone and if we snap this to the center of the of the cylinder we should be able to find the exact place that we want there we go so we push this out we definitely grab this guys right here push them out bring them down grab this guy bring it up a little bit and that's it so i know that this are the basic shapes i know we're still missing like the like the walkways and the stairs and everything but again i just want to find like what the proportions are for my thing for this first section okay now for the house very similar uh very similar approach if i take a look at the concept art you're gonna see that okay so here on one of the of the faces of the of the tower we have this like block right so if i manage to to match this block i'm gonna be i'm gonna be in a very good shape and then from this block we're gonna have like a sort of like a bevel here and then keep going up so again i'm gonna go over here create a box and i'm gonna move this up and um it seems that it's right there on the corner but not exactly on the corner so so again i have to kind of like like guesstimate where this thing is gonna be so let me move there it's very weird it seems like it doesn't want to use did i change anything feels like i changed something i don't know what it was but uh there we go i mean weird anyway so ah there we go and then snap this there right there so now again we push this and and that's roughly where it is as you can see it's not exactly on the like on the edge of the of the wall it's kind of like in the middle of it which kind of makes sense right i mean that would be the the point where you would have the most balance so i'm gonna go right to the middle there i am gonna grab this face right here i'm gonna push it in even if there's overlap that's fine and then on the concept i can see that this block pretty much goes all the way over here eventually there's a little house or there's a little hole there we'll uh we'll work it in another way but let's go all the way over here which again we need to make sure that like the distance that i'm seeing from here to this corner makes sense to the distance that we have right here and it generally does i think for the character and everything uh this face seems to be a little bit uh deeper so let's push this a little bit more like this which means that this guy's also gonna have to go back a little bit more and then of course this guy goes down here it pretty much touches this ground and then this one goes all the way up to about there and then from here we're gonna have a line going right here which is where the where the wooden thing ends and i know that this face is going to extrude up to about there which is this line over here but it kind of flares out a little bit right so so we're going to have to flare it out a little bit and then if we extrude back again we should be having our little house right there so again here's where where things kind of like you go into this thing is like this doesn't make sense like if i'm extruding out because i see this ramp like i would expect this wall to be like way more outside than the other wall and uh we do have that but then on the concept here i'm not like matching it it seems like i need to push this a little bit further in like this and probably give it a little bit more depth so something like this again it's just try i'm just trying to match this in the best possible way on the front here it seems like the the inclination is not as much so i might want to take this guy in and just push it in a little bit or even like push this like this one right here push it in as well like both of those options work just to again match the concept in the best possible way and then the thickness also does not match the original concept you can see it's it's like really thin over here uh but again this is where where you need to to kind of use your common sense and say like you know what like i think i'm gonna push this slightly more to this side and maybe this guy right here i can make it slightly smaller and uh yeah like that's probably where i'm gonna stop because i i'm not sure how i'm gonna solve this just yet but i don't wanna like modify the the proportions as much so that's gonna give me again the little blocking right there uh then we have the rooftop and for the rooftop very simple technique is just grab a cube and then select this face and go and go into mesh tools collapse sorry edit mesh uh collapse and then this one as well collapse and you're gonna get this sort of like prism and it's just a matter of again lining this up this is where having a natural right in the in the center of the object really helps because it's going to be easier to just snap to the point and find the the center there so here i should be able to find the proper height for everything so this guy goes there this guy's go to the front like this and then i can just like move this down a little bit more and there we go we have the little blocking for the roof over there now um i think that's pretty much it i mean just to make this look a little bit more fancy one thing i can do is i can go right about there and i can actually like remove this faces because that's the like the little overhang that we have there and it's super easy to fix this it's just a matter of breaching from one side to the other like this reach a bridge and then we insert an edge loop right in the middle and then this new vertices that we have right here these two guys we just merge the center same for this ones because again we're not really going to be using or we might use some of the geometries that we're creating here but the most important important part of this whole process is to is to get like most of the of the elements uh where they're supposed to be okay so that's it i mean i do see no we have the little it's this little like shelf right so this little shelf i know that uh that the height of that little shelf shelf should match this one right here like this uh thing this other element so i am gonna add another line right around here and technically i should be able to select this phase right here and just extrude this is creating handguns and stuff don't worry we're not going to be using this guys it's just to to get an idea of where things are right so it's again just just building our our initial state our initial block out for this uh whole thing so that's it i mean if you want to go a little bit more with your with this element for instance here it's one two three four five six six edges as well so one thing you can do here for instance is just create another cylinder let's snap it to the point of the pyramid here or the little cone here change this to six and we're gonna make this really small find the proper like position and the proper like thickness which is about that one duplicate move this down right about there make it bigger and position it where it should be so that's it so as you can see it took us about 20 minutes uh 20 minutes but we have a very good representation of the whole thing now here's where i would definitely try doing the uh the plane here for the for the cliff so i'm gonna show you a technique that i think works interestingly so i'm gonna start with a plane a big plane and i'm gonna go with just one subdivision i'm gonna go to the top view i'm gonna select this plane i'm gonna use my cut tool and i'm gonna start the cutting process uh what's the side this one right here so about there now a little bit closer to there there we go and as you can see i'm just kind of like tracing the general shape of the cliff like this so it's just kind of like guesstimating where the cliff is going to be and then just delete the whole thing there grab this vertex here just push it out of the frame because we're not gonna be seeing that and i mean this looks like a super dangerous place to live right uh but you're gonna be able to just like extrude this thing out and uh and now we have this thing so mesh display reverse and that's it like we have a very nice base of course we need to bring this a little bit like like push it down let me turn on uh wireframe on shaded so that i can see where things are because this platform seems to be raised a little bit so if we snap it to the platform and then we just push it down a little bit that's roughly where the cliff would be probably gonna have to push this thing like this and i mean we're gonna be working on this one a little bit more later on um but for now i think this is a good a good approach like this right you can even like grab this vertices give it a sort of like sharp effect right there i'm actually gonna grab this uh like the edges of this plane like all of the edges that go around and give it extrude just to have like a little bit of something just like that like the thickness of the platform because i do want to know where where things are landing and eventually we're gonna have like our barrels and stuff so everything is going to be over here there we go and that's it we have a very nice effect now this again is going to happen in the perspective camera you just select the camera you go into uh your clip plane and you say zero to have more uh distance and now we should be able to see the whole thing one thing you can do here and again it's just uh it's just a simple simple little uh thing that might help you visualize where we're going with all of this is create this small light setup and as you can see the light right here it's a very like direct light coming from like the far uh far left so i'm gonna go into rendering create this directional light i'm just going to position over here let's make it bigger so it's going to be coming like this way if you press number seven you're going to get this sort of like effect so it's it's kind of like this this is i mean pretty much where what we have here you can even turn on the shadows too to see how the shadows are kind of like affecting every single place so it's pretty much that one i think we nailed the light right there but i don't like having this super strong shadow so i'm gonna add an ambient light and the ambient light i'm gonna reduce to like a 0.2 or like a 0.3 to have a little bit more light and then the color of the ambient light we can actually check or select the like this blue hue that we have on the sky and that's going to give us this very nice effect you can turn on anti-aliasing you can turn on ambient occlusion as well to get a little a little bit of an extra shadow and these two guys i'm going to group them together control g and i'm going to call this a light setup there we go so just hide that guy or sorry well i mean you can hide it any time you want in this case i'm just going to move it down because i don't want to see the lights and there we go we have a very nice blocking for our uh little uh scenario right here so again as i've mentioned i i don't think we're going to be able to finish this in one week that means i'm going to have to do this in like three hours because videos are usually 30 40 minutes long and i don't think we're gonna make it so let's let's make a deal and let me know in the comments if you guys are okay with this we're going to use this week to push the modeling as far as we can go create a very nice like clay render you guys know the the clear renders right so let's push it so that we can create a very nice clear render of the environment something like something like this right like a very very nice effect uh and then uh either later this month or in the next couple of weeks we'll push the textures if you're okay with that let me know in the comments if you like this let me know in the comments as well because i think this is a little bit of an ambitious project uh i think it's one of the most ambitious we've had so far but if we take it slow and we do it step by step not only can i do it you can do it as well so make sure to to give it a shot again i don't think i can share this directly but just look for this guy moon hyo in in art station and you should find this concept if you want to follow along and that's it for this one guys i'll see you back tomorrow bye

Channel: Nexttut

Views: 1,816

Keywords: maya 2018, zbrush tutorial, maya tutorial, nalini kanta jena, character sculpting, zbrush sculpting, zbrush turorial, beginner zbrush tutorial, human anatomy zbrush, modeling tutorial

Id: mYVPjTbTxvA

Length: 31min 20sec (1880 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 07 2021