Maya Hand Modeling Tutorial 1 of 2

hello my name is Joel Thornton in this tutorial I will be demonstrating how to build a low polygon in in autodesk maya 2012 this hand here that we are about to construct basically has the correct edge loop parameterization for a low poly video game hands and or high resolution film asset you could build this thing completely in Autodesk Maya or you could export this hand into pixologic zbrush to finish it off whichever you choose basically show you here a little bit about the structure this is the low poly hand with a poly smooth apply if I go ahead and change the divisions back to zero we can see here at the base mesh basically the strength of this mesh is that it is parameterised the same for each of the fingers as it is for the thumb and I can demonstrate that by going into the Edit mesh insert edge loop tool go ahead and reset the tool and I'm going to select multiple edge loops and for a number of edge loops I'm going to set it to one and if you'll notice here that when I go ahead and insert an edge loop on the top of the thumb it goes ahead and runs the loop all the way around the under of the phone and around the sides if I do it again it does it again all the way around the thumb to the side of the hand and then if I go ahead and start subdividing the sides of the fingers they'll run perfectly around sides of the thumb as well as it when I do to subdivide the tops of the fingers my edge parameters ation will not jump a track and subdivide something that I don't want to be subdivided it only subdivides basically where I want it to be so divided I can also increase the edge prioritization in the base of the palm of the hand also you want to be a little bit careful one limitation of it is that if you go ahead and start adding more edge loops here you have to be aware that you're also going to add the edge loops to the thumb itself or on the backside now that can be fine just as long as you're aware that if you go ahead and add some more edge loops for to give more detail here with the mesh it's going to run around the backside and maybe just cause you a little bit more time later down the road so be able to wear of that what I tend to do is leave a thumb alone once I inserted the edge loops like so so I've got basically one two three four five edges on each finger that's where I tend to leave it and then what I like to do is do the rest of the mesh find micro detailer in ZBrush and or using a displacement map I use displacement maps mostly but if you're a ZBrush person this one also works it's ZBrush is essentially using this placement map to generate a high detail mesh alright so with that being said let's go ahead and get started I'm gonna go ahead and create a new scene I don't want to save that I'm gonna turn my grid back on and the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a image plane in my top orthographic view port so I'm going to go view image plan import image and I want to select my hand ref redux image and you'll see there it just pops into the viewport and I can see it in my top view that's gonna be my reference for the scene so something about view image planes in Maya is that they can be a little cumbersome and what I mean by that is they can be a little confusing in terms of how to manipulate them so if you see here I've selected this image plane and it looks like I could just go ahead and hit the W key and move it however when I do that nothing happens and the reason for that is because the image plane is actually a input node to the camera and so in this case what it's an input node into the top orthographic view port camera so if I want to manipulate that thing what I have to do is select the top viewport camera and then if I click on the image plane under the channel box which is an input into that camera then I can get to the parameters that are available to me to basically move or scale or do whatever I want with this image plan so the one you want to worry about I believe is Center Y and then I'll allow you to move the image point up or down what I like to do is just move it down a bit you can see here the screen grid is still visible so I'm just going to go ahead and unhide that by clicking on the show/hide screen right here in my perspective view I'm also gonna hide the screen grid on the top view because it's kind of going to be in the way when we actually start modeling here so that's the image plane again it is an attribute that is piped into the top viewport camera and the way that you can move in is not by selecting and moving it but by first selecting at the top viewport camera so select camera and then going into the inputs and the channel box and manipulating it in that way now another thing that is a little weird about image planes is that you can't delete them so if I select this image plane and I hit the Delete key see I get this little error non undeletable node and I can't get rid of it so you might ask what do I do you know if I create this thing and I don't want it anymore or I messed it up and I just want to start over well the answer to that is you're gonna have to go into the window pane here so the top menu set you want to go to window and then you want to open the hyper graph hierarchy and this little window opens up and you can see here that we have the top viewport camera selected and we can't at this point see anything else going on the reason for though is because we can't see the input and output connections in order to see them what we need to do is select the node here and then click on this little button right here which will display the input and output connections once we do that we can see the image plane and we got this little connection here there's two ways you can get rid of it you can just select that connection and break it so all I did was selected that connection and hit delete and that breaks the connection or you can select the image plane itself and delete it and that would do the exact same thing once you've done that you can get out of it in this case we didn't want to delete it so I'm just gonna go and create a new one just to show you guys how that's done again so I'm gonna go to view image plane import image and then I'm gonna go up one directory here select my hand write free docks again if I want to manipulate its position I have to go to view select camera in the top viewport because that's where I created it and I'm gonna use the sin of Y and I'm just gonna drop it down in a couple of units the way I'm doing that is I've just selected I've highlighted the center attribute in the channel box and then I'm holding down the middle mouse button in the viewport to basically enable the spinner to move the image plane up or down without actually having to go in here and type the value or you could just go in here and type of value it's up to you later for I kind of like the negative five so that's what I'm gonna do that and that's it and now that we've got that we're ready to start modeling another thing that you should be aware of is how to hide image planes it looks like my camera focal length it looked weird and it's at actually 35 sometimes even though I was gonna fix that if it wasn't the way to hide an image plane is very simple if you want to show or hide it you just go to show cameras and basically that's just a toggle it's either on or off so it's either showing the cameras or it's not the show camera and that's it and that's a setting that is table below for any viewport so for example I can hide the cameras in my orthographic top viewport so if I go to cameras here and I can still have it visible in my perspective equal so that's working on it alright I'm gonna show it turn it back on because I actually want to start modeling okay so we're ready to go what I want to do first is go into my top orthographic view port and I'm just gonna go to create polygon primitives cube and then I'm just gonna draw a cube here kinda at the base of the wrist and I'll click over here in the perspective you to give it some height then my wrist if I look at it is about twice as wide as as it is tall maybe maybe the ratio is something like four to three so I'm gonna do about that here with my polygon primitive once I've done that I want to go into vertex mode so I'm gonna select on the mesh that I just created and I'm gonna say vertex and then I want a marquee drag in the top view because I want to move these vertices at the difference between Marquis dragging and just click selecting so marquee select versus just click select if you look in the perspective view here if I just click select on this vertex notice what happens it only selects one vertex at a time if I marquee select it's gonna select all the vertices top to bottom so you want to be aware of that whenever you hear me say marquee select you definitely want to do that because if you click select by accident and I wanted you to move both vertices simultaneously you'll see here that when you go to move it you're only going to move one and then your mesh is going to be a little bit messed up versus what we intended in this tutorial so just please be aware of that when you're moving stuff so here I'm gonna marquee select and just move those verts like so and that looks good alright now I'm gonna go into the perspective viewport and I'm gonna hit f8 so that I can get into object mode first so that my sub object options will pop up when I right-click on the mesh so now I have right clicked on the mesh here and I want a face so I'm gonna select the face here I just hit the v key because I want to go ahead and shade this geometry now so once I have this face selective I want to go ahead and extrude it so I'm gonna go ahead and go to edit mesh extrude and then I want to click on this little manipulator here which is going to flip me between local mode and world mode in terms of manipulation of my face my polygon that's important to note because after you start working on your meshes a lot basically if you're in local mode you can get some unintended translations but you don't want and I might be able to demonstrate that a little bit more clearly as we get going right now my my mesh is too clean so it's not really apparent I'll show you that a little bit later as well we get going so much like the mesh again here and I want to go to vertex mode this time so I'm going to right-click on it and select vertex mode right click vertex I want a marquee select because I want to select all the vertices simultaneously and I'm gonna go ahead and move the verts about like that right now we're building the palm of the hand we really are not paying any attention to the thumb at this moment in time so that's why we move the vertices over here on this side what you want to do is you just want to kind of straddle the joints here on these bones and then we're gonna go ahead and do that again I'm going to right-click over my mesh here and I want to extrude one more time so I'm going to say edit mesh extrude if you want to change the size of your extrusion manipulator basically the hotkey for that is plus or minus so right now I'm just saying the minus key which is making money manipulator much smaller if I hit the plus key and lemon at the other it gets bigger that's nice to know because it can be a little cumbersome when the thing starts flying off the frame on you again I want to select this little button here and I want to flip between local and world mode I want world mode because I just want to move this thing completely straight and I don't want it to start flying off and in ten unintended direction that I've done that I'm gonna Marquis dragging the top gear here and I just want to move these vertices to be about like that so they about straddle those bones right there and that looks pretty good okay at this point we want to just go ahead and add one more edge along here for the palm of the hand so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to edit mesh and I'm going to say insert edgeloop and I'm gonna go ahead and do that I'm going to show you the difference here between insert edgeloop manual and insert edgeloop with multiple edge loops so right now we're in manual mode and you'll notice here and wherever I click it's going to add a loop right and I just rested it wherever I click it's going to insert a naturally I don't know what I get it rolled on also wherever I click it's going to insert an actually versus if I go ahead and click this little button here in multiple edge loops and I change this to a value of say 1 what it'll do is no matter where I click it'll put that edge loop at exactly the center of these two sets of edges that can be important at times sometimes you want it to be right down the middle sometimes you want it to be where you want it in this case I want it right down the middle so I'm going to go ahead and go into always set the tool here I'm in the insert edge loop tool so let's just go through it again edit mesh insert edge loop tool settings and I want to select multiple edge loops and then I want to change the number of edge loops to one now wherever I click it's just going to drop it right down the middle that looks good alright so now I just want to go into regular mode here and I want to select vertex mode at this point if you look at the side of your hand you'll notice that from your palm to where your fingers go onto your hand your hand kind of tapers and so what we're doing here is I'm just selecting all these verts down here which represent the palm of your hand and then this would be the base of your palm and I just want to move those up so that we kind of get that taper effect of the hand and generally we're going to insert some fingers here at some point so we're going to have one two three fingers so you just want to make it so once we add our finger holes that these are all going to be roughly square so that's pretty good alright at this point we can also go to face mode and I'm going to select the base of the wrist here and I'm gonna go to edit mesh and have an extruder and click for world mode and I'm going to move this down a little bit also and then I don't want to scale it I actually want to select the vertices here and this is kind of more of the wrist here and I'm just gonna pull these up like so so that we kind of have our wrist going into our hand the beginnings of that okay at this point that's looking pretty good so what I want to do now is I want to go ahead and insert my edge loops from my finger holes so I go to edit mesh insert edge loop tool open up the settings wanna reset it this time I want to select multiple edge loops and the number I want to set to 3 I believe and then now we've got 1 2 3 4 holes for our fingers to go into and that's what we wanted so that looks good okay and then at this point I want to go ahead and insert another set of edges along the side so just to be redundant I'm gonna do it again so I'm gonna go to edit mesh insert edge loop tool I always like to reset this tool the moment I open it just because I don't know you know what I did before I don't know what setting I had or what I was trying to do so I always just reset it back to 1 and then from there you know that there's no settings tweaked and you're gonna kind of get what you want so this time I wanted to do multiple edge loops in one because I wanted this edge to go right down the center of the hand and that looks good all right so now at this point we've got our hands starting to take a little bit of shape right now it's pretty blocky but we got the base of the palm here we got the part where the pads are going to go underneath the knuckles in the front of their hand and now we want to do is we really just want to start shaping this thing a little bit so what I just did there is I hit the three key and what that is is kind of a real-time subdivision surface preview of our match it's not actually doing anything to the mesh it's so really just a visual preview the keys for that are three for the sub D preview one from my polygon but I started with two shows the sub D preview and the polygon control cage and then three is just the sub D preview so let's go back to one now what I want to do is I just want to go around my mesh here and I want to add a little shape so I'm going to select actually before I do that I want to go ahead and extrude from my thumb first so what I'm going to do here is I want to go into face mode and I want to select these two faces right here which represent my thumb home when the thumb is going to extrude out for my match and I'm gonna say edit mesh extrude and then I'm gonna click the little icon here this little thing that kind of looks like a power button on a Mac and that's gonna flip me into world mode instead of local mode and I'm gonna pop over to the top view orthographic and I'm going to right click on my mesh and go to vertex mode and I want a marquee select marquee select so I'm selecting both the top and bottom verts and I really am just gonna want to kind of place these so that they straddle this joint here for this bone weight your hand breaks down is a lot of people think that your thumb only has two knuckles so there's knuckle one not for accounting from the tip backwards so I knew this finger we've got on your index we've got knuckle on and knuckle - and then knuckle three your thumb actually has three joints one of them just happens to be hidden inside your palm the palm of your hand so what we were trying what we're going to try to do here is we're going to try to put three edges on each joint and so we're going to put we got one edge two edges we just need a third one on this side of the joint so let's go ahead and go back to the perspective view I'm gonna go to face mode I'm going to select both of those faces there again and at this point because my last operation no it's not six like I what if I go to edit mesh extrude oh yeah it was if I go to edit mesh extrude notice here that I can extrude it again that way or if I then my last operation was extrude all I have to do is hit the G key and it's just gonna repeat the function so again I'm gonna hit the manipulator to go from local to world load you want to be careful with that though guys because if you get kind of happy and you don't know what you're doing and you start hitting the G key you can end up with faces that are overlapping each other and you can get corrupted geometry and we don't want that so if though you are in a position here where let's say you're working on your mesh and all sudden things are acting a little freaky on you and you don't know what's up you have a couple options at your disposal the first of which is to go to edit delete by type history and that will delete the history for your object if that doesn't solve your problem you can go into vertex mode select all your vertices and you can say edit mesh' merge I always like to reset this too and go ahead and say apply and what that's going to do is if you had any duplicate phases or duplicate vertices it's going to weld them all down to one and that could solve your problem either or your third option let's say you can't figure out what's going on with your mesh but you know that it's not quite functioning properly you can select the mesh and you can say edit our file export selection open up the dialog box you want to select file type for the export let's say obj export turn off all the specific file specific options to off and what that does is essentially gets rid of any history you have on that object that could potentially be causing problems then you click on export selection and ask you where you want to save it at this point I always do temp one so I'm going to say temple on export yes I want to replace it at this point you could just go ahead and create a layer here and hide the existing object and then go to import and import your newly cleaned object and see if it's solve your problems if it's not then if it has not solved your problems and you got bigger problems you probably have to ask me how to fix it and hopefully I can help you fix it but you know sometimes we can't sometimes much just get really messed up so now I want to go ahead and start shaping this match a little bit so I'm going to grab the bottoms of thumb's here kind of add a little bit of shape I want to start along the top of the mane and basically I just want to kind of remove all the boxing this from everything so I'm going to go all the way around one minute and anything that has a boxing edge to it I am going to attempt to get rid of and this is where the modeling comes in you know depending on what you're building you you kind of have to start making decisions at this point as to where you're going to move things based on what it is that you're actually trying to build in this case I'm trying to I'm starting to just merge the thumb hold down because my thumb actually moves away from my hand at kind of an angle compared to the rest of my fingers and we can demonstrate that a little bit later if you don't know what I'm talking about you can just hold tight and you'll see it once we start merging the fingers onto the hand alright so we're going to round the side see hey we got that side okay that's the top part now let's go around and do the bottom you just picked it up and it's not going to be perfect at this stage in the game that would be a good time my image planes starting to get in my way so I'm gonna go to show cameras and then we stay get rid of that for a second like so be careful on that one because we gotta have enough edges and to really do this yet so I'm gonna keep going around here and then the same thing for the bottom here this ended up and now the base of our wrist is a little bit rounded the palm is probably a little bit exaggerated from what it's going to be but that's okay that's something like that and then if I hit the three key and we can look at it it's becoming a little bit more organic at this point you can just add a slight amount of arch and the center of the pole very slight something like that and then we also want to go ahead and just add a little bit of art here for where our fingers are going to go in so what I'd like to do is I just like to go ahead and select first go to wireframe though so that I can make sure I'm getting the right vertices selected and then I'm going to go to marquee select here I'm just going to drag around these guys first I'm going to move them up a little bit and then I'm ready select these side verts and move them up a little bit too so I'm doing is I'm just getting a gentle arc there for the palm of my hand it's just a little bit more of a natural profile and a little bit more consistent with the way your hand is actually shaved okay that looks pretty good and our writing so at this point we could also go ahead and add another edge loop right here to give a little bit more definition for the wrists so I'm going to go ahead and do that it's going to say somehow I got into surfaces mode so I'm going to go into polygons though I say edit mesh insert edge loop tool this time I want it to be a manual in insert and I just want to go ahead and put a put an edge right about there representing the spot where my wrist kind of goes into the palm of my hand and then now I'm able to go ahead and take these vertices here and just pull those down a little bit like so so we just get a little bit better wrist shape there and then then now these guys are pretty over exaggerated so I'll bring those down bring those back and some point hit the 3 key to take a preview of what I'm doing that looks pretty good alright so we've got here is we got the base of the palm Lahan and here we got the wrist I just wanted a little bit more of a break there and what I have could even exaggerate that a little bit more that's looking a lot better alright so that's gonna know whatever I'm doing these tutorials I always have to resist the urge to to model stuff so if you see me modeling stuff and you just want me to get on to the next next step I apologize it's the force of habit I need to remember that I'm trying to show you how to do it not actually build it alright so we get the base of the palm here belt where to the position now where we should go ahead and start building our fingers as you guys know it's a good idea now once you get to a significant stage and you're any project that you're building that it's always a good idea to save so I'm gonna hit the little safe key here and I'm just gonna call it unit hand zero to you let me save that and then I always like to you know save two instead of one because now I've got multiple copies so I'm gonna go to a safe scene s and just click on that left and we'll change it to three and now I've got two copies of the same father okay now we got our palm built out we're ready for the next phase of the project which is to go ahead and start building the fingers and the way we're going to do that for this tutorial is we're going to use a polygon symbol cylinder and I just noticed as I'm looking at this hand model here from the top of you that uh actually forgot to do a step with you guys so let's go ahead and do it now all is not lost it's not a big deal oh we forgot to shape the top of the hand here for the bones so we want to do that so I'm just going to select these vertices here and what we want to do is move them up so that they straddle the joints here between the carpals and the flame phalanges and then you just want to select these guys and you're just going to run out down splits of the metacarpals and then the metacarpals kind of hit the carpals but then they come to a point here where the tendons run down the back of your fingers so what we want to do here is we want to grab these and I'm going to non-uniform scale and I'm just going to pinch those in a little bit like so it's pretty good except for I didn't want to do it on the bottom so I'm going to grab those however I do want it to happen here so I grab these alright that's looking good top and bottom let's go ahead and build the fingers out alright this would be a good point for me to explain something else whenever you're modeling your mash what happens is this smoothing groups can get kind of messed up and I can illustrate that but I'm going to go ahead and just select a bunch of edges here and I'm gonna go to normals set normal angle I'm gonna change this to 180 and I'm gonna go ahead and apply it if you ever see this you gotta mashing it it just kind of looks wrong it looks a little weird and funky to you the way to fix that I like to model what everything very faceted and looking like it is on the left here rather than smooth like on the right here that looks weird to me and I can't really see what's going on so if that happens to you you got two options you can just select your object here you're probably got mesh and you can say a normal set normal angle you can drop that all the way down to zero and say apply or if you want to smooth them you like the smooth look better totally again up to you you can select the mesh and you can say normals set normal angle and generally you want to set it to about ninety and say apply and then it'll kind of smooth everything off again I don't like that so I would either do it to do a normal set normal angle and set it to zero or you can just go to these shortcuts here which is normals hardened edge or normals soften it and they basically do the same thing as doing it manually it's just that they make it a one click instead of actually having to change a parameter so again I like hard so I'm gonna do normal hardened edge and there we go good to go alright let's blow this finger out I'm going to go into the top view orthographic and I'm going to say create polygon primitives cylinder I'm gonna click in my top view and I want my cylinder to be about the width of my finger on the illustration here I'm gonna then pop over into perspective view and finish the height this thing and somehow I'm locked up so can't undo strange alright let's do this again so I'm going to go ahead and and go to create polygon primitives cylinder again I want to make it about the width of that middle finger there at the top I'm gonna go ahead and give it a height and go ahead and complete that action and I'm gonna go ahead and hit e4 rotate and I'm just gonna rotate this finger here down negative 90 degrees at this point I want to move the cylinder Center so that it's at the base of the finger I can do that by just holding down the D key to temporarily enable the center pivot manipulator or I can hit the insert key and move it down and then hit the insert key to get back out of it either way works it's up to you now I'm gonna go ahead and move the finger up here to the top of the illustration and that's pretty good here what you want is you want your cylinder to be the length of it to basically come up here and cut this kind of hemisphere in half so I could go ahead and scale that or I could also come down here into inputs in the construction history and just changed the heights here so notice here that it when I changed the height in the construction history it didn't pay any attention to my changing of the pivots I'm just going to move that up a little bit and that's good okay at this point I'm gonna go ahead and move my cylinder down so that it basically takes out the into the hole where it's gonna get to insert it here in a little bit and now what I want to do is I want to change the number of subdivisions in the subdivision axis and I want to change it to eight so subdivision axis 8 and then subdivision axes height I want to go ahead and give it a setting up nine by setting at nine it's actually gonna give me ten edges if I count on one two three four five six seven eight nine ten so sometimes in Maya you have to go one less than the number you want in order to get the number you want alright so now that I have the cylinder here created what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and create a layer for it and I'm gonna hide it and then a create a layer for the poem also so I can hide both objects and what I want to do here is I want to go into face mode and I'm gonna select all the faces there at the end by marque dragging and then in the control click to deselect the faces I don't want and then I just get the cap and I might delete them so again marque drag to select all these faces control selected deselect the faces I don't want and I'm going to delete the cap there that looks pretty good and that's what I wanted all right now I'm gonna hit the f8 key to go into object mode and what I want to do here is I want to create what's going to become a fingertip for this model so I'm not going to create polygon primitives spear and now I'm going to hold down the V key for a snap to vertex temporarily and I just want to create my spear so that it's Center is right there on that vertex never hit the e key to rotate it 90 degrees so that the the poles of the sphere are facing on the opposite sides of the finger so we change that to negative 90 and now I can go ahead and drag this spear down into place I also want to change the construction parameters on this - I believe it's 8 in subdivision access in 4 in subdivision height and see what happens there now that spheres fits perfectly on the tip of that cylinder and this is what's going to become our tip of the finger so now I can hide that cylinder layer and what I want to do is go into fur-face mode on the sphere there and I want to delete the backside of it and then I want to go ahead and go into object mode and what's like both of the cylinder and the sphere that I just cut in half and I want to go to mesh combine to make them 1 and then I want to go into vertex mode and I want to go ahead and weld all these vertices together you can see here that the vertices are not welded because they're apart from each other so I want to go to edit mesh merge and I'll try the default setting right now but they're too far apart so I just need to change that from the point 0 1 to a point 1 and there we go now we see them all pop in the line and they're all the Weldon that's great we want it and then now what I want to do here is I have a couple of triangles here see we got a 1 2 3 and a 1 2 3 and what we want to do is can make this into a quad so 1 2 3 4 we're going to do that we're going to go into edge mode and we're going to select the edges on this side and we're gonna select the edges on the opposite side also and now we're gonna go to edit mesh delete edge/vertex and now we have is a quad on the sides of this cylinder rather than a try and that's just gonna make our lives easier later down the road as we modeling this thing and sculpting it in Maya and or if you want to take it into ZBrush to be a lot cleaner if it doesn't have any triangles so at this point we have what kind of looks like a test tube and if I hit the three key to smooth it out if that's what we were modeling we would have done a great job on that but we're modeling the tip of our modeling a finger so now that we have the correct number of edges in the correct parameterization for the edge loops now we can go ahead and start adding shape to this thing so at this point I'm going to go ahead and go edit delete by type history so I'm going to clean up the history on this thing before I start shaping it and I'm gonna go ahead and unhide my palm here and we're going to go ahead and continue doing a little bit more modeling okay believe it or not we're getting very close to being finished with the first stage of the hand model so let's keep going here let's go ahead and start shaping this finger here so I'm going to pop over to the orthographic view and I'm going to go into vertex mode and at first I'm just going to shape it here from the top view so if we grab here let's start from the top if we grab here these set of edges they represent the knuckle here three and we just want to straddle it along the knuckle and then I'm gonna non-uniform scale these vertices down and what I mean by non-uniform versus uniform is that I'm scaling in one to access here instead of grabbing the center here and scaling all on one which would give me very different results I'm going to select these and scale down and then I'm going to do the same thing for the center of the knuckle here and I'm non-uniform scale that down a little bit these I'm just going to go ahead and leave alone for now we also could go ahead and taper the top of the finger a little bit if we wanted to okay that looks pretty good and we're gonna leave it alone for there and now we can go into the side view and we're going to start adding a little bit of shape here so I'm going to grab do these edges that represent the top of the knuckle and I just want to pull that one a little bit and then these three also if you look at your finger from the side you'll also notice that it tapers similar to the way the palm does from the fattest point at the base to the thinnest point at the top so now would be a good time to just go ahead and grab all these verts here and just non-uniform scale those down a bit and then do the same thing yeah and I moved us but actually that looks pretty good so I'm really buzzed right there all right the next thing we can do is we can start adding some shape to the side of the finger right now probably don't really have enough edge loops to kind of fatten the fingers up so totally acceptable for us to go ahead and add some extra edge loops in order to be able to do that so I'm going to go into edit mesh insert edge loop tool reset insert edge loops these I want to be right at the middle so I'm going to go ahead and do one I'm just going to go ahead and add some extra loops here and it looks pretty good and now what we can do is we can go into vertex mode I actually want to go into my orthographic view port beside here and now if I wanted to go ahead and kind of fat in my fingers I would actually have enough edges to do that my fingers the the fatness kind of happens right up at the base where the creases that's what I'm doing it and then same thing on the tip here it's just just stuff for the knuckle and then now what we want to do is I want to grab these verts here and I want to bring them down and start building the tip of the finger and the nail bed so grabbing these looks pretty good we got our knuckle we got a slight bump there after the knuckle and then now we have the nail bed here so these two faces represent the nail bat so I'm going to round this off a little bit to the back for my fingernail that looks pretty good I'll go ahead and grab these guys these 2 verts here and I'm just gonna scale those in a little bit that's looking pretty good okay and we've got the nail bed here for our finger and that's looking pretty good so we're ready to go ahead and model the finger now this is a little tricky and I also want to mention that some people were asking would you do this a different way if you were building a game model etc and the answer is yes if I were doing this well that's not true depending on the game and the engine you may want to do the fingernail using a normal map however if you're building a hero character you may want to go ahead and model a finger now so what I'm trying to do here is just I'm making a model that's kind of friendly for a lot of different things I work in the film industry so if I were doing a character for a film I would absolutely model finger now the only difference between that model and the model I'm showing you is that I would separate the fingernails a separate object and in this model I'm going to model the fingernail and leave it attached again super easy for you to detach it if you wanted to at a later stage this method for simplification sake I'm just going to leave it attached alright so now that we have our baseline here for our nail dead the only other thing we need to do is add an extra edge so that we can have the effect where the cuticle kind of wraps around the finger and then starts falling off the side as the fingernail grows out from the finger all right so in order to get that effect we're going to have to add one extra edge so I'm going to go to edit mesh insert edge loop tool I'm going to open up the settings I want to reset the tool this time I just want to do it manually so I'm going to go ahead and insert it right there and that looks pretty good so we're going to keep going now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into face mode and I'm gonna select these four faces and they're actually going to become the basis for our finger no my select these faces and I'm going to go ahead and extrude them so I'm gonna go to edit mesh extrude notice here this is a perfect example of the difference between world mode and local mode so right now the manipulation for this extrusion is in local mode and that can be demonstrated by the fact that this manipulator is basically perpendicular to this polygon right here so if I were to extrude this you can see here that it's going to extrude and it's going to kind of give it a Keystone effect as it goes out or it's going to do the opposite as it goes in I actually don't want that so I want it to go straight down and that's why I click the little ring icon here to flip into world mode before I do this so I just want to extrude it straight down and what I'm doing here is I'm extruding down to be about what I believe would be the width of a fingernail plus a cuticle okay but I'm gonna do it four times that are gonna make up that distance of my first extrusion I'm gonna do it three times my first extrusion I'm gonna go down a little bit and then we hit the G key I want to flip to world mode now I go down a little bit Jiki one more time world mode again go down this whenever I go farther and what's going to happen here is this distance from here to here is going to become my fingernail and these edges over here going to become my cuticle right it's kind of hard to see that right now but it'll make sense after I do this once so I'm going to go to edge mode and I'm going to select these two edges here I'm gonna move them forward and down then once like these edges here move them forward and now it will select these edges here next one down and I'm gonna go forward and down and what I've done here is I've built the base of my thumb where the fingernail then basically is going to grow out right on top of that so if I hit the three key we can see here that we've got a divot where our fingernail needs to go we've got the tip of the finger where it represents the area of skin underneath the fingernail and now we need to go ahead and create a fingernail so let's go ahead and do that before I do that what I like to do here is just go into vertex mode and grab these two vertices here on the cuticle or it's gonna fall off the sides and I just want to pull those out a little bit just gonna make it a little bit nicer it's also going to make it a little bit easier for you to grab those points at a later time without them kind of getting lost and so I'm going to just do that same thing there and then at this point if you wanted a little asymmetry in your model you could move those on your own it and if I hit the three key we can see the effect of the warn to go back to my control cage and then now what I want to do is I want to go to face mode and it miss like these six polygons here which are going to become my fingernail and I'm going to go ahead and extrude those and I want to go into world mode here so you extrude this up and then I'm gonna hit the G key again click the little icon here their world MO I go up again that's pretty good and then geeky again oh I don't know what I did but my manipulator disappeared that ever happens sometimes you can't get it back but if your manipulator ever disappears and you can get it back it's this little button here on the left I was lucky enough it allowed it to come back and I'm gonna just go ahead and finish that extrusion that I was doing at the G key again world mo extrude up again and I want this fingernail to kind of stop right there at the base of that edge right there because that's where my cuticle is wanting to start flowing over the top of my fingernail basically okay so that looks pretty good I've got a slight artifact here because I'm not paying attention to what I'm doing so I'm trying to race through and get this thing done in a time frame but I kind of accidentally ended up with like a little pitch there in the fingernail which I don't want so I just wanted to fix that alright so what I want to do here is now go ahead and grab these vertices right here and I'm gonna hit the are key and I'm just gonna uniform scale those guys down and what that is is I'm pulling those down to basically give me the cuticle for the finger now close down these ones here on the side here I went and moved and you can see here they're giving me a little grief as well as this one at the side sometimes you can just gonna have to move those yourself one at a time in order to get the desired effect so I'm going to do that here there we go so the sides here is where it gets a little tricky and see what I'm I'm doing I'm just trying to basically make the cuticle fold over on itself so that when I smooth it with the three key we kind of get that effect here so see how the cuticle folds down over the side of the fingernail on the fingernail kind of grows out the side you might just have to do this a few times to to get the neck for how this is all working I know it's confusing to look at you see me pulling a bunch of points and you're probably saying to yourself what's he doing but my advice to you is just do it a couple times and then you'll luck kind of get it so basically I'm building this model in a manner to where my control cage is always I always have the intention of smoothing that cage later to get the desired effect and in this case it's to have a realistic fingernail growing from underneath a cuticle and it looks just like the skin and cuticle of a regular old finger alright so we've accomplished that I'm gonna go ahead and show you one more thing so this is kind of you know for a man or a child's fingernail and it looks like about like that with the cuticle growing over it at this point you can also start shaping your finger into any degree basically if to me that looks a little fat so if you wanted to come in and and thin it up you could do that again in these exercises I'm not really doing a complete demo on shaping of things I'm more or less showing you the protocol for how to arrange things and relying on you guys as artists to figure out how to shape them okay so we got that the one thing I do want to show you is how to make this fingernail long if you wanted a longer fingernail so if you can email finger now the way to do that it's just going here into face mode and select these faces here and go to edit somehow I got into surfaces moan edit mesh extrude going to world moan here and pop these babies out and then there we go we got a long finger now and again you can shape that however you want alright so that's it I'm going to undo that long finger now because that's not what I'm trying to do and now that we have our one middle finger model way to a point where we can go ahead and duplicate this finger and finish off the rest of the fingers for the yeah so all I'm doing here is a I wanted to fatten my knuckles from the top view here as I looked at it and so I did that there we go that looks good if I select going to object most like both these guys hit three you can see here that it's starting to smooth nicely but what's good right now I think my fingers a little bit too flat so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna go to modify center pivot insert I want to move this pivot to be back at the base of the finger I'm gonna hit insert again and then now I'm gonna just scale this guy up a bit so that it is a little thicker and fits the hole that it's about to go into alright so let's go ahead and go back to the ctrl K just for both of these and now what I want to do is I want to start duplicating this middle finger and positioning it so I'm gonna go ahead and go into the top view and we modeled one finger and we just want to reuse it so I'm going to select it and I say control D or duplicate and I'm gonna move it over here to the index finger I'm gonna hit the e key and rotate it into position and now I want to scale it now think about your fingers is for your middle finger your index finger and your ring finger they're all relatively the same size so if you're going to uniform scale it you don't want to do that too much maybe just a little bit and then you want a non-uniform scale it to get the link that looks pretty good generally though when I keep these approximately the same size I like to just scale it down a little bit uniformly vary a little bit and then non-uniform to get the link right okay and then I'm gonna just for the pinkie however pinkie is a lot smaller than the rest of your fingers so there you can get a considerable amount of uniform scaling what I like to do is just use the illustration so once I uniform scale it down and the width is approximate to the image then I go ahead and non-uniform scale for the length okay and then now what we have here is we have all the fingers the last thing I want to do is if you'll remember we put the arc here into the palm so I want to just also put some arc into the fingers in terms of their position relative to each other and the palm kind of mirror that it just gives a little bit more of an interesting organic look and then finally we need the thumb and we are also going to get the thumb from the middle finger so I'm going to select the middle finger ctrl D and then I'm gonna go ahead and move it out now remember what I said before about the thumb appearing to only have two joints when it actually has three so the third ones down here and the way it works out is that center knuckle there the big knuckle on the finger is the same as the joint there on the side of the phone alright so what we want to do here is actually I'm gonna use this knuckle here as my guide because you want that to fall right across there and then this one we could actually go into edge mode unless you like this edge loop here and for this thumb that's probably too many edges for right now so I want to go and select those edges and I just want to delete them somebody say that mesh to the edge plus vertex and then now what I want to do is move my thumb into position and I also want to rotate it down a bit actually before I rotated in that axis your thumb is also at an angle which is about 45 degrees to the rest of your fingers so in between 35 and 45 is a good number so I rotate it down to about a negative 45 and I'm just going to see how that looks and that looks pretty good and then I go a little bit farther because this is important we want this edge on the palm so this edge coming around the palm of the hand to sync up with this edge that runs down the center of the thumb alright it's important to have that relationship because when we go ahead and combine these later that's going to be very important to the edge loop parameterization the next thing we want to do is we just want to rotate the thumb down a little bit like so and that looks pretty good now we can probably move it up a bit there we go fits into the opening and at this point now that we have everything position we can go ahead and delete some of the faces off of the thumb itself in this case we want to delete all in the faces that are on the backside of the thumb just pass this knuckle here alright and that looks pretty good all right now we're ready to go ahead and cut out these faces here for where my thumb is going to go into my mash and now I can go ahead and combine we're gonna mesh combined now what I want to do is I want to weld all these vertices to each other so I'm going to this time I'm going to go ahead and move the vertices from my thumb here into the vertices on the palm of my hand so I'm going to do that by going to polygons edit mesh merge vertex tool and if you'll remember here I said that this edge down the center of the thumb is very important that it coincides with this edge so I'm gonna make that connection first and sometimes the graphics card doesn't know which vertex that you want to you want to move so you're gonna have to just move to a different vantage point and I commonly do this I don't know why I get again but I had one more step to do before I needed to weld the thumb in and then as I need to add another set of edges down the center of the thumb here because apparently my finger has too many edges versus my palm here so I apologize I should have done that she'll remember that that's okay I caught it early enough so if this happens to you and you realize quickly that you're not going to have enough edges all you have to do is go to edit mesh insert edge loop tool and just go ahead and insert another set of edges right down the center that'll do it that's all I needed now I go back to what object mode and I can go to edit mesh and where's our text tool and go right back to where I started here and I'm just going to go all the way around here this is an area where the transition can get a little bit wonky between the finger that you've welded in and the actual thumb and really what you're going to have to do there is you're just going to you're going to have to do a little bit of modeling to try to fix that transition a little bit more in this case I just like to select these vertices here and I'm just going to rotate them a little bit like so and that's pretty good for now I might take some of the hardness off like so if you'll notice there's a pretty big gap here if I go into my top view between my thumb and the palm of the hand and what this is this represents kind of the meaty area which is essentially webbing your thumb has a large amount of webbing between it then your other fingers do and what I mean by webbing is the webbing if you look at your finger from the top put a ring on and from if you turn your hand over and look at the palm you can see the ring touches the base of the palm if you flip it over there's a good probably about 3/4 of an inch between the two and what that is is that's the webbing so what we're going to do here in order to compensate for that is you really you're just going to select these vertices here now that we've done this and we're just going to pull those babies out to make up that meatiness of the inside of the poem and keep calling it meatiness but it's really it's really just a webbing of the poem itself be careful when you do this I just pulled the wrong one it's it's this set of edges here so you're just going to follow the edge loop down and so it goes to there and so you want to be careful that you don't pull the wrong set of edges when you're when you're going ahead and doing the webbing for the any of the fingers for that matter [Music] all right and if I wanted to get a preview of that we can see here what that looks like something like that all right that's got up a lot of erosion here from the Polly control cage to what the smooth view see that erosion and what we're going to do is we're going to fix that at the very end here by just adding more edges to the model so I'll show you how to do that here in a second alright so now that we've got the thumb welded on and we got the transition modeled a little bit better I want to go ahead and grab these vertices here pull them up like so carry the meatiness on my palm along the interior here or this row that would be good time to grab these pull those down a bit here we go we're getting a little bit more of a palm like shave and you just put on you know look at uh look at your palm and see if see if that looks right want to be careful not to model and subdue mode like I am I'm doing it because I kind of know what I'm doing but for you guys are new to Maya you want to be careful there you can end up with a pretty ugly control cage if you're not careful so what I like to do is just keep my manipulations pretty light don't move don't move things a whole lot if you are going to pull points and on your subdue you preview all right so there we go that's looking better now I want to go ahead and I'm gonna make a layer here for my fingers so I can hide those and we're ready to go ahead and we want to first add some edge loops down the centers of the fingers so we have enough edges to to actually weld those fingers onto the hand so we're gonna do that first I want to delete the history you can see over here to the side it's getting pretty pretty detailed a lot of junk in there and I just want to get rid of that so I want to go edit delete by type history get rid of that I'm gonna go to edit mesh insert edge loop tool and I wanted to open up the dialog for that so I'm gonna say insert edgeloop tool' we said it multiple edge loops clicked in one and I just want these to be Senate down the edge of the hand that looks good now that I've done that I'm gonna go into face mode and I just want to shifts like all the phases at the front of the palm here and then we hit delete and just kind of looking around to make sure I didn't unintentionally delete a face and I did so easier way to do that would have been just for me to marquee select all of these phases and then marquee control select - deselect the sides and there we go that looks good all right now I can turn my fingers back on an idea and I just want to go ahead and do well these fingers one at a time so I'm going to select the palm in my index finger and I'm going to say edit mesh' I'm sorry mesh combined and then edit mesh marriage vertex tool and then I'm just going to go around here like so now notice here that I stopped right there and that's because I'm not going to do anything with that vertex because I don't actually have anything to to merge the vertex to at this point I need to combine my other finger before I can do that so I'm going to just kind of weld all these fingers on and leave those interior vertices alone until I have all the fingers component so I could also do this in one step so I just did that one individually if you're a little bit more comfortable with mine you kind of feel like you know what you're doing you could just select them all and you can say mash combined and then reduce this to one step and then we're going to edit mesh' merge vertex tool and just go around here can I'm leaving that middle vertex alone because I want to show you a different way to do it right now if I were to merge these vertices what will happen here using the merge vertex atilla's I'll select one vertex and then I'll move it to the other one and kind of give me a blonde key favor from one edge loop to the other and I don't want that so when I do merge these guys I want to just average the distances between them so I'm actually going to use a different tool to do that all right so let's finish this off I'm gonna go ahead and go round the fingers we draw these guys and then you do the same thing here I probably could have noticed that I could have moved my pinky in a little farther I caught that too late so my pinky as uh maybe a little out of step with my hand model and I'm just gonna leave it along all right so now I've got them all merged up I'm gonna go into object mode and now what I want to do is I want to weld these vertices but I'm going to use a different tool to do it so I'm gonna go into vertex mode I'm gonna select both these verts sometimes if you can't see the vertices you're selecting it helps to go to wireframe and then you can select them like so and what I want to use here is a tool called merge to Center one that's going to do is it's going to basically average the distances between those two vertices and move them to each other rather than favoring one to the next so I just hit the G key and I want to show you guys how to do it so select both the vertices and again that was edit mesh merged to Center and what it does is it averages the distances and moves the vertices to each other rather than one to the other so I'm gonna edit mesh merge to Center and much nicer transition that looks pretty good we've got quite a bit of history on our model here so I'm going to go ahead and go to edit delete by type history that would be a great time to save it probably should have been saving the whole time I lost track of it because it was explaining myself while I was doing it okay so now that we have our mesh built out here we got everything to mine I just want to do a little bit more rudimentary shaping before we get into more advanced shaping in the next tutorial all right so at this stage in the game your model is technically correct what I like to do here is go ahead and finish off the webbing so let's go ahead and do that these sets of edges right here represent the webbing for the finger so what I like to do just select these vertices whoops right here and just move those out like so we do it on this one as well one two three keep it up yeah you can grab these verts right back here at the tops of the hand can also help to do this in the orthographic view port I'm just going to go ahead and pull those back so I'm kind of using the perspective and orthographic view ports to manipulate vertices here reason for that is because as you guys know by now when you start pulling points in the perspective viewport it can get a little out of hand on you really fast I'm just going to pull those back that looks pretty good and then pull these back to be kind of on top of the necklace and then we can um could try to finish the webbing here but again like I said there's really not enough edges to really do that at this point the time so I would want you guys to do a lot more shaping here from what I have but we don't really have time in this tutorial to show that so well we'll just have to go ahead and say I want you to do that and what I would do is I'd go ahead and start pulling verts now and shaping my model up considerably before I would move on to the next step

Channel: MrYouTeacher

Views: 104,219

Keywords: 3ds model, tutorials 3d max, modeling hand, tutorial 3d max, modeling a hand, 3dmax tutorials, 3dsmax tutorial, 3ds tutorial, 3d; 3d tutorial, 3ds tutorials, 3dsmax tutorials, 3d max tutorial, maya model, 3d max models, 3d tutorials, 3d studio max tutorials, maya tutorials, 3d max tutorials, hand modeling, fast, efficient, hand model, fast efficient hand model, maya, modeling 3d, animation 3d, model 3d, 3d models 3d, autodesk

Id: F-hirvikh7w

Length: 81min 18sec (4878 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 23 2012