Maya Hard Surface Basics: Curved Surfaces

this hard surface stuff in my is kind of easy stupid jail and this channel always giving tutorials saying that heart I don't even need his channel let me unsubscribe right now bad look at this look at this model I'm doing on this curved surface boom boom extrude just gonna drop this edge loop tool here wait a minute I'm getting pinching this edge I needed here but it's causing tension here what do I do it's killing me and with me you want to live what's going on you 3d modeling beast this is Jael musi today we are talking about hard surface modeling on curved surfaces in Maya I promise you guys this is the last 3d modeling tutorial that I do right after watching the Terminator the point that I was trying to make in the intro skit was that when we start hard surface modeling especially on curved surfaces the horizontal holding edges writer that details pretty easy to come by but as soon as you add that perpendicular loop that sometimes we need to just hold up certain details it could actually cause pinching in other areas mainly the curved areas and that can be challenging especially if you start off and that's kind of the game that we play when we do a hard surface modeling especially if you're going into your sub deep preview and you say that pinching so it can be challenging to create details on those curved surfaces reinforce certain areas but actually other areas of loan I'm also going to be sharing other tips on how to create details on curved surfaces on your hard surface models in Lion now how this video came about is my man Dave came through in the comment section and demanded that I do a video explaining how to do details on a curved surface so I checked out his comment and I decided to do video and actually add on some more information to it so without further ado let's get on with the video all right I'm gonna go ahead and start with a cylinder here and then I'm gonna go ahead and move it on the ground plane so I'll go in the Y put a 1 oops that's some rotate put these in the translate Y so essentially we're gonna be trying to do is create a square cut out where I have all the four corners reinforced yet I don't have any pinching that has been caused on the sides of that summer right so here what I'm gonna do with the multi cut add a edge loop in the middle so I'll hold down a control middle mouse click to add the edge loop in the middle and now what we can do is add one here and one here and what I'm doing is actually holding down ctrl and shift to just snap to certain increments so we get the same spacing on the top and the bottom right so from here what I can do is go to face selection I'll hold down tab to paint my face selection here and I'll go ahead and just paint kind of this these four faces here and what I can do is I can go ahead and get my extrude tool and I'll extrude inward so with the thickness sorry with the offset I'll go in and I'll kind of create that window for me right so now we have something like this and we can go ahead and do another extrude and we could just get the move tool push inward and there we go right so now comes the task of reinforcing these edges right because if we just hit three now it's going to lose a lot of that crispness in the edges so our first thing that I like to do is go here to my face mode hold down tab what we can do is just to select these guys hold down tab again and paint this selection here and then I'll go ahead and do an extrude and just do inward give me an edge loop going this way and then what I can do here is drop one here drop one here and all this is with the multi cut tool right so we'll drop one here as well that's gonna be the easier one so if we go ahead and smooth this out we see that we're getting some hardness on this corner but ultimately we want to go ahead and go up and down so really get a sharp corner so I'll add one here I don't want here and let me that one there we go that spacing is better so now if I ate three now the corners are being held up pretty well right but the problem here is that as you might have guessed we're gonna get pinching in these areas right so um I typically recommend going with a blend because the blend is gonna basically highlight those pinched areas a lot better than the lambert so here i'll shift i'm sorry i'll right-click and then I'll go to exists assign existing material blend so now if we orbit here we definitely see the pinching here right so the pinching is being caused by this loop here and this kind of a catch-22 where we basically need this edge here at this corner but we don't need it here and that causes the pinching so what do we do about this well we gotta do a little bit of edge flow work and what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to try to work symmetrically so I'll go ahead and basically just select this guy here this guy here so all these edges that I want to separate and then I'll shift right click and what I'll do is detach components right so once this is attached what I can do is double click this now this is gonna be isolated so I can go to select and then we can do a inverse so we're gonna flip that selection over I'll hit delete and we're basically just gonna work on this part and then symmetrize everything over all right so now what we could do is basically start doing some lower edge flow so we know that we need this edge here but we don't want to hit right so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go here delete this and then just double click this delete this right and now what I can do is with my multi cut I'm gonna take this guy here and push it here so essentially what I'm gonna do is take this edge and run it parallel to my cylinder here right or to this edge here so now what I can do is delete this guy right and now we have this guy here which is causing a try here and it's caused some pinching too so we need to add another edge loop now if we go here and we add the edge loop we don't want to continue here right so usually what I do in this case is I just added one vert so basically so if we go here to the vert mode will see that this vert is here so what this verts going to do is actually just act as a stopper for our edge so now what I could do is hold down control the middle mouse click then what I could do is just take this guy here and then connect it here I'll hit enter take this edge delete it now if we go to three mode this is being held up for good object mode not that much pinching right so what else we could do here this also take my multi cut will run one loop here one loop here so this is what we get right here and now I'm just gonna go ahead and go back to object mode I'll go ahead and make sure that my pivot is in the middle which it should still be so with that being said I'll shift right-click I'll go to mirror options I'll go ahead and mirror in the X and I'll take off cut geometry off make sure this merge threshold is nice and low so now we have that part I'll shift right-click I'll go ahead and go to mirror again this time we'll go ahead and run it in the Y and I'll take that off and what I can do is just move this pivot point here I could have done before the mirroring but that's fine and now I'll go ahead and do this one more time and we'll do this in the Z and there we go so here's our finished model and if I go here to verb mode I left some hanging verts to get rid of hanging verts they're pretty easy all you got to do is select everything hit the lead and you'll get rid of them let's go to object mode and we still do get a little bit of pinching here as we can see there's not much that we'll be able to do because this is a really low red cylinder so usually when you're cutting out details you want to go a little bit more dense and here I'll show you exactly what I mean so here I built another similar model and you see that it's is a lot more dense this one had 60 spans on the cylinder versus 20 that I started and if we smooth this one even with the blend this looks pretty good right so here I'm just gonna zoom in on this corner and you actually see no pinching at all so that's kind of a difference so this is something that I kind of struggled with when I first started doing hard surface I try to keep everything very low but on curved surfaces your best bet is to go a little bit more denser than you usually would that way you have less volume loss and all those corners are going to be better contained by the added edges all right so let's go ahead and take a look at if we wanted to basically expand on this right so maybe we want to do this more than just one time or just have it done to one area since we're talking about curved areas I want to get a little bit into radial symmetry all right so here let's just say that instead of this one a slot or reach this area that we wanted six right and like I said this is actually based off a cylinder with 60 divisions so here what we're gonna do is we need to figure out how many spans is this section that we're gonna build right so I'm gonna go here to my face selection mode and holding down tab I'm just gonna go ahead and paint this selection here all right so this is going to be pretty much the pattern that we want to build and we want to basically replicate it around the cylinder so the first thing that we need is how many faces so this is ten faces so this pattern is going to involve 10 faces the cylinder was built on 60 faces right so this is gonna fit fine right that means that we're gonna be able to have six of these patterns revolved around this Sun now what we need to do is first separated right so here I'll go to my let me just go back to one mode and I'll go ahead and get my edges so I'll double click this guy here and I double click this guy here and you see that I basically selected the area that I want to work with and separate now a lot of you and I used to do this all the time is if I want lifes like this to go around do the whole deleting game select faces recent life but that can be cumbersome so if you want to make just a precision selection to peel off what you can do is just select your edges and then shift-click shift right click go to the attach components and now all you got to do is double click this guy and that's what you basically want to keep so if we double click this we can't delete and there it is all right so now we go back to object mode and we want to work with radial symmetry right because we want to create this cellular again with that detail so I'm gonna go to edit and then duplicate special and access the option box so we have two options here one is copy which is going to basically create a copy of static copy and if we do changes to our original none of those changes are going to be ported over or we can do instance where it's gonna create instances and keep that live connection so I'll show you instances because I think it's pretty powerful so I'll go here the instance and we do hello all right now that we have our cylindrical slice right we basically got do a little bit of math so I'll go here to edit and duplicate special options now that we have our slice we have to do a little the math right so we need sick I'm sorry we need five additional right because we want to total six so that's gonna be five five copies and then we need sixty degrees in the Y right so why is this sixty well there's three hundred and sixty degrees in a full circle and if we divide that by six which is the number of phases or sections we'll get sixty right so that's going to give us the degrees that we want and then we need to work in the y axis so if we had duplicate special we get booboo right the problem is is our pivot so if I go here we need to change this pivot to pivot from where we actually want this to revolve from right so we'll hit deep we'll hold down V here and then we'll hit W again now just go back to instead of just going to duplicate special again we can just middle mouse click since that was the last command that we did right so it's gonna bring up the option box duplicate special and there we go right since we made this an instance you'll see that if we go here to shading wireframe on shaded and maybe we decided that after duplicating this with the instance option that we wanted to add more details it's not gonna be a problem we don't have to backtrack so I could come in here right maybe I want to bevel this edge yeah and I forgot to hit instance so silly silly JL so let me go back here again and then I'll do instance duplicate special so now I can select this edge bevel it to get a little bit of thickness out of this one going to face mode select that loop extrude inward right and then if I know that I'm going to need to hold in that adjust here what we can do is put the divisions to three that's going to save us a little bit of legwork then with the multi cut here I can go ahead and add an edge here here here and here and then I can just go ahead and select this face here delete it and then go here so like these faces deselect these and the lead so I need to add a couple holding edges here as well so hold this shape a bit better on the inside so now we want to create one unified object the leading history on this won't work so what you actually have to do is convert the instances to an object so I'll select all my instances I'll go to modify convert and then I go to instance to object so now these are all baked in if I go to face mode here you see that it's no longer updating so now could just take all these guys here I'll go ahead and do a mesh and combine I'll take all my verts here and then what I can do is I can do a merge and now if I smooth this out there we go there's our model if we go to shading and turn off wireframe on shaded that looks pretty good okay last thing that I want to show you is actually creating something on a flat plane and then adding a bender former to actually give it the curvature right and this is how I created this guy right here so if you see that pattern it looks kind of complex but if you break it down and you do it straight with the proper or divisions going horizontally it's actually not that difficult right so I saved the slice here alright and I did that for a reason so let's go ahead and get rid of any thickness here so I'll take this guy here this here and then this here as well I'll go ahead and detach the components like I did previously I'll double click the and then what I can do is go to select and I can select the inverse and those are the shells there that are separated I delete that and then now I'll go to vertice mode I'll scale flat right so working on a flat plane a lot of times especially creating patterns can be a lot easier than starting out with a curved surface maybe you're doing like treads for a tire maybe you're tracing a reference image so working on a flat plane and then bending it can definitely have its set of advantages right so here what we first want to do is create a strip or a long pattern so we need to get a little bit of information so what I'll do here is first freeze the transform so I'll go to modify and then freeze the transforms I'll hit D V and then just snap to this vert right here in the corner I'll access my move tool I'll hit control D again right I'll hold down V to snap now we see that we need to move in a value of 1 and the X to basically just be flush with that other piece so I got the information I needed I can delete that and once again I'll go to edit and then duplicate special option box we could go to edit reset the settings and then we'll create a strip of a total of 10 so we need nine more and then as we as we found out we need a value of 1 X and then we'll go ahead and hit duplicate special and there we go right so we'll select this one we'll go ahead and combine the mesh and then I'll just isolate this and now we definitely have to merge these verts so again I'll select all my verts do a merge command which the merge is so to merge your verts you can do edit and then edit mesh and merge right there yes I got I'm shot I'm trying to record baby I got it like I'm I can't keep yeah okay bye I can't get any work done around here people calling me leave me alone I got I got my subscribers to take care of alright so so now we have our pattern and the last order of business is to bend it into place so will my pattern with my piece selected here I'll go to edit duplicate special and then I already set this up so I need ten total so I need nine additional and we already found out that we need one unit over and the X I'll do duplicate special I'll shift click this guy I'll go ahead and isolate selected and now we need to combine this so I'll go to mesh and combine and then I'll select all the virtue so I need to merge the verts which is under edit and then we can do merge use the lowest value that'll work so we don't get any vert pinching going on and now it's just time to basically create our deformer so we'll go to deform and then we'll go to nonlinear will go to bend and the first order of business is to rotate this so I'll go ahead and enable my rotation make sure that I basically orient this on which way I want to bend it so I'll hold down J to constrain to 15 degree increments so that should be at 90 which it is alright so the next order of business is give it a little bit of curvature to see which way this is bending so I'll go to curvature here and you see that it's bending this way so maybe if you wanted to work on an arch you would just do this delete the history and you'll be done or if you wanted to replicate something that like we did previously you would just need to rotate this one more time so I'll do this here and then now I need an I know which way I need to flip it additionally so I'll hold down J and flip it this way and there we go right and if I wanted to have these guys touch what I would do is just go back here to curvature and go all the way here and then just to finish this off I can take this and then do edit delete by type history it'll get rid of that the former and then what I can do is just select all the verts again and then just merge the verts to get rid of that border edge and now we can do something like come in here and maybe we want to extrude outward and there we go there's our shape so so this is just another tool that you will have in your tool belt when creating a curved foreign surfaces in at night so that's the end of the video folks thank you so much for coming through and spending some time with me and improving on your skill sets when it comes to hard surface modeling in Maya as always please comment your thoughts on the comment section down below make sure to smash that like button and also subscribe to my channel if you haven't done so already so until we meet again I will catch you next time

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 32,667

Keywords: Maya Hard Surface, hard surface tutorial, hard surface modeling, hard surface maya, jlmussi, hard surface, maya tutorial, blender, 3ds max, modo, maya for beginners, maya for beginners 2019, maya, autodesk maya tutorial, autodesk maya tutorial beginner, maya modeling 2018

Id: UJx-9BI13sA

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AirHamyes]

This was cool to watch. I am self taught and I think I know a lot. It's awesome to go back and look at basics and see how bad a teacher I was for myself.

[u/onoratofelix]

any extra tutorial on hard surface ? kinda new here coming from creature modelling

[u/domino_stars]

Thanks for the video! One small tip: the Phong material is even better than blinn at highlighting pinches

[u/LostEndimion]

Discovered guy 2 days ago great tips and tricks