Maya Hard Surface Modeling: Complex Shapes 2

what's going on you 3d modeling beast this is Jael musi and today I have another Maya hard surface modeling request this comes via my man Peter he was struggling with a cylindrical shape in Maya one two bang some detail in there seems like cylindrical shapes are causing a lot of pain out there for a hard surface modelers I'm gonna go ahead and take his model do my own rendition and keep most of the design elements the same but probably add a little bit of my own flair to it and hopefully you guys will be able to find value in this and learn some new hard surface modeling techniques within Maya all that in the video coming up all right so this is the model that Peter sent me I'm gonna basically focus on the areas that I see that he struggled and guessing that a lot of you guys might especially if you're starting out 3d modeling hard surface modeling in Maya you might struggle obviously looking at this model it's it's really not bad at all but this you could obviously tell here of the edge flow and then if we go here and we activate three mode things really fall apart especially in these problem areas a lot of these right here could just obviously be held up better by holding edges but that was that's kind of the easier fix so my aim in this tutorial is I'm basically going to concentrate on kind of these these areas here and you know one of the reasons that this is not working is that these edges here kind of break up the flow of this cylindrical shape right so if we go to assign existing we drop a blinging on here go ahead and go to the three mode and then we can go ahead and turn off the wireframe on shaded you see that those edges right there causing pinching here so the challenging thing about this shape is that this is probably one of the most ruthless and hardest shapes to actually model especially if you're a beginner because you got to think about it like this you have the cylindrical you know shape that's symmetrical perfectly radio right and then any edges that you add or especially if they're not you know conformed and perfectly pushed out they're gonna break the continuity of this perfect cylindrical shape right so one of the things that could definitely help is that if you start with a more denser cylinder right and that's what I'm gonna basically do so we're gonna allocate areas of detail we're gonna give it a higher density and then areas that are not so a dense what will go with a lighter base of the cylinder and this is gonna make sense once we start another thing that I do want to point out is that I'm not gonna be covering every single hotkey every single tool I will however if I don't show you the menu I will put it on a card in the call-out card within the video so you do know how to access that tool I'm not gonna go ahead and completely rebuild this whole model because I think that tutorial will be a little bit more drawn out and I could still draw the point across with the shorter tutorial so let's go ahead and begin I'm gonna go ahead and create a cylinder here and then I'll bring up the properties and let's go here and we're gonna actually create two of these so I'm gonna 56 and then I will go ahead and create another one so I will name this hello and then I'll go ahead and create this one here and then I'll bring up the properties here and then we're gonna go to 112 on this and then I'm gonna guide and group these so here's the group and I'm gonna go ahead and move the pivot of this I'll hit deep V and then I'll go ahead and scale and I'm gonna do this from the side of you here and kind of look at my reference so I'm gonna go here to the front and then now that the pivot is here I could actually snap to the grid by holding X and then I'll go back to the scale kind of get the width right first and then I can just push and do something like this so basically since we use the group we have a low version right and then we do have a high version of this within this group so I'm gonna go ahead and work with the high one first and I'm gonna go ahead and high V low Oh turn on go to shading here and I'll go to wireframe on shaded and I'm gonna go ahead and first create this in a modular way and I'll explain that how that's gonna go down in a second but the first thing that I'll do is kind of look at this and just create this right here right so I'll go to my multi cut tool and I'll drop a you know edge loop here holding down control and then I'll drop a edge loop here and I'm basically gonna go ahead and just work on this little patch right here alright and then what I'll do from here is holding down control and middle Mouse I'll drop a edge loop right in the middle I will also go here and this is my symmetry line so what I'll do here is I'll go to detached components and this is already hotkey for me so this is now border edge and that's gonna make it easier to basically see that also in wireframe and shaded view which is kind of my symmetry line so from this point I'm gonna go ahead and kind of create that slant and the easiest way I could think of doing that it's just going here on the front view and then with the multi cut tool going here and I'll go ahead and drop another edge and then I'll go and basically create this line here right so I'll also let that strip right there so like that right there and then I'm really just gonna focus on this right so at this point I'm gonna go ahead and kind of create a top separation here and with the paint selection tool I'll hold down tab and I just kind of paint and I'm looking to get this strip right here right so this is pretty much what I'm gonna detach so I'll go here and this is extract so what extracting is gonna pull those faces and now this is basically a separate mesh premiere I'll go to my face mode again and kind of paint what where I want that hole to be right and then I'll basically just do it extrude and then play with the thickness and just push back on just about right so from here this is gonna be pretty much like I do most of my hard surface modeling it's gonna be a repeatable pattern now I will show you how to do a a symmetrical detail right since this is technically a symmetrical right it's not symmetrical so from this piece you'll be able to basically figure out how to do that okay so the first order of business is to you know basically reinforce these edges now what I like to do is let's take care of the easy stuff first so I'll basically select these guys here I'll go ahead and select these guys here as well this guy here this guy here and we're gonna go ahead and do about right so do a bevel we'll do three divisions right and I'm using this tool here which this bevel option here and within the modeling toolkit and that's gonna give you just kind of these interactive options for setting up your belt right so we have three divisions and the nice thing about the bevel is that it'll basically put that on either side right so we don't have to manually going hit three and we'll see how we're doing here right so this is actually not so bad but we'll definitely get pinching I could just tell by how this is kind of collapsing if I go to assign existing material blend the pinch is gonna be a little bit more obvious right so we see it here we see it here and obviously this is kind of cut off so we are getting a little bit of deformation here as well right so the first thing that we have to do is think about well what's gonna take to hold this edge here right so we already have the edges basically in the right place that's gonna hold this up but the problem is especially on cylindrical areas and then if this was a flat area this would be a different ballgame but since it's a cylindrical kind of this end gone what's causing an issue right so let's go ahead and rectify that issue so for me I'll enable the multi-cut do control shift and if we go here on the side of you you see that control shift will constraint to 90 degree increments so there's one edge and then the there is the second edge and I'll take this guy here I'm gonna move it slightly so I'll go to three mode and I'll look at the the pinching and that uh that looks pretty good right so we kind of alleviate a lot of it just by fixing up that that end on that we had so let's work on this bottom one this is gonna be a little bit more challenging but we'll get through it so in in in essence we basically want these edges close but we don't want to continue these edges here right so the problem here is that we kind of have this which is not ideal this little quad and then you know if we were just to basically drop some loops here this is gonna basically crease this edge so we'll get some sharp end in so we kind of want to feather this thing a little bit right and the good thing is we're working on this denser part right this denser mesh we're gonna make a transition right so what I'll do here is I'm gonna go ahead and go here to the front view and then with the multi-cut since this little bevel kind of screwed things up right like we can't add a whole loop what we could do is just go here and click here click here hold down shift to snap right and then kind of move this where I want and then I'll hit enter and there we go so it we didn't need to have perfect quartz to drop that actual that that's the nice function of that it's that functionality in the multi-cut right so from this point what I want to do is basically kind of feather the this that holding edge out so I'll go ahead and connect this guy from here and do that and then undo that here as well and what I can do here is gotta merge these guys and then we could basically delete this guy here and we'll probably delete from here so we'll kill that and we could go ahead and kill this guy as well now I'm not gonna kill the whole thing I'm just gonna kill from here to here cuz we're actually gonna do this same exact thing on the inside as well so we'll go ahead and get the multi cut tool connect these guys like so and then I'll go ahead and connect this guy here like this I'll connect this guy so and now should be able to delete this to leave that and we're all caught it so let's see how the mesh is actually so it looks pretty good okay so now and I'm not gonna worry about this because the symmetry will take care of this so now it's time to basically figure out well we have this little strip here and this is kind of the cool thing about working module II so what I'll do is I'm gonna go ahead and probably bring this down a little bit this is gonna get married over so we do need to get rid of these guys here this is gonna pose an issue obviously it's gonna create some yucky stuff right if we leave it there right so just make sure that this is clean and then from this point we can do our mirror so I hit D V I'm gonna vert snap here go back to my move tool shift right click mayor options in the Y object and then we'll do mirror and then we can go hold down ctrl and just what like to do is just bring him to zero and then I like to do ctrl shift and it helps if we're on a wireframe here but I basically want to give it the the lowest amount of value or threshold that's gonna get rid of that borderline right because what happens sometimes especially if you got bevels if you crank this up you get this over pinching right so point seven looks good that looks good so now here we go and we have kind of this first piece of the puzzle right and since we already built kind of the piece that I wanted I could actually hide this higher dense one and then I'll go back to the outliner and what I'll do from there is turn on the low right you have this little piece and you would treat it like a modular piece so you know you can go ahead and first obviously make sure the pivot is right here so you'll hit D V then we convert snap here right so from that point what you could do is you know kind of explore and see what you got so you call down J know maybe you could move it here right and then you know maybe you could move that there like that now if we had you know both of these pieces you could you know click clean this up here just kind of create that 90-degree angle so you could really get creative choice I'm just gonna take this guy here and I'll hit D again V to snap right and now that I'm basically snapped here what I can do is I'm gonna go ahead and scale and let's make sure that I'm on the world so I'm doing ctrl + shift to get to the world and if I do a negative one in the X this should flip it flip it for me which it does right so in essence I just need a duplicate so I'll duplicate it and then this guy will flip negative one in the X and there's our pattern right so if we wanted to make this a little bit you know a symmetrical we could basically just hold down the hold down J and kind of look we're you know what what piece of let me turn on wireframe on shaded here right but you see that were snapping to a since basically the denser cylinder was exactly half things are gonna match pretty well and we're gonna have edges that that'll match to this so you'll see how this kind of pans out in a second right so from here now we kind of have this a symmetrical shape and we're kind of building these modular components and rotating them into place right so one of the things that I'll do here is kind of start blocking the cutout or the shape here of the cutout so and I'm actually gonna do this within the side view so I'm gonna need a cut here and then I'm gonna need a cut here and I know that I'm gonna basically need a cut here as well so I'll go back here to the this view right so I'll put a cut here and I'll put a cut here and I want to match that that shelf that we built right so I'm gonna just basically extrude in alright and then I'm gonna just play with a thickness and I'm holding on control shift and I'm just trying to match this as close as humanly possible there we go all right it looks pretty good now we basically have to get rid of these guys here and I'm gonna get rid of this guy here and then this guy here so you could probably see what I'm up to all right so these are gonna you know end up being connected you all right so there we go so we're kind of matching that let's go ahead and sort of edge loop here and then we'll insert a edge loop here as well so that all matches well I'll go ahead and select all my meshes I'll go ahead and combine them and then now what I can do is make sure that this edge kind of matches up closer this edge matches closer here I'm gonna go ahead add edge loop here edge loop here I'll take this guy here and this guy here bevel it go back add another division and now all the should keyword match all right but it's it seems you know obvious but it's better to just know right off the back instead of you know selecting all your edges and then having Maya tell you that you know your bridge is not gonna work all right so here we're good we have 2412 on each side we shift right click and then we'll go ahead and do a bridge so that looks good and then we'll do the same exact thing on the other side just select that range select that range shift right click and then we'll go to bridge again all right so that looks good and then from here obviously we have we could basically just extrude down and they're just kind of finished the model right so what I'll do is because you know we can't really condense this this is going to cause kind of that pinching that happen here right so what I'll do here is just take this and then take this guy here hit the lead and then I'm gonna take all my verts select merge and put this down almost to zero and give it a the lowest taller as possible all right so from here let's this is kind of a moment of truth we'll go ahead and hit three again and then we'll go ahead and go to shading and turn this off and hear what's what's happening is that this is the blend and this is still the lambert so we should be able to clear that up by going to just give this the blend and there we go so that looks pretty clean and you know obviously it's not as complex is here but it is a symmetrical right if we look at it from here right this is off to the side and you could basically take these corners and kind of manipulate them you know as you need so the last word of the business I'm just going to finish this with some quick details you so now what I can do is since we kind of have irregular an irregular pattern here you know I'm gonna leave that alone but what I will do is I'll create a another cylinder and let's go back in here and we'll do 56 and then I'll kind of scale and if you actually play with this manipulator here it's only gonna basically work in the leave the Y alone right so we're working in the X and then the Z just gonna bring this guy down like this and then go back to the scale tool all right so that looks good it's kind of exactly where I wanted I'm gonna go ahead and peel off the caps and then make sure that this is pretty much here right and then I'll go to face mode I'll just select everything and then just deselect the middle delete all right so I'm gonna go ahead isolate the mesh select all these edges here and before I do that let's actually get rid of all these caps alright so from here we'll select these edges bevel them right and I'll go a little bit wider and then what I'll do is I'll select one of these faces I'll go to select and then I'll go to similar it's gonna select all the similar faces here I'll extrude so I extruded all the faces right and then I'm gonna go ahead and push in and what we could actually do first is just do a very small offset right and then and that's gonna kind of leave this outside border edge here and then we can go ahead and do another extrude and this time we could just push back and then we can go ahead add another set of divisions right so that's gonna add like the holding edge this way and that way and then from here we can just get the insert edge loop tool and a hold an edge here and hold an edge right and if you really want to be light you could go in there and delete these guys I really don't care but yeah if you really want to be clean about it you could delete that and maybe even scale down everything just have it nice and flat but that's fine for me since this is gonna be actually just hidden within that cylinder so let's test it out now looks pretty good if we wanted to have you know kind of less drooping here what we could do is just add a couple more divisions I'll get the multi cut control middle mouse click that's gonna add one right in the middle and then we'll well add one here as well right so you'll see kind of the difference between the top and the bottom and this one is moving a little bit more than this one just because of that extra one and then you see how that got shifted down already got pushed down so so modeling for sub D sometimes you do end up just modeling extra geometry just to keep things a little bit better confined alright so that looks good we'll go ahead and isolate that and there we go so now we kind of have this nice little you know ribbon detail this little accent piece right we could also go in here and go to mesh display and go to soften edge and that way it looks better right even in one mode and then what I'll do from this point is kind of some lower piece of detail here but we'll simplify it so so I'm just gonna fast forward the video here kind of finish this piece you so what I'm gonna do here is I'll add a as loop here and edge loop in the middle since I am working pretty much a symmetrically I really don't know I want you know I want to be as precise as possible so this that that that edge loop is gonna give me kind of a reference right something to kind of push towards and I can do the same thing here and what I'm doing I'll hit D and then I'll go ahead orient the holding down control orient to this edge and now I can basically push and I'm pushing along that edge right so now that I'm pretty much precise I can go ahead and just take those edges delete them and then I'll go in here so like these guys and you'll probably guess it but I'm gonna go ahead and bevel I'll go ahead and go in here select these same as before do a bevel three divisions and that's gonna hold up and then maybe I want some just some some radio detail just to break the piece up so I'll go ahead and multi cut and a multi cut a couple more times let's see if we try it again yeah that looks a little bit better so we'll play with the the first thing that we want to do is change the alignment to surface you see how it now it sticks to the surface better and then let's play with the radio offset so what I'm looking to do here is preferably not have a big slant so I'll play with the offset so these guys are pretty much up and down and then what I can do from this point is what do I should be able to so extrude inward just a little bit just to give it just kind of that hold an edge there and then extrude it one more time and I'll play with the thickness there and then we can add a couple divisions and then what I could do for this guy I just select these and then I can go ahead and do one more extrude just leave that hold an edge on the other side so whenever possible I'd like to do extrude as a way of adding holding edges that whack and kind of do keep the spacing the same and you know have everything pretty uniform so this is how the model turned out if I turn on the wireframe here you'll see that all the edges are being held up well we really don't have any pinching and hopefully you guys will be able to learn how to apply some of these new workflows into your own hard surface modeling techniques within Maya so I did decide to push this a little bit further and this technique I'll probably do it just a separate video on but I'm just gonna quickly talk about what I did to just actually crate the thumbnail that you see on this video essentially what I did is I signed it a material and then I basically gave this mesh a level one smooth as you see I went ahead and did a automatic mapping on this so the UVs are pretty awful here and I would have recommend this for production but you know for a quick render maybe you have Cline or in this case I just wanted to have a nice material with HDR and just give it a little bit more life so I gave it a automatic rejection and then I just used the layout tool within Maya just to get everything here within 0 to 1 so I took my mesh into a substance painter and you could obviously see the horrific UV layout here on the right hand side I just quickly baked out the maps obviously for this since the UVs are pretty much trash you will have to go to something like a 4k to get decent resolution since you know nothing's really optimized and you are wasting a lot of pixels with a sloppy UV layout like this so I picked up all the maps through a smart material on there play with the settings a little bit since the scenes were everywhere I try to minimize just some of those seams as best as I could then I opened up IRA and I played around with a couple of different HDR images rotated the background just kind of looked at where the highlights were landing on the model I played around with the render settings to get the right quality dropped a matte background so I swapped it out from the visible HDR and that's pretty much it thank you so much for watching this maya hard surface modeling tutorial please let me know your thoughts on the comment section down below subscribe if you haven't done so already and please share this with any hard surface model that you think will find value in this information also make sure to check out my hard surface modeling cheat sheets by checking out the link down below which is basically a guide that I prepared to help you if you want to get better and faster and harder modeling within Maya so we meet again folks I will catch you next time

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 30,992

Keywords: Maya Hard Surface, hard surface tutorial, hard surface modeling, hard surface maya, jlmussi, hm tutorials, flipped normals, hard surface, maya tutorial, blender, 3ds max, modo, maya for beginners, maya hard surface modeling tutorial, maya modeling, maya modeling tips, maya modeling tutorial, maya modeling tutorial 2018, maya modeling 2019

Id: _hmAFs1e3Ic

Length: 33min 9sec (1989 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Hexagonal_Bagel]

These are tremendous, thank you