Maya Hard Surface Modeling: Cylindrical Shapes

if you've been struggling how to create complex cylindrical hard surface models within Maya then you click on the right YouTube thumbnail in this hard surface tutorial I will show you how to create a repeatable pattern that is flat then apply it one of my favorite deformers and bend it into place all that plus some bonus tips in the video coming up what's going on you 3d modeling beast this is Jael musi and today we are talking about creating a cylindrical complex hard surface model within Maya so how this video came about I had a couple of messages the 'mark station inquiring about how I created the barrel for this m2 browning so I decided to break down my workflow and I think you guys will find some value in it and learn some new techniques along the way if you're new around here make sure to subscribe to the channel as I do hard surface modeling tutorials within Maya like this all the time and if you want to get better and faster at hard surface modeling within Maya I recommend that you download the hard surface modeling cheat sheets which is a great companion piece to all my videos and the great thing about the guide is that within it it has links to specified time stamps within my youtube videos shall you need more information about the topic so without further ado let's get on with the video so let's go ahead and begin for the purposes of this tutorial any hotkey or command that I don't cover or I don't show you where to access that tool or command I will go ahead and drop a call-out card that way you know how to access if you didn't know how to do it previously I'll create a cylinder here frame and from here I'll go to mine face mode hold down tab to paint my selection like this I'll do ctrl shift I that's gonna reverse my face selection I'll hit delete I'll go to edge mode extrude out give it a offset I'm holding down control little things that I'm going to do right off the back is I will set up the pivot and then I will also scale this about maybe twice the original size and that's because if you have a larger scale compared to the grid so if I go here and show the grid any time that we are modeling and things are really really small if we go to do things like vert merges the tolerances sometimes don't work out well if our objects are small those tolerances are too big and we tend to get over pinching so I'm just gonna go ahead and scale this up a little bit and then I'll go to modify and then I'll freeze those transforms all right all right so from here what I can do is I'm gonna take this edge again and I'll go ahead and taper it down a little bit we only need to work with half of this for the time being so I'm just gonna delete this and then what I'm gonna do as well is delete this and then from here we're gonna need the help of a plane so I'll go here to my top view and I'll create a plane and I'll go to the option box and this should be ten and I'll show you why that's gonna be ten in a second that's gonna be one they should be a two by two and let's create it on the Y okay and the scaling is off a little bit so what I'm gonna do is just scale down like this and I'll move it over right so I'll move it over right about here so what I'm looking at is that once this even though we're modeling this flat I'm picking a head and I know I'm gonna use a bend deform right so right now if we look at the vert spacing here I didn't I'm gonna show you this by just taking this extruding and then I'll hit my move tool scale right so if we bend this shape right here so you see that the spacing here is not really uniform right and especially areas like this where these edges are close together it's gonna cause pinching we know that if we have two edges together on a surface that's curved we're gonna get pinching so even though it doesn't look bad now that it's flat I'm thinking ahead and I really ideally want these fans to be perfectly spaced out and since we have you know ten ten edges here we have ten edges here this is going to help us basically as a template to basically a bridge this gap and get even spacing right so what I'll do is I'm gonna select all these guys here and I'll delete them and then what I can do from this point is just combine them and I'm gonna take this range right here just extrude it outward like this right so now we know that we don't want to mess this facing out and we don't want to mess this shape out because that obviously that's our you know our cylindrical hole cut out but these we have a little bit of wiggle room right and that's why sometimes it's great just to have that extra lip that way you can make nice transitions right and I'll just go ahead and hold down V invert snap and what we could do from this guy right if if this guy's a little bit off it's not a big deal meaning like if this guy's slanted alright let's just say it was like this and we wanted it to line up with these guys all's we have to do is just select all these right hey Dee the access or edit pivot mode v2 snap right here go back to move and now we're basically scaling from this and this guy's going to be flat along this edge we could just go ahead and select these verts and merge them and we can do this one as well and sometimes I just like to make sure that my edges are straight so right there and just scaled so what i did is i scaled towards that edge and i flattened it out so this looks pretty good we can go ahead and go to face mode here delete this right and now it's time to create our pattern but before I do that I don't want if I were to mirror this would kind of have these verts kind of pinching here right for the mirror so I'm gonna give this a little bit of a buffer and I'm just gonna extrude this now I thought we wanted to be super super precise of what I could do as well almost creating like a template for the spacing I could go to edit mesh and then we can do a duplicate so now this face is pretty much on its own and what I could do there if I Center that hit on that face and if I wanted to be super super precise okay ad again the birch snap here and then vert snap here so I know that this edge or these verts need to be pulled up just slightly so I'll select these guys and I'll move them and what I could do is Wow Sadie here again vert snap there W and then vert snap there and I know that's the same exact spacing right so from there I could just take that one face and delete it all right so now I have that little buffer so what I could do is just mirror this guy one time over so I'm married in the X and make sure this is relatively low on the tolerance I'm going to take this edge here and I'm gonna go ahead and move it closer here and then just complete that and then mirror this guy over shift right click I'll go to mirror make sure it's on the X make sure that March threshold is nice and low so I'm gonna take this guy here I'll hit ctrl D and move it down and then we do want to create a repeatable pattern and we are using the grid to our advantage so what I want to do is move it right here and if we really want to be precise I can hey D V or I hold down v to vert snap there aw again hit V divert snap and there we go right so these edges line up and then here we'll go ahead and tweak them a little bit so I'll go ahead and select both of these combine and then we can go ahead and merge I'll go ahead and merge this guy here and this guy here all right and then also we got to figure out which one we want to slide so is there going to be this one or is there gonna be this one or we could do a select them both or maybe scale and maybe average them out so I think that should have worked fine just gonna take these guys here just make sure they're merged we could kind of redo this on the other side but I rather just mirror this and I'll make sure that it's just magical so we're gonna go ahead and basically disconnect detach these components and then we'll detach these and now I can double click double click delete all right and here's pretty much the pattern so now if we go in here and we could just move this pivot shift right click mirror so we can mirror this kind the X 0 there South and now it's gonna be a perfect repeatable pattern so we have the first strip of our pattern and I know that this is gonna work from left to right since all this is pretty much the same but we see here that we have a shift in the topology so when we go to stack the pattern this way things are not gonna match up so what I'm gonna do here is take this guy and I'll go to edit duplicate special option I'll duplicate special and this is I did create an instance right so if I go back here it said on instance so the cool thing about the instance if we put it up here right this is basically gonna whatever I do on one side it's gonna get married over right so essentially and since we're working on the pattern instances actually can be very useful for a pattern creation like this right because I can take this vert and move it to basically vert snap here and you'll see that the little transformation that I did is going to get applied here as well right so we see that the pattern is gonna fit and we could do the same thing the same exact thing on this one so we could take it hit V and then snap and you see that it did it to this one right so we know that this pattern is gonna stack together quite nicely all right so from here I can go ahead and delete this guide and no longer need it it did the changes that we wanted so we see that this is gonna stack this way and it's gonna stack from left right so let's go ahead and create this from left to right one of the things we could do now is extrude and add the thickness or we could use the Select similar command I'm actually just gonna do it now that way it'll be a little bit quicker and especially when we start duplicating and have a bunch of these we don't have to worry about you know adding holding edges or any of that so I'm gonna go ahead and add the thickness now along with the Holden edge so I'll hit F select this guy select this guy what I can do from here is just select a range shift click and then double click this range and then double click this guy and you could hold down shift to extrude and then from here we can just go and add and hold an edge so I don't want here I'll add one here and here alright so we see that this is gonna look good we could just add an additional one in the middle so ctrl + middle mouse click is gonna add in the middle and that extra one is basically going to kind of reinforce this just a little bit better we could also bevel and maybe hold that up even better and I think I'm actually going to do that instead so I'll take these guys here the lead and just kind of redo that selection real quick do a bevel with two divisions and sometimes I do like doing the bevel and it saves you time and you see that you kind of get the you know the edges from both sides and that's gonna actually that up quite nicely and this is what I was saying about this extra edge so if I delete it you see that it kind of this edge kind of came down a little bit so sometimes just adding that extra topology will help keep creases or hard edges a little bit tighter so I'll go ahead and do a edit and then I'll do a duplicate special make sure that I'm on copy and then I'll want 9 additional and then I want to translate to in the X duplicate special there's the first leg of the pattern we're gonna go ahead and take these guys and combine and then we'll take these guys and we'll do a merge and any time that I do a merge I like to just check my these close edges right here in verts make sure there's you know none of this going on over pinching so everything looks good so before we build it a long ways we we do want to go ahead and take care of this guy right here and what we'll do is we just want to fill this hole right here so we'll go ahead and take these edges and delete them or sorry faces take this guy here and then just extrude out scale D to move the pivot vitas verts snap there W again to move and then V 2 verts nap to that corner and then we could just mirror the whole thing over but this is pretty quick so I'll go ahead and delete these guys here select this range extrude move scale D v WV again and then we'll go to vert mode double click merge verts and by that being badda-boom alright so looking snazzy at this point the last thing that we want to do is probably duplicate this up a couple of times so for this same thing we could do the duplicate special but I don't think I'll need it so I'll go ahead and vert snap here so I could just do a ctrl D move up hold down the vert snap there ctrl D again move hold down V vert snap right there there's our pattern you take all these combined we can go ahead and select one we can select all the verts and then we can go ahead and merge look over our mesh make sure everything is nice and peachy right and then we can go ahead and basically apply our then deform so I'll go to deform nonlinear and access the mighty mighty bend the former so I'll go here and we'll keep the zero keep the zero and this should be negative 90 and this looks like it needs to be 90 and then there we go all right so this is bending and just make sure these are set to 90s or zeros so now I'm capped off here and what I can do is just give it a value of 360 and that's still not enough so for me it's gonna be 468 that's gonna work perfectly you see our pattern fit and now as good modelers good samaritans right we need to basically combine these edges so I'm gonna go ahead and go in here and double click select that range same thing here come and select the other range and now we can go ahead and merge it now that's merged we can go to this object and then we can do edit delete by type history right anytime that you have a deformer you want to delete the history before actually just deleting that the former if you do it without deleting the history will just snap back to a flat plane so I'll take this edge here and then I'll go ahead extrude and do I'll do negative 0.3 I'll take this guy here and then so I'm doing numbers that are gonna be easy to remember if you can't get it right here on the fly you could always go to here and then just basically type it in alright so now what I could do is go here on the other side we could obviously mirror this but I'm just gonna do it manually with the same value so extrude negative point 3 Bevell remember that and then we could just switch this to 0.5 and then so wrap it up we can just select these guys here and just apply a smaller bevel so this is the moment of truth and we'll go ahead and hide the grid we'll hit 3 mode give it a unforgiving blend should expose any pinching and take a look here and this looks pretty good all right so we don't have any pinching everything spread out all right so to finish this up what I'm gonna do here is I'll take these guys I'll extrude one time and then what I can do from here I'll go ahead and extrude again ohh shift right click merge collapse merge to Center it's gonna give me a nice cap so what I'm gonna do with this cap here is I'll go to my side go in here select this guy and then I can go to mesh and we can do I'm sorry edit mesh extract now this is a separate piece of geometry which I can take move the pivot and then I could go ahead and just scale down slightly and then I'm just gonna move this guy here like so then I'll take this edge here and I can go ahead and extrude extrude down and I can go ahead and just take this guy about halfway extrude just extrude inward again then extrude like this and then I'll go to my side again wireframe smooth this guy here delete and then I could just simply go in here Belleville this guy just take these guys here bevel them it's like this right about here hold down X the grid snap scale flat make sure my pivot is here so I'll hit deep V versing out there and then we'll go ahead and do a mirror in the X if you didn't want all this faceting even on like one mode we can just go to mesh display and then soften this edge and then now we can just go ahead and smooth this and that's our finished result that's all the information that I have for you folks thank you so much for spending some time and improving your hard surface modeling techniques within Maya please let me know all your thoughts as always in the comment section down below also consider sharing this video with any 3d artist that you think might find some value in it until we meet again folks I will catch you next time

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 44,407

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: zniQNA999wo

Length: 25min 34sec (1534 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/hamiltonafjr]

That was really helpful for me. I’m switching from modo to maya and love the modeling tips of this video.

[u/tUrban_tim]

Neat. I'm gonna download your cheat sheet. Thanks for sharing