Maya Hard Surface Modeling for Beginners

are you new to Maya and want to create hard surface models maybe you tried hard surface modeling in Maya before and they're not happy the way that your 3d models are turning out well there's nothing to fear because your boy Jael is here I created a Maya hard surface modeling tutorial for beginners what's going on YouTube Isaiah you see and today we are talking about hard surface modeling and more specifically hard surface modeling using sub D's so something is basically a way of working on the low res cage but previewing a smooth result anytime that you're doing any high-end hard surface modeling sub D modeling might definitely be a way to go now live model both with poly modeling and sub D modeling and usually anytime that I want to do something like a vehicle or a gun or a Mac working with a sub D preview is very similar to working with a vector file so any of you graphic designers know that you can take a vector in Illustrator or even in Photoshop and you can scale that out versus a rasterized or a pixelated image that if you scale up you will actually have quality loss to that image so this in essence is the perfect technology because if you create a sub D model with the proper holding edges you could always end up the number of iterations in that sub deep and actually smooth out your mesh so you never really have to worry about camera placement and seeing fastening if you get too close so without further ado let's go ahead and get on with the video sub D modeling and holding edges go together like french fries and ketchup there are primarily three ways of creating holding edges in Maya and we'll go ahead and take a look at each so the first method of holding an edge is beveling so I'm gonna go in here and I'll hit the three key enable sub DS and you see that my shape pretty much just crumbles and that's because it needs to be reinforced so I'll go in here and I'm gonna go ahead and select all my edges I'll go to mesh sorry I'm pretty bad with these right here since I have okey but I'm going to do a bevel and I'm gonna go ahead and bring the fraction down a little bit and now if I hit the three key you see that it holds the shape a little bit better what you could actually do as well is if you up the segments you'll see that it'll actually reinforce that edge so that is one way of holding an edge and if I take wireframe on shaded you see that we get a pretty nice smooth result and still pretty much hold our shape the next method I have is fencing and this is one of my favorite ones so I'll go in here with my multi cut tool and I'll do a ctrl and shift what I'm actually gonna do is I'll go to standard when you're adding or when you're fencing here you probably want to go ahead and snap two increments that way you're getting even edge distribution so what you could do in your multi cut tool if you want to closer towards the edge you can put a lower value here I'm gonna put a value of four so will your multi cut tool if you hold down control you see that you're able to add any edge loop anywhere but if we hold down shift as well you see that we're gonna go ahead and constrain to four percent increments right so I'll go ahead and add one there oh I had one there there there orbit around add one there and one here from the other side it looks like we're all faced then so I'll go in here and I'll smooth this out and it holds this pretty well and if I wanted to reinforce this a bit more I can go in here and add another set of loops I'm just gonna zoom in here you see that the more loops I add it's gonna hold that shape of there but I'm actually fine the way it held it with the first pass so I'll leave it at that so we have bevel we have fencing the last option for holding up your edges when doing sub D and hard surface modeling and Maya is crazy so creasing it's not one of my favorite methods you can use it if you don't want to add extra topology for my understanding of it other packages don't support it so if you are taking your mesh into ZBrush and doing that obj export it's not gonna go ahead and recognize that creasing therefore you'll have to redo it within whatever package you are exporting it to so the way creasing works is you don't necessarily add in the edges but you add a crease value to selected edges therefore you're able to hold up that shape so the creasing is right here under crease so when you go to mesh tools and then crease let's look at the options here and I'll go ahead and just reset the settings here I'll reset the tool and we'll go ahead and exit out of that and now we'll go ahead and go here I label the tool so what it sound us is that if we select the components that we want to crease and then we middle Mouse drag left to right we'll go ahead and set a crease value so I'll go ahead and drag all the components here and I'll start scrubbing and you see that it's starting to reinforce that edge and I could actually take it all the way up and have a perfect square but I'm gonna go ahead and download down just a little bit and there we go so we held our shape via creasing the next sub D modeling concept to grasp is density versus volume so if your topology your initial topology is too low in resolution you will have a greater amount of this is exactly what I mean so here we're gonna go ahead and take a look at these three cylinders that I have created one is eight divisions one is sixteen and one is thirty-two right so same exact cylinder just different amount of subdivisions right and what I did was I created a nerve circle to go along with it and that 1% pretty much our original volume and I need to add holding edges to this before we begin so I'll just quickly do that and now this is gonna be more obvious from a top view here but if I go and subdivide each one of these you see how much volume this eight side of the one lost right compared to the original shape which is indicated by that inner circle and then if we jump over and we look at the sixteen side one you see that it held up fine but it did lose a little bit of volume and then the 32 division cylinder barely lost any so we'll go ahead and jump here from the top and it's gonna be even more obvious right so we'll just jump here to object mode so the X item one lost quite a bit of volume the six seen just a little bit and then the thirty-two didn't lose any volume so I'll keep that in mind when you are creating shapes you know do understand that if you go too low on your resolution and you are trying to match a specific volume especially with your reference you might have to up the volume or divisions of your mesh so the next topic I want to talk about is UV distortion and time that you deal with something modeling you might notice that your edges actually spread apart when you go into something mode and that can have effects on your UV and texture layouts right so you are going to get some stretching and I'm going to show you how to go about basically eliminating that UV distortion that you initially get when enabling sub DS so here we have a basically of the same shape one is reinforced with holding edges and one is not we'll go to our UV editor here and we'll see that we have pretty much the identical UV layout so if I go here and I enabled my checkerboard you'll see that if we select our first pattern here this looks pretty good right we actually have all our you these set good Texel density and no stretch but what happens with this right be half holding edges so in theory this should actually hold up so we'll go ahead and select this one with the holding edges and enable something mode and we see that we have a lot of stretching near the edges so what can we do about that so what I usually do in these cases is I go ahead and apply a smooth to the match and match the final resolution that I want my match to be okay so in this example I'll go ahead and go to mesh and I'll apply a smooth and I'm gonna do that in object mode here and I'll actually go ahead add two divisions seems about the resolution that I want and now we have a smooth mesh and it's not subdivided but it is smooth smooth and some of these actually work very similar on what they do and you see that even though I applied a smooth on here it's still actually pushing are you these and distorting them near the edges just like enabling sub DS was right so from this point what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go take my faces here and I want to go ahead and add a unfold but I'm gonna go to the options first so I don't want to change my UV layout here I actually like the UVs all I really want to do is just unfold this just a little bit to get rid of the distortion near the edges so I'll go ahead and make sure that layout you v's is turned off I'll go ahead and apply and then we go right so it actually went and just relaxed or unfolded these shells just a little bit more and then I have my edges all nice and UV and no distortion near the borders but just make sure that your UV layout is done before you have this smooth and then you can go ahead and yuri layout and then unfold and you'll be good to go so next i want to talk about some of my keys to success when doing hard surface modeling with some D's in mind so these are things that you want to think about before you actually start your model and the very first one that comes to mind is the difficulty right so thinking back when I started modeling and I think we all do it when we first just started looking for a hard surface model to create we want to look at something that is doable but not too challenging right and I think that the actual challenge in hard surface modeling a big part of it is actually dictated about how much curvature and hard surface object actually has so for example if I was to take a vehicle let's just say a Lamborghini or a Maserati or even the Batmobile something with a lot of curves a lot of edge flow that's going to be inherently harder to create that's something that is very see or very square so let's go ahead and dive in and let me explain so here for example I have a curved surface and a flat surface right and if we enable sub D here and sub D mode here we see that the shapes actually hold up relatively well but what if I want to start adding some details and a lot of times you know when you start creating kind of your block out you'll incrementally start adding divisions and start adding detail wealth for a square shape or anything with a flat plain it's actually pretty easy and as a matter of fact we see that your X float really doesn't matter it could actually be pretty terrible so let's just say that I wanted to add maybe something extruding from right so maybe I'll add a division here here here here and then maybe I'll do something like this pretty terrible I know and I definitely don't recommend this if you are applying for a company showing wireframes taking art test you didn't hear this from me but in a reality you can have pretty terrible topology here and as long as you actually have the right holding edge right so if we go in here and subdivide this on a flat area it's really not gonna matter that much so you see the shape regardless of the atrocity that we just committed here it's so pretty it's still pretty much held up well right even if we take a wireframe on shaded we can't even see it there's nothing that tells us that something's going on here unless we enable the wireframe right now on the other side if we go here so if we go here I'll take my multi cut tool and I'll add some pretty heinous topology here what this loop here and now if I subdivide this what's gonna happen is we're gonna get pinching right so here you're getting the dreaded pinching and basically pinching happens when you have two edges on a curved surface that are closer to the other one so they're not evenly distributed and you will get that pinching there and pinching on curved surfaces it is common it's definitely something that can be negated it really just takes a lot of practice especially when you start adding detail there are definitely strategies and workflows I'm not going to go too deep in the rabbit hole with this on this video but just know that time and experience does help creating detail in curved surfaces without pinching so my next key to success is working from the largest shapes that should have the most subdivisions especially if they're curved and moving your way down to the smallest one with a lower number of subdivisions so this is exactly what I mean so here we are basically working from large to small right so the largest shape here if I select this edge loop you see that we have 20 edges and then our medium shape here has 8 and then we work down to our smaller shape and as for so if we subdivide this this looks about right right so I go in here I have a good number of subdivisions if I want to zoom in here my camera ok this looks ok and this looks ok here right imagine if you had this backwards right I've seen some artists that start out they basically would have to larger shape maybe at 4 or 6 and then there's smallest one maybe around 16 and 32 so what happens is when you're looking at these largest shapes you've really got to crank up the value of a smooth of you're applying that smooth to your final shape or the divisions within the sub DS themselves and this could lead to performance issues or sub D values that are way cranked up more than they need to be to achieve the proper subdivision levels so my next key to success when creating hard surface models in Maya it's figuring out early on in the pipeline what pieces of your model need to be animated or not and this really comes down to the debate of should you model your object like it is created real life and model every piece separate or if you can get away with actually modeling everything as one piece and just faking the illusion that it's actually built from separate pieces and I spend somewhere in the middle I've done models where if it's needed for animation I will created as they are created in real life and model the insides the thickness of the panels but if I can get away with it and there's really no need for animation I will mainly build my meshes as one piece so this is what I mean in this scene I have xo9 fighting Robocop here where I wanted the gun to actually come through the leg like it did in the movies so I had an actually model like it was credited in real life I had to do a lot of research gather a lot of reference and then model all the parts and give the leg thickness so it would look proper when the actual animation took place so here if I scrub through the timeline so you see here that the leg breaks away revealing the gun holster and then from this point the gun holster will go ahead and pop out like I did in the movies so I had to model all these panels with thickness I had a model all the interior details the holster and then just go ahead and animate via some keyframe animation as well as some blend shapes so for this model is pretty much the contrary of the other example that I showed you right so this car was modeled just to be pretty much a shell there was no need for the doors to open therefore I saved myself the trouble and the time to actually model the backside of the vehicle or in this case the door panels right if I needed the animation to actually support animation if I wanted to open up all the doors I would have created the actual back side like I did with the Robocop leg pieces but for this example I didn't need so so I do it right so here if I take this door panel and isolate it right it's just a shell right I'm just faking the illusion that it's a separate piece right but it doesn't really have the thickness or all the detail on the back side up so that's a video folks thank you for being here I really appreciate your time and I really hope that this jump starts your hard surface modeling in maya especially when it comes to using some piece I would love to hear your thoughts on the video in the comments down below don't forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel I also do the whole social media thing so you can catch me on my Instagram and on my Facebook and if you want to connect you can reach out to me there as well thanks for watching and I'll catch you next time [Music]

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 37,236

Keywords: Maya Hard Surface, hard surface tutorial, hard surface modeling, hard surface maya, jlmussi, hm tutorials, hard surface, maya tutorial, blender, 3ds max, modo, maya for beginners, maya hard surface modeling techniques, maya hard surface tips, maya hard surface modeling tips, maya hard surface retopology, maya 3d model, maya 3d modeling tutorial, maya basics for beginners, maya 3d modeling basics, maya 3d modeling car, maya 3d modeling 2018

Id: HPrj4FbVnRM

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/brokenstyli]

I hadn't heard it called "fencing" before. I'd only heard people refer to it as "insulating".

Fencing makes so much more sense now that I think about it.