Maya Hard Surface Modeling: How To 3D Model Any Pattern

you want to know how to make hard surface repeatable patterns and I'm gonna show you in the video coming up what's going on 3d modeling beast this is Jael musi and today I'm gonna be showing you how to make any hard surface repeatable pattern how this video came about my main man Marco hit me up on Instagram wanted to know how to create a honeycomb pattern I decided to do the video and also show you guys how you can not only create a honeycomb pattern but really just any repeatable pattern and then actually the form it onto a mesh using a variety of deformers consider subscribing to the channel as I do Maya 3d modeling tutorials like this all the time also make sure to snag your copy of the hard surface modeling cheat sheets which is a great companion piece to all my youtube videos without further ado let's get on with the video I'm gonna begin this by jumping here to the front and creating a cylinder so first I'll go ahead and rotate it holding down J holding down J's gonna constraint as you move to 15 degree increments it's gonna snap or we could alternatively just put a 90 here so if we drop this down to 6 see that this is gonna approximate that honeycomb shape one of the things that's important here when creating your pattern is you want to choose the primitive that's gonna approximate as closely the beginning of your pattern so I'm gonna go to face mode hold down tab paint this selection these are the faces that I want to keep I'm gonna do ctrl shift I if you know here in perspective you see that it just basically inverse my selection I can go ahead and hit delete so now we're just left with this plane right here from this point what we're gonna need to do is just extrude out so we'll go ahead and take the border edges here extrude and just do an offset so that looks pretty good and then I can just go ahead and take these guys here and hit delete so this is the first part of this pattern when creating a pattern like this you have to play close attention whether it's staggered now right this is a staggered pattern I'm gonna select my object here go to shading wireframe on shaded I'm gonna hold down shift to duplicate this if I figured hey you know what I have that first shape and I'm done right then you would go ahead and proceed to start duplicating this and this is not going to line up right you're now playing close enough attention to how that pattern was built so in reality the true pattern of this consists two pieces so what I'm gonna do want to hold down shift and clone it out and then from here I'll hit deep to edit the pivot V 2 verts nap here W again to go back to my move tool and then I'll hold down V here to snap right here and this is the true pattern this is a true repeatable pattern and it really this is the most important part about creating any hard surface repeatable pattern within Maya is finding the pattern and it's repeating element and this is the pattern itself so now what we need to do is come in here and we're gonna go ahead and combine this we're gonna take these verts and make sure that they're merged and now if we go back to our move tool we hold down shift and clone this you see that this aligns properly right so now that we have the staggered pattern going it's time to create the first strip so usually I like to build out my patterns with the first strip going from left to right and then I like to get the height going for this we're gonna need a value we're gonna need to figure how much to offset each piece right you see as we move this in the X we get a value here right so what I'll do is a hold down shift move this guy right about here if we want to be very precise what we can do is change the pivot again so hit D vert snap here go back to the move tool hit V and this gives us a value of four point two four that's our magical number that's gonna insure that every time that we move or pretty much butted right against this piece right here so we just needed the value and we needed the direction which is the X so we can delete this I'll go to edit duplicate special options and here we need to put the information that we gathered so when I'm s elected I'll go to edit duplicate special options I'll go ahead and put that value in a four point two four and the X I already have one copy I need a total of ten so I need nine additional ahead duplicate special and now you see that this pattern the first row is actually selected right so what I can do from here I'm gonna take them all combine them I'll go ahead and delete the history by doing old shift D this time it's gonna clear that out so now I need to know the translate Y if I go ahead and hold on shift I can duplicate this again I'll just snap the pivot here move it and then vert snap again this gives us a value of two point four four eight I can just simply copy the value here delete this and then now I can do edit duplicate special again we can't just go ahead and middle mouse click this edit since that was the last command that we did or you can go ahead and hit zero and then place that value here and the y and we're gonna do nine copies going up as well duplicate special you see that everything snaps up perfectly so I'll go ahead and take all these pieces here combine them merge the verts go in object mode I can delete the history also using alt shift D if you wanted a cleaner pattern what we could do is just select these faces here and delete them so this is the first leg of the pattern if you need it to the format you need to figure out which the former you're using before you actually give it some thickness so maybe you want this deformed right maybe this is a grille of a car and you want to give it a slight Bend maybe it has a little bit of curvature your car body and you want to project that onto it so what you could do is grab a sphere and what this sphere right here is gonna do is basically approximate it really any shape but this could be the body of a vehicle right so what we could do is just give this a little bit more shape will give this quite a bit more divisions so we'll move this up scale a little bit more so that looks about right and we'll just scale this quite a bit more here so I'm gonna select the object that I want to formed and then the actual influence object hold down shift I'll go to deform shrink-wrap options and if we reset this I like to use vertex normals and I'll hit create you see that this is now projected onto this object from this point you want to make sure you delete in the history if we delete the sphere or the influence object it snaps back to its original form so I'm gonna select both objects here and I will delete my history and now we could delete the influence object and this is back then the last thing you could do is extrude this out and give us some thickness here's our finished pattern and it's now deformed into place so maybe you needed this guy in a cylindrical fashion so depending on the de former is gonna depend whether you could add thickness on or before with the shrink wrap or shrink wraps tend to destroy or just pile up or collapse all your thickness on top of each other but if say we were to use maybe a bender former we don't have to worry about that right so we can go in here we can go ahead extrude this out and maybe for this guy we want to go ahead apply it nice to bevel to this we can select one of these border edges here we'll go to select and then select similar now you see that most of the edges that we want to bevel are actually already selected these right here cut off right this is a little bit of a different shape what we can do is just add this shape on as well right add this edge and then since select similar was the last thing we do we could just simply middle mouse click and it's gonna add that to the selection right so well ma we might have to do this a couple of times to select all the edges that we want beveled and we'll middle mouse click again you see that it's doing a nice job of adding the selection I'll go in here and add this one as well and then middle mouse click again it looks like we got them all so from this point I'll go ahead and do a bevel and this looks pretty good I'll select my mess right here I'll go to deform and then select nonlinear and apply the bend so with the bend deformer the bend handle and the orientation is pretty important you see right now it's how it's up and down so we want to go ahead and rotate this and we can go ahead and bring the channel box here I'll hold down J it's a constraint to 15 degree increments right and now usually what I like to do is just give it a little bit abend to see which way it's starting to work so I'll go to my inputs hit this bend here and start applying some curvature all right so it's actually going the wrong way and it's telling us that we need to flip this one more time so again I'll hold down J to constrain a 15 degree increments and flip it all the way across like this all right you see that it's at a perfect 90 degree angle and now we go back in here give us some more curvature and we could Bend this guy in the place so I'll go all the way in here obviously if you wanted a clean merge delete these guys and I'm not gonna do this whole thing but do enough for you guys to get the gist of it you need a nice clean border edge and what you can do with the bender former here is it won't let you actually scrub through past 180 but you can manually put in a value that's more than 180 right so you see that I got us a lot closer so now if we came in here and maybe did 192 we could keep playing with these values right and then after that we could just go ahead and merge these verts and get a clean some shape and then from this we could just take this and we'll delete the history and now we have a perfect repeatable pattern that we deformed into place into a cylinder using a deform er thank you very much for tuning in folks I really appreciate your time let me know how I did in the comments down below and please consider sharing this with any 3d artists on my find value in the information until we meet again folks I will catch you next time [Music]

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 39,523

Keywords: Maya Hard Surface, hard surface tutorial, hard surface modeling, hard surface maya, jlmussi, hm tutorials, hard surface, maya tutorial, blender, maya for beginners, maya hard surface modeling tutorial, maya modeling, maya modeling tips, maya modeling tutorial, maya modeling tutorial 2018, maya modeling 2019, maya vehicle modeling, maya car modeling, maya 3d modeling tutorial

Id: P6LX_Ix3GKE

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SuperSmashSonic]

I like you added a little flair to this Maya tutorial, as most are pretty mundane. Definitely gonna try this out!