Maya Hard Surface Modeling - How to Fix Bad Surfaces

hey everyone today we're going to take a look at how to deal with one of the most frustrating things when it comes to modeling and that's how to fix bumpy lumpy surfaces on your hard surface models you'll see that i have two models here that look similar but have quite a few underlying differences when it comes to topology and edge flow for example if we look at the gray model you'll notice artifacting and bumpy surfaces here in this area now if we look at the green or blue model you notice that overall the surface is much cleaner and smoother overall so with that let's take a look at how to fix these issues i also wanted to say thank you for all the shares and support on the last video a lot of people were asking hey can we download this model and i'll drop a link down below on where you can download it and uh kind of help support the the content i'm making for only a few bucks nothing crazy and as always you know don't forget to like comment subscribe if you got any feedback or tips to add you guys so uh yeah let's get going all right so the first hard surface modeling tip is to always make sure you're using a uh the right material as your modeling for example if i go ahead and take a look at the helmet that has these artifacting issues it's clear as day you can see where those issues are now the default material in maya is this lambert one material so if you can see right here with that assigned it actually hides and not that it's doing purposefully but you don't notice those artifacts and lumpy areas as much alright so always make sure to assign a favorite material with fong fong e or blin and you can see that i have those already here as an existing material so there so just make sure to use this as your modeling it'll help you catch issues as you go now the next point that you want to keep in mind when hard surface modeling is having a good base mesh that will give you enough detail and subdivisions to be able to actually add intricate details okay now you can see that one of the main differences between these two models is that the blue model has a little bit more or quite a bit more uh faces edges and vertices here you can see that this has about 64 running along the helmet and the other one has about 36 okay and i ended up starting here with the left one with about 30 to 32 edges okay so let's take a look at what i mean at uh at a high level okay if i start with this cube here and really kind of scale this up and i'll go ahead and subdivide this cube maybe about three times here okay so now we have about 32 subdivisions okay now if i go ahead now and take the bottom half and completely delete that and grab this edge and so we're just kind of kind of getting a nice simple version of the mandalorian helmet okay so i'll go ahead and control middle mouse click here with the multi-cut tool and then i'll go ahead and actually turn on symmetry to make this a little bit easier now you want to make sure to use object z instead of world z since we're not on the line of symmetry here on the world okay so you can see i'll go ahead and grab these and something like this okay so here's a nice simple version of the helmet now if i go ahead and work with this you'll notice that if i try to take these vertices here now and get a tight corner so you'll notice that this kind of curves a little bit too much and i take this and control shift and kind of slide that on the edge now you can make sure to use this here with the edge slide and if i go ahead here and kind of pinch that there and then i can go ahead and control right click and grab my multi-cut tool here with ctrl middle mouse and if you hold ctrl that'll add it right on the middle otherwise you can just control left click anywhere on there okay now again if i go ahead and just quickly assign a fong material here we'll take a look and see kind of what's happening so you can see right out the gate that i start to get this pinching um that's happening here okay because one of the reasons why is i'm trying i'm trying to do too much with too little okay so if i go ahead and extrude this now and extrude this out you can kind of see and you can kind of see what's happening here and by giving this a little bit of thickness right and i can control middle mouse and add this uh here all right so overall it's looking okay but if you want to minimize kind of some of this artifacting that's happening here well one of the ways to do that is to kind of start with a bit smoother mesh okay so i'll go ahead and recreate another cube here and we'll this time use more subdivisions okay so we have two different versions here one that's subdivided a bit more and for this one we have about 64. and this one's going in the opposite direction we have 16. so here's the one with the nice 16 samples so maybe i'll go ahead and just reorder these so they're going from smaller to to greater okay now again if i take this one now and i grab this kind of middle edge here and i like to use uh detach component so i don't have to worry about selecting faces and that'll just separate the top from the bottom so i'll go ahead and delete that and then go ahead now and grab this face and move this down for the helmet okay and again i'll grab multi-cut control middle mouse to add it in the middle here and now what i'll do is go ahead and just kind of create a simple version a simple opening of the helmet so maybe something like this okay so now that i have this here you can see that if i go ahead now and hold ctrl shift i now have more geometry to work with and i'm not stretching and pulling um these edges and vertices too much okay so you'll see now i get a nice sharp corner here and the artifacting is happening substantially less than what was happening over here okay and so if i were to go ahead and even uh create a simple shell of this and go ahead and add a uh multi-cut here right along the middle here so control middle mouse that you'll again get a nice tight corner so you can kind of see the difference there right it's a subtle difference but these are the things that are going to help you get much much smoother um right so again if we look at this corner you can start to see it look pretty apparent in comparison between the two right even though we're starting with what you may think is quite a bit detailed 32 subdivisions having something like 64 is gonna help a lot more and you can see that i only am leveraging all of this detail here for really the top cap right and then on the bottom half i don't carry that down here for example you can see that i'm only using enough geometry that i need for the kind of cuts in inset on the mask right and again looking at this in the opposite direction and this is what i see a lot from students when i'm teaching advanced modeling courses it'll start with something that's just doesn't have enough geometry and then they'll go ahead now and try to add in the geometry without uh you know adding in making sure that they have enough g g o right so this one just without a doubt this is not enough to hold these corners and then if you go to add these corners here by manually adding edges then you just get this nightmare of creasing that's happening along the mesh okay the other thing is you can of course you know you'll notice that i'm using something like 16 32 and 64. i always recommend using a power of two so that it's easier to remove or add geometry throughout right so for example if i'm like you know what i don't need a lot of this geometry kind of running along the back side of this you can start to delete every other and that just helps um with circular symmetry okay or radial symmetry i should say all right so just one of those tips that i recommend when starting with base meshes okay so you can see if i go ahead and remove that we're now cleaning up and removing geometry that we may not need okay maybe that was the wrong one here okay but just be careful not to remove it in areas that you would need it okay so having a good base mesh is certainly the start and don't feel intimidated by having that much geometry you can definitely use tools like having a freeform deformer especially if you're creating large surfaces so i typically use actually just a lattice here so if i wanted to work on updating the form of this helmet which is what i did in my time lapse video is that you know i didn't worry about moving vertices by hand a lot i just changed a lot of the form here by using a lattice so that's where you can use these uh deformers to to help out okay so you can see you get this more this conical shape here instead of this kind of wide white shape all right so that's one of the points or principles i would recommend for hard surface modeling and the next one is we're going to look at some tools right because at the end of the day whenever it comes to hard surface modeling you again want a nice even distribution of faces and edges so you can see what i'm doing extrusions i have enough topology to to extrude out right and you can see here ice this is where i start to really push and pull edges and i'm not able to really create a nice smooth surface because i just didn't have enough edges and when i was about halfway through i said man i'm probably gonna have to remake this which is fine with a higher higher quality or higher detailed base mesh okay now a lot of times you don't have to you can kind of get by with using the um the tools in maya now let's take a look at some tools that'll help fix bad topology and help us maintain this nice even distribution of edges okay one for sure is if let's say i go to this middle one here and i want to add in an edge what i'm actually going to do just to make this a little bit simpler is i will uh hold ctrl shift after selecting this edge and go to faces and just delete this inside face to easily remove uh the shell that we had on there okay so now let's say i want to add an edge here and i'm like well i don't want to add or start with a higher quality base mesh no problem let's grab the multi-cut tool and let's go to our modeling toolkit and you can see that there's a setting here under multi-cut options and then the cut insert edge loop tool now this one is what causes this next step causes a lot of issues you'll see that without using this setting if i go ahead and let's say add in an edge here an edge here take a look at what's going to happen we start to get these bad creases in here which is not good at all right you see this uh hopefully it's going to come through on the recording and you can see that there's this subtle artifact in here okay well i'll undo that and this time i'll use uh again using the multi-cut tool but this time enable this edge flow option now watch what happens if i control middle mouse look what it's doing it's now conforming to the surface and edge flow of the surface and you can see that that creasing or pinching that was happening is nearly gone and of course the reason why there's a little bit of a crease is because we need to maintain an even distribution well that's where this transform constraint with edge slide helps you can see me use that by holding ctrl shift middle mouse and then watch that right now you can see i'm starting to move and then add these move and adjust these edges here by using this constraint okay i use these all the time okay and there you can start to see i've added surface here to conform to the surface of the the edge flow all right so that's one way maybe you don't want to start with too high poly of a base mesh and then you can add as you go all right either way will work fine now sometimes as you're working another tool which is really helpful you can see if i go ahead now and just start let's say just messing some things up and it is you know starting not to look all that great here right so now you can see i wasn't really paying attention and i got dense and you know bad topology bad edge flow but i don't want to remodel it well we can use some tools to help fix this okay one of the tools is if i double click this edge here and go to edit mesh you'll see that there's one called edit edge flow and then there you go that kind of helps really fix the edge here now we're kind of using this as an exaggerated example but you can see the difference with with what it's doing and then you can almost let's see if it'll um let's see yeah because it's taking this uh between these two edges and kind of finding the midpoint so you can continue to hit edge flow and fix up some of these edges without having to do a lot of manual manipulation of vertices because that's probably honestly one of the most boring parts of modeling is just moving and adjusting vertices um over your mesh but it's definitely something that has to be done so that kind of helps smooth out some of the edge flow so you can see that's starting to fix some things there all right the next one is i would say making sure that when you insert edges again i want to emphasize this is avoid dead edges where you just again hold ctrl shift and middle mouse to add in there right and you can see that's not conforming to the surface and that's where having edit edge flow you can see the difference now if i have this enabled will help out this uh this the surface here okay so just making sure to hold ctrl shift and then you can see the difference between this and this edge here versus this edge here and this helps avoid dead edges okay and then one of the other things that is really helpful you can see actually if i um maybe kind of move some things around here and you can notice actually i'm moving on the normal by holding ctrl middle mouse so that's another way with transform constrain to use one that's actually not listed here okay but along with uh edge slide the surface slide so you can see that i can actually use surface slide and this helps maintain the overall silhouette of your model and just allows you to clean up topology and edge flow okay now what i actually want to do is kind of again mess this up so we have a little bit of sloppy geometry here right and maybe move some things in move some things out and we're like all right we're done and we take a look at it we're like oh crap there's a lot of lumpies and bumpies everywhere well this is where sculpting tools are really nice okay so what you want to do is i'll turn off the constrain here and i want to maybe grab this smooth brush which is going to be helpful and make sure you have the mesh selected if i go to my tool settings though make sure to tone down the strength here a little bit maybe set it to about 10 and then now we can go ahead and just start to smooth out the geometry now be careful with i turned down the strength because it can be destructive depending on the detail of your mesh right but this is just going to help smooth some things out now you don't want to use it too much if you want to kind of fix issues like here i definitely use this one which is the relax tool so use this relax tool and then now watch what happens relax tool kind of does a little bit of the opposite or not really opposite but what it does is helps you keep the overall form and just worries about um the distribution of your edge flow so very nice very powerful and between these two tools i mean you're able to fix a lot of damage on your models okay and so if you take a look back here look at that that cap that i just went ahead and just messed up and moved things on the normal move things to create bad topology has been basically removed by using these tools all right so the next point would be if you know you're happy with your form but your topology and everything is just too far gone and way too messy then rebuild there's absolutely nothing wrong with rebuilding and remodeling areas of your model i mean that's essentially what i did here right so if i grab my mesh here i'm actually going to go ahead and duplicate this hide the original helmet and ctrl 1 to isolate okay and what i'm going to do is turn on this which is make selected object live but actually i want to subdivide this so i'm going to hold shift right click and apply smooth and maybe one or two subdivisions should be fine and then i can go ahead now again and make this a live surface then i can grab my quad draw tool and as you can imagine i can go ahead now and start to what's called retopologize and rebuild and remodel this mesh now this is an entirely new mesh okay and what this is going to do is going to help me create a nice cleaner version of what i have now i always recommend make sure to focus on your edge loops and face loops first and then you can go in and do the larger areas right but for example i'm all i'm doing is left clicking and once you create four dots you've essentially created a quad so hold shift and left click and then you can create and continue to grow that and as you grow and add more dots here or vertices you hold shift and left click there's also other tools like holding tab and left click to move that up or holding ctrl shift to delete faces to rebuild then if you want to add entire edges uh or insert an edge loop that'll conform to the surface just hold ctrl and left click okay all these are down here uh in the quadrat tools and then keyboard mouse shortcuts okay and this isn't a quadra tutorial but this at least is showing you how you can take a mesh with that has good form and rebuild and clean the topology um using this method here and then i can kind of go here and start to build and then you can see how fast that once you got the form it is actually really really easy to create this and what's even nice is that it has a lot of the tools that we just had with the sculpting tools for example if i take this now and hold like tab tab sorry tap middle mouse tab middle mouse to middle mouse right and you can continue to like if i use this here and just continue to let tab left click just these edges and faces right and you can see how how fast again i'm able to kind of rebuild this and then control left click right and i'd say maybe do every three or four um edges or two or four uh edges running along here okay so again like if you were to kind of go here and you had a face that kind of ran like this and middle mouse move these and you can kind of see again how quickly you can rebuild there right and again not really a quad draw or retopologizing tutorial but at least i just want to quickly show you how fast you can rebuild right and i can do something like this all right so we have something like that and you can see that it's a bit messy and you're like well i just kind of ended up back where i started well let's we can start to leverage and utilize these tools right the tools of relax within quadra so now i can snap these on my line of symmetry oh and now you hold shift and left click and there you go look how you can just completely start to re work this and you get nice clean even topology right and you just continue that process um throughout the throughout the mesh okay and it starts to look like you're a pro modeler which which you which you will be all right so cool so there's uh one way aside from just you know straight rebuilding um but hopefully that those help so again i really want to make sure to show this last thing so if i take this plane um here you can see that um this will kind of in a nutshell really explain it uh one last time as a summary so if i take this plane and let's say instead i do a four by four okay and i'll duplicate and move this here so i have both of these planes here okay so as a final recap i'll take both of these move this guy over and what i'm going to do is actually subdivide the second one as the higher poly one and i'm going to take this guy here and we're going to use a deform and this simple deform is going to do a non-linear and a bend we're going to give it a little bit of a curvature and i'm just going to curve like this both 90 degrees like so uh zero in the y there and maybe we just do 45 degrees so we have some curvature there all right and i'll hit g to repeat last so i can apply a bend here again okay and again we did a 45 degree curvature and we did it 90 degrees 90 degrees like so actually just type it here uh in the x and z and zero the y and i'll just go back to poly modeling and delete my history so again if i took this and at the highest level just straight extruded this here and move this down of course turn off your make live surface i wasn't paying attention there so there all right and then now if you want to hold this cut you'll remember that what i can do is do a multi-cut here and if you just add in these edges you can see sometimes that that uh edit with edge flow doesn't work all that great because it's trying to interpolate the edge flow it's no big deal but if i go ahead now and try to add in and try to hold lines on these corners and of course if we add in our fong material and control one to isolate you can kind of see what's happening here right and you start to get these creases and annoying things that just don't really help us out now if you watched my corner tutorial you'll see that you can split this corner here like so and you can actually get rid of these like this look at that and so i i cover how to do corners in my previous tutorial so make sure to take a look at that but again it's this only works so well if you don't have enough topology so now if i take a look ah yeah i see look at this bad pinching that's happening here okay so if we just apply what we just said by starting with this um a little bit more subdivided mesh right not crazy we wouldn't go overboard and then what i'm going to do again is maybe just try to grab the same amount like so we have one two three four five by one two three four uh maybe i'll do something like this i know i did four by four um but either way shouldn't uh matter too much okay so something like that one two three four and one two three four okay and actually i'm gonna even uh square this okay and then ctrl e or use the extrude tool and just move this down okay now again now we have more geometry to work with right here we're trying to do too much with too little here we have what should be just enough um to be able to work with this now you could use this here to tighten these corners because we have enough geometry and if i go in here in the middle something like this but if that starts to pull in a way that you don't like well you can use my corner technique my corner technique you can use the corner technique that i teach right and by splitting this here and you can see that if i go now i can add these corners like so all right i can cut it this side a little bit differently or at least a different order i would say and then now we can cut this cut this and we can get rid of these two since i didn't add one running all the way around okay so and then i can grab my multi-cut tool and then boom boom we can add these holding lines and then we can take a look and there you go look at that look at the difference between having this nice corner here versus this and this is what drives everybody nuts right so if you just apply these principles um with a nice starting with you know a better base mesh um on your models so you can see not this is too low this is better and then you can use the tools to improve or this one uh you just have to be comfortable with handling topology as as many subdivisions as this okay so and that's what led me to go from uh i'll delete this one go back to the previous one that's what led me to go from something like this which i was just kind of speed modeling and getting the overall form to go to something like this where you have it basically completely cleaned up and nice and smooth perfect you know production ready game ready um ready to go into any engine okay so um yeah that was uh planned to keep this uh straight to the point so hopefully you found this helpful as always um you know like comment subscribe down at the bottom if you got anything any feedback or any tips you you also want to share feel free to drop that down below i think what i'll do as well is uh allow you guys to download this model so also post a link to download it for for a few bucks nothing crazy um and uh we'll go from there so i'm excited to keep putting out uh more videos and tutorials so as always stay safe out there and i'll see you guys around thanks bye

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 22,424

Rating: 4.9603634 out of 5

Keywords: 3D, modeling, 3d art, autodesk, maya, topology, edgeflow, hardsurface, hard, surface, mandalorian, helmet, tips, workflow, speed, improve, best, corner, lump, bumpy, fix

Id: bQqr8ImjScU

Length: 28min 59sec (1739 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021

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