Maya Hard Surface Modeling - Mandalorian Helmet

hey everyone after wrapping up my character modeling series with the hammer boy today we're gonna look at hard surface modeling techniques with creating the star wars mandalorian helmet i've captured the entire process of modeling this helmet and i will explain my approach to how i created it this video is a time lapse that includes me narrating throughout it i have marked the places where i explain my process in the table of contents below where i narrate each part of the process by watching this video you will learn my high level approach to hard surface modeling techniques that include sub d or subdivision modeling edge flowing topology how to maintain clean topology and how to model simple to complex objects in maya keep in mind that i use maya for this video but the techniques can be applied to any 3d software so with that let's get started alright so a big part of what i did was find reference so i locked out and found some nice reference on sideshow.com which they make props for movies in in hollywood so they had some nice front side and perspective shots now they didn't match up perfectly and there's some you know perspective distortion when you're using for orthographic so i use these more of a as a guide but they're definitely the most accurate reference you'll find online so use it to your best ability and you'll see that i'm matching up perspective shots and i just used a 45 degree focal length and did my best to match it after that i went ahead and created a 16-sided cylinder to match up with a subdivided cube and the subdivided cube i subdivided it about three times and that gives me the 32 sides to match up with the 32-sided cylinder so that gives me a nice cap for the the top of the head and then i have the cylinder for the bottom and that worked out really really well and once i got these attached i just used some snapping you can use d to move the pivot for the edges and move tool to snap i then use the lattice to make sure to help with the overall form and the lattice just helps me with large scale changes and i'm using the front the side the view and the perspective in order to get that of course make sure to work with symmetry uh to help with efficiency so once you do that you know that'll that'll make your life a lot easier [Music] [Music] so once i spent the first part of the process just making sure that the form and everything was aligned and the proportions were all good i now go ahead and start cutting in the detail this is where edge flow and topology is very important this is where you want to make sure to plan out your edge flow and get everything set up properly and again i'm bouncing between the front view the side view cutting in where i'm needed where it's needed and then i go ahead and harden edges now some people might be watching this and say well why don't you just use crease at this point i just wanted to stick to a nice sub d workflow that you can use in any software even though creasing is pretty much in any software and if you wanted to take this and upload this or take this out of maya into game engines and whatnot so uh i will be again using sub d workflow and beveling and chamfering a lot of edges here all right so i also flatten the side of the head and i'm going in and preparing a lot of the area to extrude and cut out so that's kind of the main focus here all while maintaining a nice clean distribution of edge flow and always checking my reference [Music] [Music] [Music] so you'll see here that i'm going through and setting up and readjusting kind of the camera again just using it as a guide and i'm going back and making sure that everything looking good from the side the front and the perspective view it's not going to match 100 but again i'm using these more as a guide to help with [Music] modeling [Music] [Music] [Music] so here around the eye area you'll see that i actually used kind of this kite quad to run some edges through and i ended up going back on that instead of running edges horizontally i run it coming down uh vertically so running up and down so you see i'm making room here since i didn't like all the pinching that was happening and a lot of times you know to get rid of pinching you're going to just have to add more geometry which is fine and then i'm just doing a little bit of cleanup and making sure that it subdivides and smooths nicely so you can see i'm again doing some cleanup and i would definitely recommend using the insert edge loop tool to insert with edge flow that's what i used here with a little bit of cleanup and that just helps me avoid all the hard pinching and creasing within your model once i've shelled everything and gave it a nice extrusion i go ahead now and i use a bevel with chamfer all right or chamfer however you want to say it and this makes sure that i maintain my original edge flow and add in those holding lines so you can see i'm going back to the reference making sure that i add those subtle curvatures and detail and just keep that mesh clean so you can see this is where i really step into the next portion of the modeling and do a lot of kind of precision cuts and holding lines to make sure that everything looks as good as it should so always got to make sure to take a look at those corners and you can see how i do it i didn't speed this up too much so you can follow along you can always sew it down if need be and here i'm adding some more edges to help with the curvature on the inside of the cheek area and doing some cleanup moving some edges and you can see that after i did that bevel and chamfer i had to add edges to kind of run across the mesh run across the model and i'm using insert edge loop tool to help with that alright and it starts to pinch and there's a little bit of uh you know some some messy vertices so that's why i use average vertices uh that really helps clean up that uh that bumpy area so that really did a good job and i kind of scaled it down and i'm starting to add and refine those forms all right so i'm pretty happy once i get to this point and i want to move on to the next part so what i do is just kind of separate the inside from the outside of the helmet and i go ahead now and i start to add in that extrusion that runs essentially on the forehead horizontally around the model pretty straightforward i go in and do an extrusion with an offset and then once i offset it i do an extrusion to go inwards now where that extrusion ends it's not the cleanest area but i what i did was just leverage those modular pieces to hide that messy topology so if nobody can see it then in my book that's fine and i'll make sure that it is cleaned up and unwrapped properly so now i'm working on the the modular pieces so here i just use the same techniques i start with a simple form and i start to add edges and and start to build up and add that detail i always start with a six sided cube if i can i give it thickness refine detail and add those holding lines all right now even though i'm not on the origin i can use mirror here with just object uh z all right so you can see this is not the most complicated shape it's probably the second most uh complicated in here and i go ahead and just refine the form and then i'll start adding in some holding lines [Music] [Music] [Music] this part is very important because watch how i take care of these corners okay so you can see that i have corners in the round and i instead of running these edges all the way down the mesh i just go ahead and split that one edge that one face and then i can remove the other edges so hopefully that was pretty clear i can probably do a separate tutorial on how to do corners hard surface corners in maya or just with sub d workflow techniques all right [Music] all right so now we're off to the second part here uh the modular piece that kind of runs maybe a sensor of some sort or where the antennas go and boy this one this one was fun it didn't look all that complicated at first but there's a lot of intricate detail i initially modeled this with a 16-sided cylinder and it just caused a lot more issues than what it was worth so instead i used a 32-sided cylinder to you know give me a lot of geometry while maintaining you know nice clean form all right so i use object symmetry again uh even though i'm using a higher subdivided model subdivision model i'm still able to you know keep and apply the techniques where i refine the form i block it out add the detail give it thickness and then give it holding lights so there's a lot of cutting multi-cut there's a lot of beveling and chamfering and extruding so even though this was really intricate it was definitely a fun piece to model to try to you know keep as clean as possible so you kind of see me going back and forth and trying different things i wanted to keep all of that in this tutorial because you know as as good as everyone is you know we're all not gurus that that say this is exactly how to model each piece sometimes you gotta try a couple techniques um and hopefully this was pretty clear on on how i did that and i would say it's pretty close to what the actual model looks like it may be uh there may be some things that um i didn't include but you can see a lot of that is just from the perspective distortion and the way that it's rotated i end up moving and setting up positioning it later with the lattice and rotate to kind of give it that more proper look but that was the gist of how i did this so you can take a look and see how i finish it up [Music] [Music] all right so now we're on the top of the head piece here you can see that i'm using multi-cut now if you're you go off the model hold shift and drag you can cut that so i use that to cut that nice straight piece on the model and then i go ahead and um detach it extrude or duplicate mesh in this case i duplicated the mesh then deleted what i didn't need and then i go ahead and just kind of uh do some cleanup but really this was a really simplified piece um really everything after this is really easy especially after doing that really complicated piece so i just make sure that i have my edges that i'm then going to bevel and then move some things on the normal and use transform component but again yeah you can kind of see how i do that with the simple with simple extrusions multi cuts and beveling here [Music] okay so now we're taking a look at that rear panel piece so this one again was pretty straightforward uh piece with just some basic holding lines basic extrusions and then it kind of has these fans or vents i should say running down the back and thankfully i had some good reference to work from uh from the sideshow website so i was able to kind of move and position that and really this compared to everything else was fairly straightforward with a nice simple piece so i go ahead and take care of this one pretty quickly um and then you'll see how i then do those separate pieces which was another fun piece to model with the uh with the vents where they were you know hard surface organic at the same time and then i duplicate move duplicate and move so just make sure to model one piece save some time and then move it in position and i made sure not to attach it to this vent piece because you can clearly see that you know they're separate you know you're going to model it like you would in real life maybe they're welded or maybe they're made to be modular and replaced so yeah that worked out really well [Music] all right and on to the last part here which is the essentially the glass part i go ahead and just work off my existing topology i go ahead and duplicate it and then i extrude those edges down and then i just cut in only the areas that i need and i do some extra extrusions and moving on the normal for for this piece once i do that i make sure to match it to my reference and then i make sure to give it some some thickness add in those holding lines and take care of those corners so that was kind of the gist for this piece [Music] [Music] all right as always i really hope you enjoyed this um this is a little bit of a new format where i'm combining kind of voice over narration with time lapse so if you enjoyed it please let me know down below uh and of course if you if you have any tips or recommendations throw those down um and we can kind of get a dialogue going so again uh like comment subscribe if you found this helpful as always take care everyone and stay safe

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 9,571

Keywords: 3D, modeling, timelapse, time, lapse, 3d art, autodesk, maya, topology, edgeflow, hardsurface, hard, surface, mandalorian, helmet, star wars, hard surface

Id: 70hefEEuejw

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020