Maya Hard Surface Modeling: Spherical Shapes

if you've been trying to create around hard surface models of Maya using a sphere like this I'm here to tell you that you've probably been doing it all wrong I'm gonna show you a great workflow to create round hard surface models of Maya using a little known to former and some bonus tips all that in my hard surface modeling tutorial coming up what's going on you 3d modeling beast this is Jo musi and today we are talking about creating a spherical hard surface model within mine and I think the main problem lies with most of us including myself when I started is that we seek to create a spherical hard surface model and obviously the primitive the choice is gonna be a sphere the problem with that sphere is that it has those nasty poles in there and it really routes our geometry towards those poles and it's really not an ideal as far as the topology goes so with the workflow that I pretty much came up with is using a cube and we get the nice spread out geometry of the cube and then we could use one of my favorite deformers which is called a shrink wrapping performer to actually get the shape right so we're gonna take the nice spread out topology of a cube and that way we can go ahead and use the former and project that shape a spherical shape onto that Q so we really get the best of both worlds also make sure to download my hard surface modeling cheat sheets which is a perfect companion to my videos it's a short PDF guide that will help you on your hard surface modeling journey within maya the great thing about the guide is that it has video explanations so that link within the PDF document will take you to bookmark parts of my video shall you need more explanation on that topic and you can get the free guide by clicking the link down below and I will also throw it up here on the YouTube card so we're gonna go ahead and begin with a cube here so I'll go to create polygon primitives and then I'll go to a cube right here and we can go to the settings here for the poly cube and I'm gonna set all these to two so I do want this a little bit bigger than initial size also wanna split right down the middle so I'll set all those to two and then from here what I want do is I'm gonna have some cylindrical shapes coming out of this so I need a little bit more divisions so what I'm gonna do is just jump over here to a side of you select these guys here I'll go to mesh and then I'll go to triangle eight now we have this triangulated pattern right so essentially what we want to do is start out with an X pattern so I'll switch over to edge mode and then I'll take the ones that are basically not creating the X and I'll select those guys so it looks pretty good and then what I can do from this point is I can go to edit mesh and then we will go to flip triangle edge right so you see that it flipped that edge and now we have this nice X pattern on here so before I do anything else I'll go to show and I'll just hide the grid here it's kind of in the way and now I'm just gonna go ahead and select these verts right here in the middle and make sure nothing else is selected but those middle verts and then I'll go to edit mesh and I'll go to bevel since we bevel that one vert we're actually going to get something that looks like this and gone here but that's what we want I'll go back to face I'll go to select and then I'll go to similar it's gonna select the rest of the faces here then I will shift right click and then I will go to circular eyes components and with the circle eyes option I'm gonna play with the with the radio offset here to something like this I'll hit delete and then once that's the lead I'll go to object mode I'll go to mesh I'll ply au level one smooth right here and now it's time to actually deform this on to a spherical shape right so obviously we're gonna need a sphere so we'll go to create we'll go to polygon primitives and we'll select sphere now we want the sphere to be just slightly smaller or the cube slightly bigger it really doesn't matter I'm just gonna take this fear here and then just scale it down a little bit right and I'll do it a little bit more going a wireframe make sure there's no clipping going on so I'll go back to object mode here I'll select the cube first I'll shift-click the sphere I'll go to deform and then I'll go to shrink wrap options you can go ahead and reset the tool if you want so you see that it's set toward inner object and that's actually what we want so I'll select that I'll hit create and now we see that we basically projected this shape right this round shape on to that cube so from this point what we can do is remember anytime that you have a deforming and you don't delete the history if you delete that influence object it's just gonna pop back to its preview shape so what we're gonna do here just select both objects edit delete by type history we'll clear that out now we should be able to delete the sphere and still keep our shape right and what I'm gonna do at this point is right-click I'll assign a existing material so this is just a new blend that I created and then I'll go ahead and smooth this I'll go to three mode I'll take off wireframe on shaded so we do have a little bit of a pinching here and that's probably because of these extra edges here right so what we could do is just take these and then we can take these in the lead and I'm not gonna worry about these and you'll see why in a second so the first thing that we want to do is we're gonna switch things up a little bit so we're gonna work on this panel right and we're gonna give it some unique detail and then we're gonna work on this panel give it some unique detail as well so and this one will leave as is and then these other two are just gonna get married over right so what I can do here is I'll go to edge select this edge like this so basically all the areas that I want to split up I'm gonna select the edges so from here I can shift right click and then I can go to detach all right so now you see that we have kind of this thicker edge here that means it's a border edge and detaching what it's going to do it's gonna peel off those components right so they're no longer attached so the cool thing about this is that if we do a mesh and a separate now these are different components these right here we're gonna delete and yeah so we'll just basically work on these so what we could do here is since the pivots still at the middle which is pretty much what we want we can shift right-click we can go to mirror options we can set up a instance we'll go ahead and mirror that one and then we'll do the same thing here shift right click mirror options this one's gonna be in the Z and it's still going to be in instance right and same thing as this one shift right-click mirror and this is gonna be in the Y okay so we'll turn on wireframe on shaded back on and the cool thing about this is that you know whatever we do here it's gonna get projected onto the corresponding size and so on with the other two pieces all right so I'm gonna undo that and let's go ahead and I'm pretty much just freestyling this so I'm gonna take this guy here and just push this out so what I like to do let me go a little bit slower here right what I like to do is sometimes I like to extrude and then just go back to my move tool and just push out right so once you have that extruded as long as you don't deselect anything you can just go back to a transform and it works pretty much on the fly so I like to use the transforms in conjunction with the extrude operation so I'm just gonna go ahead and give this a little bit of a lip and what we could do here is extrude this back in play with the offset here and the thickness alright so something like this and then I'm gonna go ahead and take this guy here and just scale it make sure it's flat and same thing here see that we have a little bit of a curvature so we can actually just blend that out real quick and then and I'm flattening out by basically scaling towards that axis which looks like it's the X in this in this case right so I'll go ahead and extrude it inward hit W and I'm just pushing in and then what I can do here is just create a quick cap so I'll go ahead and extrude one time right and if we smooth this out you see that we have the other edge and then from here we can go ahead and do a merge collapse so I'm doing shift right click so from here we could do shift right click merge collapse merge the center so we'll cap that out and we can do something similar here but here I'm gonna mix up the pattern a little bit so I'm gonna take this guy here I'll extrude I'll just get the scale tool before I do that I'm gonna take this guy here just kind of flatten it out and then I'll extrude scale scale inward like this right and then hit W again so I did another extrude I hit W I'll go in like this and then I will extrude and we have another edge right here this edge right here is peeling off and 3 mode is actually a good way of just sometimes we like we hit extrude but we forget what we did so sometimes just hitting 3 will actually expose those edges that are on top of each other right so now that we have that edge that extra edge we could do shift right click merge the center and we'll cap that out so we're looking pretty good let's go ahead and reinforce these guys here so I'll take all the edges that need to be hardened and then I'll do a mesh sorry add a mesh bevel and then I'll give that guy 3 divisions and probably taper down the fraction if you if you feel like these values are jumping around a lot what you can do is hold down ctrl and you'll get more or gradual control and if you you actually need more control than that you could do ctrl shift and you'll get even more incremental values right so that looks pretty good and I'll go ahead and repeat that for this part as well and so I'll do another bevel have the bevel key a shortcut in so there's no need to just keep showing you that command so there we go we got bevels and now this should work what we want and obviously this is updating to the other side since we created it so that looks good that looks good and this looks good right this is what I mentioned about some bonus tips so we're gonna create some panel detail here with a plan it's a nice way of just getting some quick detail especially on these cylindrical caps it really is just gonna add a little bit of spice to our hard surface model so we'll go to create polygon primitive and we'll create a plane and we'll go to the options and make sure it's a two by two so we can like how that looks we'll go ahead and just move it off to the side here and we'll work on this on this side of you here and I'm not worried about this not fitting yet we'll worry about that in a second but I do want to go ahead and create that panel detail so what I can do from this point is I won't need to work on half of this so I'll just delete half and just kind of focus on this area and what I can do is I'll go back to object mode and I'll just shrink this just a little bit so right about there that's gonna work fine and then what I can do here is I'll take my multi cut and with the multi cut tool if you do control shift and middle mouse click right we get a edge right in the middle so there's no guesswork needed if you just hold down ctrl and then middle mouse click instead of left clicking it'll drop that edge right in between so now we have this what I want to do from this point as well is drop another one here and then move this guy like this this guy like this right here and I'm gonna move this guy something like this alright so what I can do is move this guy up a little bit and just play around and get the angle that I want and once I have it I could just get the scale tool just scale these guys flat and then from here what I'm gonna do is we could take this edge here and just scale so sometimes I just like things to be nice and straight before I do anything else so I'll basically want to pan online from here here and here so I'll go ahead and get my bevel tool so I'll bevel those edges right and then I'll give it a small thickness here right so what I'll do here is I'll just select these faces and I will extrude and what I'm gonna do is just push this guy back a little bit and what I also like to do is drop three divisions and that's gonna give me those holding edges I could just go in there and drop edge loops but why not just do it with the extrude since it's a little bit easier especially if you have to zoom in those small areas and then we could just take those edges there and those edges here as well and we could just get rid of them I'm sorry those faces so we'll get rid of them and then we'll see how these guys deform so we'll hit 3 mode you see that we're losing a lot of those hard edges so what I'll do is I'll go to my multi cut and I'll start dropping some edges so here you see that the multi-cut likes to average things out for holding edges and if I want to be straight off with another edge I'll actually go to the insert edge loop tool instead of the multi cut edge loop function so mesh tools insert edgeloop tool' so we'll do that and now you see that we have a nice straight edge so I'll go ahead and drop some edges there and that's there an edge there edge there edge there let's see how we look so that looks pretty good right this is actually being held up pretty well so we're pretty much done with the modeling and the cool thing about this is that you know it's on a flat surface so we don't really have to worry that much about pinching all right so we're gonna go ahead and mirror this bad boy over so make sure that my pivot is where it needs to be so I'll hit D to enable pivot edit mode and then V to just snap to avert right there on the edge shift right click and then we'll go to mirror options and it looks like we're working in the Z mayor and there we go and then now we could just go ahead and take this and move this bad boy back like so and we could shape it so if we really needed to in this case we don't but you could just shape it either you could either bullying a shade or you could just get a cylindrical cap and kind of snap these verts right here but for the purpose of this you get the point it's now really needed right really just round out that shape so I'm gonna go ahead and take this guy here I'll do control D and then to duplicate it right move it rotate it I'll hold down J to just snap to 15 degree increments that looks pretty good what I can do from this point is go to my move tool hold down hit D hold down V to just vert snap right here and then what we could do is vert snap again right there so we're nice and squared away with that one vert all right and let's see something that looks kind of cool so what I'll do here is actually flip this guy just to change the pattern a little bit and that's a cool thing about you know these little hard surface designs that you know with just a little bit of rotation it's a mirroring you could actually get a pretty different shape right so for here what I think I'm gonna do is I don't want to scale it because I'll skew kind of that evenness of that of that panel line so I'll take this guy here and then we can go ahead and just move it up something like that all right so we want to cut into that cylindrical cap and then we could do the same thing here we could do half and then delete in the mirror but I'm just gonna do this by hand don't have to be super precise in this case right so now this is hidden so let's just take it let's take the object just make sure it's coming through here like so so from this point I'm just gonna go ahead and look at this edge here select that range and to select the range you could just select one edge hold down shift double click and I'll select that range right if you just double click on here just select the whole border edge you don't want that so select one edge hold down shift double click and you'll select a range I'm gonna go ahead and push this guy up like this and that looks pretty good so I'll hit D the right to just move that pivot okay W again shift right click and then I'll do a mirror in the X you see that I'm getting some wonky issues with the the Mary and that's because we have transforms right so anytime that you mirror you want to make sure that these are cleared right because we flip the sky so the mirroring is gonna get a little bit out of line unless we freeze these transforms so we'll go to modify freeze transformations and now you see that all that's the erode out so this should work properly since we should be mirroring right here in the X so we'll shift right click mirror mirror X that's a clean mirror so it's time to make one mess out of this there's two options you can go about it you can basically select the instance and convert it to a polygon mesh or you could just delete and mirror over I'll show you both ways so you know basically how to do them so this guy was an instance so we can go to modify and then convert and we can go to instance to object and now you see that it's no longer gonna go ahead and update all right so we kill that connection this one still has the connection so you'll see that it updates and the other option is you just take this guy me Merritt so before I combine and mirror these guys what I'll do is just take these faces here and delete them and if you're tight on a polygon count I suggest doing that and if you're not then it's not a big deal so now I can go ahead and take both of these guys I'll go to mesh and I'll go to combine and now that's one mesh so now what I can do is hold down D V to move that pivot and will basically snap it to this vert right here okay W again shift right click and then I'll go to mirror and this should be a mirror on the Z as a copy and there we go and then I'm actually gonna do the same exact thing there I did show you how to basically kill that instance if you need it so I'll delete that and then we'll go ahead and combine these I have that shortcutted so and then I'll hit the again v2 vert snap right here W shift right click and then we'll go to Mirror Mirror that over this way and what I need to do is just delete this guy first and then we can mirror this guy in the X mirror there we go and then this last guy here since there's not any changes that we did we can just go ahead and do modify and then we can convert so all these should be polygon meshes looks good so I'll take all these and then I'll go ahead and combine them one last time I'll go into vertice mode and then I'll go to mesh and then I will go to merge and with these guys especially when you got bevels with small tolerances what you want to make sure you're doing is make sure that you are on a very low merge threshold and you want to check those tight bevels there make sure they're not getting pinched we want to go ahead and just select this guy will hate three mode and looks pretty good the last thing that we could do is to maybe add a little bit more pop is going here and we could go ahead and select these guys select these guys here and then we can do a extrude and very slightly so you see that's getting pretty pretty far out so I'll hold down ctrl shift just give it a low-value and then we'll go three divisions on the well we'll go three on the divisions now we should have another nice little panel line and this guy here obviously since we did hit three it is shrinking a little bit so what we could do in this case is just select this guy here double click and just kind of scale it in a little bit and I'll actually do this with both and I'll use this sky here that way we're not we're not scaling here and just pinching them together right what we could do is just use this guy and then if we use this guy we won't a basically scale in the Z will leave the Z alone and that way we're not getting that out said that we probably don't want right so we'll just pinch this down just a little bit just to clear it and yeah I think that looks pretty good [Music] thank you so much for tuning in folks and please let me know on the comments down below your favorite deformers within Maya share it with another 3d artist that you think my fine value and if you haven't subscribed already please consider doing so as I do hard surface tutorials like this all the time until we meet again folks I will catch you next time [Music]

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 51,145

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: 4ioxnMq-9io

Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 30 2019