Maya Modelling Secrets

hey guys heading in Morten here for flip normals and in today's video we're gonna do a quick demonstration of how to speed up your modeling workflow inside of Maya in this one we're using Maya 2018 but most of these apply for all versions or most newer versions of Maya so the guide here is gonna be split into three parts we're gonna have marking menus hotkeys and then some general tips and tricks so first off marking menus so marking menus can be activated in a number of different ways they're contextual based on what you've selected or haven't selected so when nothing is selected you hold down shift and the right mouse button you get the creation menu up where you can have spheres cubes whatever so this is just a really quick way to create primitives the super cool thing about marking menus is that they don't really care about being visually selected so you know they're outside the human scope of perception so you can move really quickly let's say we hold down shift and right mouse button and you just go to the right you create a sphere so this is really easy to do even with we have nested marking menus so something within something else you can like go to the right and then go up right and it'll it'll correctly create whatever you've you've hit there if you use to you modeling will mark your menu will look like a modeling genius you'll be so fast that people won't actually know what you're doing yeah I will put you and you have merged subverts of water so one of the cool marking menus on today you will use a lot is for your transforms here so if you hold down if you select an object you hold down shift control right mouse button you can go into the standard world mode right where your pivot is just aligned to the world if you go to object for example it's not aligned to the object so super quick way to just change between these modes so one super cool feature in the transform marking menu is the axis so if you go to axis and you hit normal say if you select some vertices here now you have a transform gizmo where each like the handle of each vertex edge or face or whatever points to the normal so once you start moving it along it has to be N it moves in and out based on the normal if you were if you do any of the other ones it's just super weird but em for normal moves it in a now this is really practical we go to our amazing sausage test shape here pretty good modeler if you want to shrink let's say you have a selection here and you have a selection here if you were to go you wanted to shrink this in and out you could do this and you shrink this in but it's a little weird then you go here you shrink this and that doesn't really work now it's just like these let's go back in to our access normal mode and then just hit in the n1 you can see that it like expands it or contracts it based on those normals now this really this will also works with the soft selection so just hit B you can hold down B and just drag on your screen to adjust the soft selection this will do a sort of like based on your self selection this is really handy for thinning out or making objects that are more complex thicker or thinner I use this a lot for this exact purpose maybe not for this organic stuff but particularly for hard surface stuff if you just you realize you have 30 pipes and they have the wrong radius like doing that by hand is a real pain in ass you can just select them and just just move them in but normal and you just thinned them all out super quickly so really nice tip there one other cool thing let's go to our marking menu here is we have the multi cut tool so this is just holding on shift and the right mouse button when you're on an object you just go to multi cut turn up so I'll select and multi cut tool is just you know all around really good modeling tool that's quick and easy to use this has gotten a lot better throughout the years in the beginning when they first introduced it it was something else let's say one cool feature that we that we discovered recently is if you have the multi cut tool and you just press the middle mouse button at the same time you see it always snaps to the centre of the two edges that you're in between you don't have to worry about say if you hold down control that's for doing the edge ring here or it's loop and shift it like snaps and angles and sometimes it can be a little hard to hit the exact center but anywhere between these two and hit the middle mouse button it just places a an edge in between mmm very nice I didn't I I also didn't know but this until recently and then this is just sped up a more liberal for so much ever since so kind of segue into that one thing that's really common when you're you're placing new loops like this is you end up with a loop that let's say you want to make a really perfect surface you're doing car or something hard surface you want something that really flows nicely here they introduced the tool a couple years ago that's called the edge flow tool so select that each component hold down shift in the right mouse button and then edit edge flow now this I'm just by pure magic you know it averages out where it's supposed to be so this is the default sort of view bridge these two you insert an edge loop and then it looks at the other edges that come before and after to sort of figure out where should your edge lie between here yeah really super handy tool I use this a lot to read topology like I just throw out some super illegal topology and then I just use to edit edge flow tool this to this mixture it's really nice and even yeah it's incredibly useful tool mapping there's a hotkey in general which we talk about in a bit is very useful so I kind of a two-for-one here a new tool that they introduced in 2018 is the circular rise tool so moto I know Henning has told me about that before moto let's have this tool for a long years yeah that is for ten years assess what circularize is for is making circles on things so two for one the reason I'm saying that is you'll see it in a moment so if we select let's say we select these here and we want to make a hole in this like a perfectly round hole before what you would have to do is kind of like move these things out there so they're kind of like they're in a circle formation now what you can do is you can just select the components this can be this doesn't have just have to be faces it can be other components as well hold down shift the right mouse button and then you go down to circular eyes component now this just makes a perfect circle now this can be kind of annoying to select some time so if you're in selection of just in-phase object whatever it is hold down tab and you can kind of paint your selection around this is really quick if you want to have a quick just really quick selection so circularize and then what you can do from here is just extrude it in extrude down here whenever you do anything hard surface this is this tool you need this tool this here is beyond useful and there you're gonna have a perfect hole without this don't have to do like what Morton was talking about you have to like just kind of move the verts around and maybe you have to snap them just cylinder inserted there this is really useful also play around with the settings for the circle rise tool as well they're quite useful yeah so if you want to let's do another test here just on top so again we go guess that's kind of marking menu as well you just hold down on an object the right mouse button you can go into any of the object modes so let's go to face again just paint this out circular eyes and then in here like if it's messed up or if you want to messed it up you could twist it around and you know play around with the settings and see what you can make out of this it's really really cool - laughs good job man yeah thanks so next up we're gonna look at some custom hotkeys so not all of these has to have to be custom some of them are built into Maya some you might have to look for in the Internet or if you know any metal of Python you can write your own really handy stuff so if you go to Windows settings and under hotkey editor Maya there's a couple versions ago they introduced the hotkey editor a hotkey editor which is really nice and user-friendly unlike before it was terrible before guys terrible what I've done just show you how to make a new sit real quick so what you can do Maya default will just be what do you have so you select my default and you can hit duplicate just give any name you want I'll call this one test and then under tests you can start creating new hotkeys I'm just gonna go back to my hotkeys so I only have a very few select hotkeys just because I don't use a lot really it's also really annoying if your heart get too many things and then you go to you go to a different workstation yeah like we don't want a lot we've been going around teaching and like we're working at different computers at work if you if you have like 30 hotkeys you won't really be able to work on any other computers so I just say miss morkan here I might I might have it up to 10 hotkeys Macs because if you get too dependent you're just in trouble yeah so some of the hotkeys that I have let's just close this again so is if I'm working with something you know maybe you have a lot of objects that are super close together and it's kind of hard to see to alt Q I've met isolate selected so that's just in this feature up here you can map that to any hotkey that you want just quick in-and-out you want to work on another object you want to see what you're working on this is super useful another one kind of in that vein is the x-ray tool so I have two different modes for x-ray one is x-ray the entire scene so I can see what's happening the other one is just x-rays selected objects so I've chosen to set this up on old X alt X is my selection and control old X is the entire scene no matter what so just super handy super quick to just when you're doing complex objects yeah you really want to set the set this up to a hotkey or custom marking minion whatnot at least you want these two to guys actually your convenience yeah another one see two ones that are super useful is my align pivot to origin and then realign the pivot to the center not just realign if the pivot has been moved in any way you can always move it back to the center of the sense of sort of center of the object so let's just go back to the hotkey editor here and just set up a random hotkey so let's go back into our little test hotkey editor and see choose a custom so these are all mine these will just show up that independently of where you are so these you have access to a bunch of hotkeys that are here you can search through them as well so let's say we wanted to set up scale for example you wanted to map scale to a different hotkey you just click here and then you just type in the key that you want now if you want to set up some more advanced hotkeys someone maybe someone has made a script that does something repetitive and you want to map that to a hotkey simply press the runtime command editor create a new key or a new hotkey call it tests give it a description testing and I usually just place it in the costume category you can create a custom one here I think yeah I've created a user category here as well but no however you want to sort it then you just paste your command in here whether it's Mel ORS Python save the runtime command and then apply a hotkey to it out here this could be any script like any script you find you can map to a hotkey like this and the last bit of stuff will go through here is just some quick tips for here we'll have something with the pivots now this is again that's something they recently introduced in a couple versions ago in Maya is how to manipulate your pivot in a super nice way on the object so if you hold down D this is your sort of pivot editor so now you can actually align your pivot to any component on your object so if I wanted to align it to an edge it just takes the average between this and this angle or you have your faces you can even align into a a vertex so super handy stuff if you wanted to sometimes you want to snap on something you don't want to have to go in precisely and click it so if you hold down D and V now you can move your pivot around and it'll automatically snap to whatever component is around there another thing you can do is they hold down D and V and then you use the middle mouse button it'll sort of snap to wherever your mouse or your ever your cursor is so this is just really quick for selecting you want to go into the middle of the transform gizmo and put it on your object another one is aligning stuff to your grid so if you hold down D and X so X and again with the middle mouse button we can just sort of place it on the grid now this isn't just for the pivot you can do this with anything so V now is gonna snap it two points here and holding down just X is gonna snap it to the grid so now we're actually moving the object so like snapping tools they they might seem it might seem like you're not really gonna use them a lot but it's one of these tools you just end up using all the time for various things like I've been able to just snap points around and say when moving in but the manipulator is something you will just keep using continuously as a modeler so highly recommend like what Marta's doing here now he snapped me two objects together so first you just move your you just move your pivot to a point and then you snap that point to another point so you see there now quickly we can we can align things that really shouldn't be aligned or it could be hard to align at four and then s sort of so now we know those points are perfectly touching right yeah so it's not thing to really learn that so you just just get used to using hotkeys for this yeah and another this is actually this is actually built into Timaeus you don't even have to do anything it's the repeat key so you can use this for a bunch of different things but the repeat key basically repeats your last action your last tool action that was activated so let's say we we selected some some vertices around here and we wanted to Everidge so hold on shift right mouse button and go to average vertices now it averages in and then what you can do is you can just press key to keep reactivating the tool you do this with other things let's say you have to average something a hundred times or 50 times or whatever this is a really quick way to just go in and average it yeah you just spam the G key like crazy it's one of these tools you will just keep using all over and over and over again the G key best friend Amaya so thanks so much for watching and if you want to see more content like this don't forget to comment like and subscribe and we'll see you guys later you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 218,721

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character

Id: BAxUMjHdS84

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2018