Maya Retopology: Ultimate Beginner's Guide

hello jail I'm dr. Lambert hello doctor I came as fast as I could our director broke the bad news how is he I've been working closely with dr. Blinn and dr. Fong this situation is not looking good at all paging dr. Lambert to the psych ward paging dr. Lambert to the psych ward it's patient ray again what was that about it's that damn right again his girl Maya left him for a guy named Arnold never been the same sense lost his mind ended up in the psych ward and now he just goes by mental ray get him back to him and look at his vitals we have lamina phases not manifold geometry tries and guns Octagon Oh titled ons it's a complete utter what about you these they are automatic man this is worse than I thought it might be time to just let go and start over I can't doc he has too much history and I spent too much time with him we have to save them is there anything you can do well there's one last thing we can try it's a long shot and I'm not making any promises what's that doctor emergency reach apology what's going on you 3d modeling beast this is damn you see and welcome to my Maya reads apology tutorial for beginners and in this tutorial I'll be showing you step by step how I apologize a character's head within Maya I chose to do a creatures head versus a human and I chose that for a reason and I think that this character has some slightly different forms it does have similar ISA humanoid character but it has different variances that will better get your head around how to routes apologize not just a human head but any character that is thrown your way so why don't we reach apologize in the first place many years back packages like 3d studio Max and Maya were really the only option for creating a character and those packages mainly relied on edge flow for you to be able to create your character right so you have to have some sense of edge flow to be able to build those shapes fast forward to today we have packages like ZBrush where you can completely sculpt the character or even scan data that really topology is not a must when creating a character but there's always a price to pay right because these meshes whether you have a zebra sculpt or scan data if you're looking to create a production mesh you're gonna need good topology right and without proper topology this character that you're creating won't be able to be deformed animated rig or even a you v's laid out to it so if you're starting your mesh in a package like ZBrush or you're using scan data then roots apology is a workflow or a technique that you should probably be aware of or knowledgeable so I imported my three meshes here the head the teeth eyes as a obj imported it from ZBrush one thing you'll notice is that this scale is relatively small to the grid and that's something I try to avoid so in Maya usually I like to pretty much scale my things around the you move this grid give or take that's because really small scales will affect your tolerances and other settings that you know are just not ideal when working with Maya so ideally you want to work in Maya relative to the grid same thing as something comes in ginormous you probably want to scale it down a bit but in this case we want to scale up and work with a relative volume to this grid but on the flip side I'll actually want this scale from ZBrush to be preserved just in case that I want to export my mesh back and have it snap exactly to the mesh that was within ZBrush maybe I want to project some details maybe want to do further sculpting and I want everything in the lineup so in this case what I did is I grouped all my objects I set a keyframe on all the transforms and then on a second frame we're frame number two I just scaled up and then I keyframe these parameters and you'll see that the scale is quite a bit larger and the translation in the Y now I'm working pretty much over the ground plane right so now what this gives me the option do is work on a relatively larger scale whatever mesh that I my roots apologize mesh I could always drag it into the scale group it will inherit the scaling from this group and then I could just snap it back to the original scale that it came from ZBrush and exported back in there and I should have no scale issues so let's go ahead and begin so I'm gonna go back to frame two I'll hit F the frame on my mesh and before we dive into the nitty-gritty of the actual roots apology within Maya I'm gonna go ahead and show you this edge flow guide so this character was done more of a traditional approach just basically box modeled within Maya and we do have a topology or a edge flow guide for this this is a traditional humanoid character I actually did this in a earlier videos and if you actually want to check out how this was built I'll throw it here on a YouTube card but the reason I'm showing this is because when you first start 3d especially characters some of this these patterns might seem a little bit confusing you might not understand the rhyme and a reason but there is a rhyme or reason and that's really just these are optimized for deformations right so things like the eyes these are things are gonna be open and closing and you want that resolution to be there once these things are being pushed and strikes right same thing with the mouth you see that will have a radio set up here and we also have kind of this radial corner for the nostril and even though this character is pretty different as far as the proportions once we start the roots of Paju process you'll actually see that so the corner of this mouth is actually going to resemble the corner whose mouth the edge flow around the eyes is gonna resemble this and we'll also see the corner of this nose here along with this radio loop here pretty much sectioning off the topology within the year so let's go ahead and begin the reach apology process and what I'm gonna do at this point I'm gonna go to the modeling standard workspace by default that's gonna show the modeling toolkit on the right hand side and we will be using the modeling toolkit quite a bit here so from this point the first thing that I'll do is let's just hide this edge flow guide we're gonna select the head this is pretty much what we'll be working with and we have a couple options here to the snap but here we have make life we want to make this a live surface that way whatever two paws do we'll build on top will automatically snap to this volume right here and one thing you'll notice here within the modeling toolkit is that it's transform constraint is set to the live surface which is this head which is pretty much what we want so we'll mainly be working in the Quadra for this routes apology Maya tutorial so I'll select this and one of the things you'll notice will have the keyboard mouse shortcuts here I will call these out as I'm doing them but this is just a nice little reference to have of all the hotkeys available to you once you start reading apology so roots apology is pretty much gonna be the process of me drawing the proper topology on this pretty much very dense mesh that has notes apology at all and like I said earlier oh you know the important areas are gonna be the I radios the mouth radials and the nose right here and also pretty much the isolation of the year so that's gonna be the main ones as well as some of the neck muscles here that's gonna have some nice edge flow that we're gonna create so what I like to do and what I see a lot of beginners actually make the mistake of is when they start with topology they start creating these very little or small squares right so you know they start roots apology at this very very small level and eventually what happens is this you know instead of being maybe our roots apology it becomes a three four five six our roots apology because you're drawing these little you know polygons by hand and you know it could just be very very time-consuming so what I like to do with my roots apology process is do it in passes so I'll do a first pass that is pretty much a large pass with the main edge flow you know established and then I go in and start building the secondary shapes of the model right and really get in there one of the things you'll notice you know once you establish just the larger shapes it's just a matter of adding subdivisions and a lot of that extra work is actually done just via these transform controls and just adding more resolution to your cleaned up mesh right so let's go ahead and just delete this here we're gonna go here to Quadra and the first thing you'll notice is that we have a crosshair this crosshair will allow us to place verts on our mesh and then if we hold down shift it's gonna allow us to basically build a polygon between those verts and you'll notice that as we're sliding this transfer I'm constrained here is constraining our movements to this live surface now we have a couple options one of them is to add edge loops and you'll notice that as we add a edge loop if we all found control it's gonna let us add that edge loop up and you see that it's gonna push and really just as long as we add topology that new topology is gonna constraint to this underneath surface live surface alright so if we added this and we want to delete it we hold down ctrl and shift and that's gonna allow us to delete edges and faces as well now if we wanted to add a edge tool right in the middle just like in Quadra you can hold down control middle mouse click and that new edge loop mathematically is gonna be write down perfectly in the middle of that new polygon so from here we also have the option of extruding these phases we're not just limited to drawing all these points and just connect them we could actually extrude from these edges so how we extrude from an edge is we hold down tab we left-click to extrude one edge and we will hold down tab in middle mouse click to extrude a edge loop all right so we definitely have a couple options of how we build out our topology the other thing I want to talk about is if we all downshift we could actually relax and this is probably gonna be more noticeable if I had a lot more topology but you see that it's gonna try its best to respect the volume but spread these vertices around via this brush type relaxed operation another cool thing about quadrille is if we do ctrl shift and right click we can get to the multi cut tool here alternatively we could just switch it by clicking here and now we can go in and actually cut into our mesh using pretty much multi cut punctuality if you hold down tab you could actually almost paint quad strips so just by holding down tab and left clicking you'll see that we are pretty much sees trips and they will follow my mouth so that could be in handy if you need to change the size of the polygon you can just hold down the tab and middle mouse click and you can drag up or down and you know relatively make smaller or larger polygons so let's go ahead and begin with our first pass I'm just gonna go ahead and delete these I'm gonna begin the first pass here starting on with the eyes so I'll go to Quadra and I'll start at this corner here and just draw these four verts hold on shift in between to establish or create a polygon in between and it's gonna move my my way rather quickly and just work this initial loop that's pretty much going to be the eyelids for the character next thing that we're gonna work in is the corner of that mouth and just like the corner the eye is gonna have a similar radial corner here so we'll start here and it's pretty evident this shape so I'll just click my verts and start doing pretty much that initial radial loop so I'm gonna work my way around here I'm gonna add one break here so holding on control middle mouse clicking and just space that out and usually corners do require more topology so another thing that I tend to do when we're apologizing this I'll hold down tab left click and I'll go ahead and draw a large strip here and do that and then I can go and subdivide this a couple of times so one thing that we want to be thinking about is these structures here let me do the bottom one because they're actually a little bit more prominent so I'll hold down tab left click I'll shoot all the way over here one thing you notice is that we kind of have these structures here these that support these big teeth that this character has so right now we don't want to start doing a lot of crazy stuff as far as topology we still want to relatively keep this light but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna plan ahead and I want to go ahead and basically just block this out with a single polygon and then once the first pass is done once this is pretty much isolated we can go here and start you know adding some nice radial topology and really just build this structure with some nice edge flow but for now what I'll do what I'm doing is just encompassing this whole structure hold a single polygon right so what I need to do is just start approximating with split where it's gonna encompass and just block it out so you don't need a lot of topology initially to block out you know large and start planning things out I'll do the same thing here hold down control I'll split this split that in I'll go in here and just approximate this volume with this polygon draw some verts here again blocking this structure out hold down shift creating that polygon between those verts same thing here and then I'm placing the stop right here at the origin point of that structure same thing here and sometimes when you're really light on polygons like this you might have to finagle the camera a little bit you see how if you're here it might snap off into space so the lighter you are sometimes it will cause issues but there's definitely ways you can work around it if it's jumping around a lot maybe just doing tab and extruding and then just positioning the verts sometimes that works well especially in that first pass when you're light on topology all right so this looks pretty good this bottom jaw and let's start working the top here so for each of these structures I'm just drawing a big polygon you so I'm gonna work in the corner of this nose right here and just draw my four verts hold down shift and connect and really what I try to do is whenever there's a sharp break in the geometry so like here we're in the shape that's when I really need a additional work right so that's kind of one of the guidelines or what I think about when you know finding that balance of keeping things relatively low but you know obviously having enough to properly describe the shape in that initial phase I'm working my way around the corner and what I try to do as much as humanly possible is you know keep things pretty even on the top and bottom of the radials I'll go ahead and move on to the brow and one thing that I'll do is I'll bring back my edge flow guide here one thing you'll notice on this guy right and this is a pretty standard or common pattern for the brow it's not really gonna work for us right so we do have a brow here but it does wrap around and kind of shoot through to the other side of the nose right the problem with our character is that this area it's gonna get very dense right between the jaw and just this lower eyelid so we're gonna need a very thick part here and then we're gonna have to route that geometry into a small space so that's not really gonna work so in this case we're gonna have pretty much this flow here but we'll have to improvise so either this is gonna shoot through to the bottom here or maybe we'll just wrap it around so let's go ahead and start here and I can hide this guy for the time being so let's go ahead and start creating the brow here so I'll go ahead and draw one big polygon and I'll connect holding on shift and if things just don't snap right them I don't waste too much time I just do the extrude instead and I'll extrude all the way out here and looks like that guy snaps so you want to be careful cuz automatically it is gonna try to snap to verts so just make sure you're pulling giving up giving yourself enough space and I am mindful of spacing right I know at some point these are gonna have to connect but I'm not worried about that right now but I definitely want to have you know some uniformity when creating this and I can bring this guy down because we see that this shape starts to taper this way so we could definitely start tapering our edge flow a little bit and then I'll work this this way and definitely gotta split these up so I think this looks pretty good I'll add one here so anytime I see stuff like this where you know definitely have like this really sunken end I usually try to just add you know one in the middle and now we we start to push out just a little bit more so and we're still lining up with this so I like the placement of that loop alright so what I'll do here is start going out this way just kind of block in the top area of this brow so what I can do here is start going this way all right this is the flow that it's giving me one thing I will do before I do that is bring this down and just shoot across that's going to block this in that way and this is gonna have kind of a corner here so let's approximate that so I'm gonna draw a polygon here and then we could draw one here and now we're kind of have this redirect going on this way right with this corner so what I can do at this point is hold out in tab middle mouse click and just extrude this edge like so hold down control it's going to go ahead and drop a edge will appear and now it's just a matter of sliding these verts to approximate the shape sometimes what you can do is instead of working with these two edges you can delete one you just have less topology to add and then you could just do a little bit of edge flow work there at the corner I think that's what I'm gonna do so I like how that's looking and we can go back to the multi-cut here you see if I switch here it'll actually get off my quadrant but if I stay in Quadra I do control right click and go to the multi-cut doesn't mess up our visibility so that's kind of a nice thing so I can just add that edge loop there hold on control middle mouse click right now just go back to Quadra and we can do our a little bit of edge flow work here that we kind of had previously so I'm going to leave the brow alone I think it's at a good spot so the next order of the business is to basically finish out this front part of the head or really what I call the mask this is really where most of the edge flow is actually on a character and then the back of the head is kind of more bland so what I'll do for this and one thing you'll notice if you do the tab middle mouse click you'll get especially on quadrille how everything's trying to snap so that's not really optimal so what I like to do sometimes is break up the edges extruding one edge and now I'm going to be able to extrude this in one direction in this in one direction right so probably from this point I'll do tab middle Mouse and you see this polygons kind of broke up the edge flow so it's gonna kind of act as a stopper so I'm gonna bring off this all the way down like this as much as possible and then play around with the verb that way we're actually snapping so one thing that I probably need to do at this juncture is that edge loop because you know the volume here is really bad so before I do that I'm gonna start just thinking about this corner here so using this extra topology and I'm gonna start spreading this out as much as I can right because we're coming from these points here so we don't want stuff like this you know towards this area so we definitely want to spread out this topology but I think we can put it to good use same thing here we'll spread this out this way and this way as well you I'll just go ahead add an edge loop right about here right in the middle we definitely need that volume one thing that I like to look for edge flow unless my shape really demands it I don't like things like this right like very spiky so especially when I'm starting to do my first pass I just want a smooth flow right so I want to think about this as a line and you know a smooth line is that at that unless you know my shape underneath like I said it requires it so that's kind of what I'm looking for when you know pretty much is drawing these edges think that looks pretty good let's go ahead and kind of block this area out I mean let's start filling this in and we're also gonna take care of the nose so I think I'll start with the nose first in this case so I'll go ahead and just start drawing polygons you can see like sometimes the shapes that are actually pretty easy to see like we see that this probably just could be a knocked out with a single poly there and I think a lot of this has to do with the sculpting all right so if you use like the polish brushes or the trim dynamic and ZBrush sometimes that can help create planes on your block outs but in turn a lot of times it's kind of easy to see those shapes versus you know if your sculpt is very very muddy you so obviously I try to remain light here but you know with noses you know small areas like that ears they are gonna require some more denser edge flow right off the back well we could do ears go this way like this and we are coming here towards work it just kind of tapers down a little bit so I don't mind doing something like this and finishing it and I like that maybe we'll put this one here so I'll start filling some of this in here and some of this is gonna be pretty easy because I was mindful some of this I will have to add some divisions which I really don't mind especially here so just holding down shift I'm just connecting this and like I said if you're mindful about what you're doing and always kind of have that you know connection in the back of your mind then you know fill in these gaps won't be so tedious since they most things will line up you so I finished blocking in the front part of the mask here what I'll do from here is finish out blocking the forehead running out the corner here and really just start blocking in some of the years as well but what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna hold down tab and then middle mouse click and I'll overshoot it right about here same thing with this and then I'll pretty much work with extremes and start filling this up one thing you can do is start reducing this if you need to usually here you'll see depending if your character has hair not but a lot of wireframes you'll notice that a some polygon a reduction or rounding towards the center will happen just to reduce some of the topology going to the less dense part of the back of the head and this is a reduction pattern that you can use you see that if you route it towards the center line you're basically a creating a corner and this edge no longer extends that way so that is a pattern that you can use one thing that I'll do is I want to preserve this line right here for the skull so let's start bringing this down and then from here I could probably want to use one of these edges and pretty much continue so I'm just kind of working on the spacing right now I think I'm going to start tapering then this way so from here I can just take this and hold down tab just extrude this guy out like this gonna block that out I'll go ahead and close this gap here so I'm just gonna go ahead and just start rounding this now one thing that I do want to keep in mind is that this is gonna have to get a lot more dense so you know what do I want to do with this edge flow ultimately if I leave it like this it's gonna end up flowing here and I don't know if I want that because you definitely see that we need it here but we don't need it here so maybe we can go ahead and start kind of routing it back this way and more towards the center line so what I'll need to do is figure out where the corner of this shape needs to be it looks like right about here where those wrinkles come in so what I'll do is I'll bump these guys down right and from here we can start creating a little bit of edge flow with the multi-cut tool right so I'll go ahead and do ctrl shift right click will go to the multi-cut and we could actually create one of these corners here here right so what I can do is here and I'll just cut this way now we're pretty much getting two loops for the price of none meaning these are kind of flowing back this way but none of them are flowing back this way right so now I can go ahead and add one here and add one here and you see that ultimately we're not going to be super dense here which is kind of what we want you so I don't mind this maybe I'll end up doing another one right here but for the time being I'm content with this may be just me spacing this out so I'm happy how that looks let's go ahead and just add a couple divisions here so I had one in the middle maybe what I could do at this point too is it since we're still in the first pass let's actually reduce some of this you and I'm going to leave this one as well and I'll just add this one here and this one here you so I'm going to show you a quick method of using a primitive to actually insert here for the back of the head and this is a nice technique because a lot of times you know drawing this or extruding can get a little bit tedious and this method works good for back of the head also it works really good for limbs if you actually use this cylinder instead of a box but what I'm gonna do here is create a cube and I have that hot key so I'm just gonna bring up my cube here and I'll frame on this and what I'll do at this point is just scale so I'm basically one block in the back of the head here with this cube give or take now you you might start noticing some lag that's because quadrille if we look at the history here and we actually just bring up the channel box see that for every move that you do it's gonna actually store that in the history this long long history stack could actually lad your system so what you could do a quick fix here is go to edit delete by type and you could just freeze the history and now you deleted that history stack so that should help out your performance a little bit obviously the the resolution of this mesh is also important so you know try to dynamesh it if you can or just reduce the poly count before bringing it into Maya so what I'm gonna do here just scale it to encompass the whole volume on the back of that so let's go to mesh here and go to smooth and we're gonna give this a level two let's see what it looks like it reads a little too dense so let's just give it a two you see that just starting with this cube we get these nice poles they kind of match with the corners of the the back of the head so from here we don't need the whole thing we only need just pretty much this part so we'll go ahead and delete this and I'm just selecting the edges here and you see that pretty much block this out with the edges so I'm gonna go ahead and detach this and just double-click this here shift I to inverse the selection and not sure why it's snapping to this let's delete the history and now we go back here this should be good to go there we go so that was kind of odd and I'll click double-click this island here so detached will let you once you detach the components you will be able to basically just double click those polygon islands so just quickly a gut areas out and I need to do the same thing the main trick to this is that you know it it doesn't penetrate the volume so I think this looks pretty good make sure that you're in component mode on object mode this won't work but now since life surface is on and we just go into our verge and just snap in here you see that this is gonna snap right it's kind of hard to see now because just the shaded mode but what we can do the cool thing about this is that we could take this mesh we could take this mesh and we could just combine it you can go back to Quadra and now ultimately we kind of use the primitive to you know basically get deformed onto this head and just kind of felt help us fill in some of these gaps right so this is definitely an option I mean obviously could have extruded and kind of did the same thing that we did here but this is just another workflow and really works all well with arms if you start with a cylinder so what I'll do here is take this guy and detach it as well double-click this and delete it all that Quadra so from here I'll go ahead and just finish connecting this and start creating the edge flow for the year so I'm just speeding up the video here and connecting the head to the back of the head keep doing one more rerouting towards the center of the head and I'm actually removing some edge loops within the first pass I am doing a radio to block off the ear as well and I'm gonna start blocking out the sternocleidomastoid basically it's the neck muscles that started the clavicle and run towards the back of the year here I'm just dropping in the initial radios for the ear and then the inner radio so just like the eye and the brow I'm doing these radial loops filling them in later for the back of the year of what I'm actually gonna do is I'm not gonna try to attempt it since it was pretty muddy and not well-defined I'm actually gonna model this part more like traditionally modeling with live surfaces turned off so I'm looking to finish out the first pass here by blocking in the back of the neck and also the front of the neck so for this part I'm just gonna speed it up again I'm just gonna pull this down I will probably do some edge flow work here you do notice that you know for were to extrude all the way down here this is pretty much going to be routed if we just pull everything down towards this V right here so that's probably not what we want so I will do some edge flow work throughout this probably this way that way we don't have pretty much just the traffic jam of edge loops here you so let's start the second pass the second pass should move a little bit quicker since most of this has already blocked in and we really don't have that much edge flow work except for the base of the teeth here so what I'm gonna do is basically add another edge loop here and it looks like we need it anyway so I'll go ahead and add it right about here that looks good just to add a little bit more resolution and then from here looks like we need to start thinking about this structure right here right so what I'll do is kind of move this we could probably add another edge loop here and now we can start blocking out this the top of this right well we're essentially gonna need is some radial edge flow right and there's a couple of ways but just blocking this to weight a polygon is definitely gonna help right so we could extra or we could just use the multi-cut either/or that's gonna basically do the same thing I think for this we're just gonna use the multi cut tool here and I'll cut this way like this and I'll cut this way and I'll cut this way as well one thing that we probably could do instead of leaving this one out is actually just do this you now we can go back to Quadro give this a little bit more breathing room push it back just enough so we're clearing the tooth here and at some point just like I said the like the back of the year we're gonna have to build a mouth cavity and that's gonna be done with the live the live surface and the Quadra turned off for now I'm just gonna push this as much as I'll let me and you see that now we have a nice little radial flow to this one thing that we'll need on the surface is another division here so one thing that you probably want to check before you start your second pass is kind of things are flowing I already checked mine so I think I'm fine but you know just definitely make sure that when you're adding loops to areas that need it they're kind of flowing the way that you want them to all right so I'll go ahead add a loop here right in the middle so I'll do control in the middle mouse click that looks pretty nice I can add another one here and that's gonna help to round this out and then I can go back in here and do the same thing right so with more divisions here we can take that and further shape this and depending on how close you are going to get to this creature to this head here you know this loop is gonna be in handy because once we get done modeling we could actually push down so you'll be able to see some of that separation between the actual gum line and the beginning of the tooth and I'm just making sure that these this edge flow matches with the underlying structure I think what I'm gonna do here since we're gonna need more resolution flowing this way I'm gonna actually do a reroute here so I'm gonna rewrite this back we're probably gonna have to fix these poles so it flows this way but I'm gonna go to the multi-cut again and same thing that we did at the brow this is gonna be beneficial so we'll cut this way and we'll cut this way and we'll probably just merge these verts like this and that's gonna should fix that up so so we'll go back to Quadra here and then just snap these guys like this like this right and now we should be able to just drop a little peer go back to multi cut and make that connection I'm gonna probably add one here just to restore some volume so you pretty much see how I did this one and I'm gonna repeat the pattern for all these bone structures finished creating the structures for the bottom of the teeth here and you can see that they're all pretty similar just as radial here and then this rerouting a pattern towards the base so I completed that the next order of business is going to be basically evening out some of these larger spans so we're going to add more resolution around here after that we'll turn off Quadra and we'll extrude and create a mouth cavity we'll go ahead and get the inside of the eyes created fill this up and then we'll create the back of the ear here sometimes when you have Quadra unable and you're trying to extrude in and makes it very very hard I'll speed the video up and add more resolution throughout the mesh I'm adding more resolution here and just really just trying to balance out all sides and this is kind of what I said about you know the second pass just builds out quicker because most of the entry slow is already established so in a lot of parts the second pass is just adding more geometry right or just adding more edge loops here I'm just closing out the inner part of the year and I'm just extruding out thickness with Quadra turned off for the mouth cavity what I notice works better instead of just doing a normal extrude where you control the thickness you just do the extrude and then you enter pivot at a pivot mode you move that pivot to the middle of the mouth cavity it just scale inward because sometimes when you just are doing the thickness slider it gets kind of wonky and you know if you have a bunch of faces or edges facing different directions you don't get a clean direction with that extrude so that's a little bit work around if that mouth cavity doesn't build out right this part I'm just building out the back of the year again with claw draw and live surfaces turned off and I'm just modeling and you know cleaning things up and make sure that the ear connects you also keep in mind any changes that you do Quadra turned off they won't snap to the live surface so what I'm doing is areas that I actually added edge loop or just did adding really any geometry I'm just basically moving it with Quadra back on and it'll snap to the underlying surface I just selected the centerline of the model and I just scaled it towards the X and that's gonna just flan that out and getting things ready for symmetry and looking at my mesh with Quadra and the actual sculptor decimated mesh it turned off one thing that I'm looking at is I could probably use a little bit more resolution here and compared to the teeth so what I'll do is just turn back the head back on turn live and then turn this guy go back to Quadra here and I'll probably just add a couple more edge loops here let's just push out that volume so that doesn't look too bad and I'll do the same thing here and just make sure that this resolution just matches well I think it does for this one and then the last thing too is that I'll make sure that this this line or this loop really just hugs the teeth well alright because we're about to push this guy in so I think we really needed to get a clean a perimeter here just going around just making those last little bit of changes push this guy like this you see in the back and obviously it's a little bit hard to see but I think we could just push all these back so it looks pretty good and now I'm just going to take this Quadra off and I'll just isolate this go to face mode hold on tab paint these guys and then just extrude you know just extrude in something like this and what I could do with this edge is selected and do a small little bevel something like that bring my teeth back select my live mesh here or my sculpt and hide it so now we can see the effect of just having that radio in that extrusion you know if we get close to our character and you know this is that ridiculously dense but it really just helps you know sell that illusion that these are two different structures and you know that's any time that you have geometry wrapping around something else that's really when you get that connection or you know really that illusion that these are separate pieces and they're both fitting together after finishing all the holes for the teeth I went through my model and did a final round of cleanup I cleaned up the nostrils make sure everything was quieted and for here I decided to do another reroute so I would reduce the number of edges going into the mouth corner the final part of this which is very important is just getting everything ready for symmetry so doing final bits of cleanup and also selecting all the border vertices and make sure that they are flattened out in the X scale that way you can get a clean symmetry of your model if I bring back the edge flow guide that I brought up in the beginning we'll see that a lot of the similarities here even though this is very different proportions we have the same loops right here for the eye right so we have the same radial loops what I are similar loops for the brow so we just had to make some adjustments here similar setup for the neck muscles here and then we also have that same radial sectioning off the ears as well right so ladies and gentlemen this is the final reach apology of the bottom thank you so much for tuning in to this Maya roots apology tutorial for beginners and expanding your knowledge on character creation and your own workflow like always please consider subscribing if you haven't done so already let me know in the comments down below what you thought of the video and please consider sharing this video with another 3d artist that might find value and the information until we meet again folks I will catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 20,318

Keywords: maya retopology, maya retopology tutorial, maya retopology zbrush, 3d character modeling, maya character modeling, maya tutorial for beginners, maya tutorial, maya tutorial 2019, maya tutorial modeling, 3d character modeling blender, 3d modeling tutorial, 3d modeling tutorial maya, zbrush timelapse, zbrush sculpting, substance painter tutorial, blender character modeling, retopology, retopology in blender 2.8, retopology face, retopology in zbrush, quad draw maya

Id: PFmbSPSc0dk

Length: 53min 13sec (3193 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ldepalatis]

If you’re new to 3D, watch this! Getting bogged down on everything else before learning retopology is key to disaster

[u/kingkellogg]

How the heck do you do thst remind me bot?

I live seeing different tutorials on retop

[u/Bilbo_Smaug]

The intro is Gold.