Maya: Simple Character Part 01 - Modeling

first we need to create the project so we'll go to file project window click the new button so you can type in a name for your project we'll call it low poly character and we can leave the underscore project just to let us know that that is a project folder click the yellow folder to choose the location of where your project is going to be saved and so that's going to save out a folder in that location that contains all these different folders inside of it then we need to set our project so go to file set project click on your project folder or click once into it and then hit set so now in your work folder you should have the project folder inside of there in the scenes folder is where we'll save our scenes files source images is where we're going to save our textures and images is where any of our renders we saved out to now we're going to set up our image planes using our reference images so open up your source images folder where you should have copied the front and side images now we're going to put our front reference image in the front camera and our side reference image in the side camera so in the viewport menu go to view import image image plane choose the front PNG and now it's put in a front image plane looking towards the front camera now for the side view part we'll do the same thing go to view image plane import image and choose your side picture there we go now we have two image planes one using the side camera one using the front camera hit f2 frame in and zoom in on them so we'll select these and use the Move tool to move them up so that way the feet are resting on the grid and then we'll take the front viewport and push that back and take the side viewport and push that off to the side now we're doing this because our we're going to be creating our model in the middle here and we don't want these image planes to get in our way when we're modeling so we just move them back and one of the things that's great about using image planes is that when we hit four to go to wireframe our image planes are not affected by this so we can see our image behind our model and still work work on it in wireframe so generally we'll be working in the side of the front viewport with wireframe turned on if you only want your image planes to appear in the camera that they're associated with and not in the perspective view then you can just select it come to the attribute editor and then choose in this display setting of look through camera then you will only see it through the camera that it's associated with and then if you don't want that just switch it back to in all views if you can't select your image plane something happens you can always go to your hypershade window and in there as well as our material library we also have a tab for cameras and there we can select our image planes and have access to that same attribute editor all right so the next thing we want to do with image planes is want to select them go over to the channel box and hit the fourth button to put them into a new layer you can hit the V to toggle on and off visibility to make sure that they're inside of the layer and then that third icon switch that to the letter R and then the contents of the layer are only rendered we can't select them or mess with them if you want to mess with them just tap back on the R until it's nothing and now we can edit them again I recommend putting them in their own layer because when we're trying to right-click and the image plane is present then it seems to overwrite any of our right-click menus so a lot of times we have our object selected and we use the right-click menu to get to the different component to the different tools so we'll have an easier time if we make the image plane not accessible now we can begin the model so we'll use a primitive cube so we'll go to create polygon primitives cube and then in our front viewport we'll align the cube to the body and scale it down so it fits the width of the body shift right-click and select your insert edge loop tool and click and drag in some edge loops where we're going to need the shape to change so now we can go to vertex mode and select those vertices and use our scale tool to move the vertices out it's important to make sure you're dragging out a marquee selection over the vertices so that way you're also selecting the vertices behind it in this orthographic view we can't necessarily see the vertices because they're directly behind each other so doing a marquee selection will make sure we select both alright so now if we take a look in the perspective view we've only done one side so we'll go over to the side view and line up the vertices with that so we can select the vertices again we're making sure we do marquee selections and just click and drag and just use your move tool to move them roughly along our reference image all right so now if we take a look at that in our perspective view it's looking pretty good now we can go into our other views and just kind of make any little adjustments move it around we can hit three to go into smooth preview and make sure there's no problems at the model and see how it looks if it were to be smooth hit one two go back to regular smoothness now we'll right-click and go to face mode and select the two we'll do a shift right click extrude face use the z-axis to pull out some depth and then click once on the click once on one of the scale cube gizmos and then that will give us a uniform scale tool in the middle and then just click and scale that down like normal so that way we can extrude a little inset select that new face and do a shift right click extrude face and then pull out on the Z to get a lot of depth if we move the x-axis and try to adjust from side to side where both of the legs are it's not really going to work because they're going to go at different angles so instead for this we'll just hit our to go to our scale tool and then scale them in on the x-axis to bring them closer together all right now might look a little strange so we can just use our other accesses to kind of clean it up a little bit and then we can push it down in the y-axis bring that handle all the way to that middle blue cube and that's going to align the face so that way they're flat on the floor so now we'll move on to the arms select both of the side top faces do a shift right click extrude face hit one of the cubes to bring up the uniform scale and then scale it down inside that face and then we can just pull out on the z-axis to get some depth there and now we can hit the G key which will perform the last action we did which was an extrude so we can hit G and then it'll just extrude that face that we have selected already and then same thing we can try to adjust their vertical miss but with the extrude tool they're going to be going at different angles so just hit W and use your move tool for to do that then we can use our scale tool to kind of adjust the shape all right try to make it match up roughly with the reference image now we're going to get started on the feet so select our model shift right click insert edgeloop and then click and drag an edge along the bottom of the leg select both of those edges and scale them down in the y-axis to just align them and then we can move them down and then we'll select the front faces and extrude out the foot from there after you perform an extrusion you can hit W and then just move those faces out we'll switch to our scale tool and then we'll scale both faces in the z-axis to align them so that way they're both flat and if we go to object mode and hit 3 and so it's a little funny so we need to add another edge loop so we'll do it shift right click insert edge loop and add in an edge loop along the bottom of the foot there and this one doesn't have to be perfect because eventually we're going to only use one half of the model okay so now we can pig in the hand so we'll select the face at the end of the arm and do a shift right click extrude face drag that out and then use the scale tool to clean it up we only did one arm we only made one hand because like I said after we smooth it we're going to end up deleting half of the model and then just mirroring the other half over so in object mode select the object do a shift right click choose smooth and that will smooth our object and add subdivisions and so we made that really simple base and then by smoothing it we add in some more resolution and now we really have all the resolution we need we're going to delete the left half so we'll go to face mode we can select that ring of edges around the left side and then double click to select that whole element of that half of the body and then delete it so we'll select our object go to edit duplicate special with options hit edit reset settings so for geometry type will choose instance and under scale that first column which is the x-value will say negative 1 and so now we've created a copy that was scaled at negative 1 so it was mirrored over and it's an instance so when I grab vertices and edges of this side and move them around or make changes it's also affecting the other side so now it's going to be a lot of tweaking trying to get the shapes right a lot of going between components our scale tool and our move tool and adjusting the shapes of things so we can select this ring around the foot and scale that out give it some more volume we can go to face mode and select the bottoms of the feet and then use our scale tool always make sure you're selecting the always zoom out make sure you've selected the faces you meant to and then we switch to our scale tool and scale it in the white to just make it flat and now we can go to vertex mode and adjust big chunks at a time and we can start actually matching this up a little bit better to the reference image now that we have more resolution to work with here so we'll let just the foot and make that match a little bit better you can switch between our different viewports to help us out with this move down the faces of this foot just taking that existing geometry and moving it around so it matches the shape of our character so now let's look at our front viewport and our foots a little squished so let's select it and scale it out and then we can select more vertices and adjust the shape that way scaling it all out at once to get out a big change and then we can come in and grab a few vertices or individual vertices and make smaller changes there we go that's looking better now let's see now it looks like the bottom of the foot is a little small so let's select these bottom faces and then scale them out in the X there we go now we've got a nicer bottom but look there something else we can do to get kind of a more petite foot looking feel is to just select that edge and delete it using ctrl + backspace it depends at the liquor going for I'm just going to stick with a really simple petite foot so I'll highlight those edges these ctrl + backspace to delete them and then just take the further back edge and bring that up so it completes the foot there we go I think that looks nice if you were going to make a longer shoe then you could add more edge loops it just depends on what kind of detail you're trying to put in there now we can work on getting the leg set up with the body so we'll go to our front view port we'll right click and go to vertex mode and now we can make that line up a little bit better with our front image so we'll move the foot over we can start scaling up pieces of the leg and moving them around scale up the five remember to use marquee selections and for the scaling I'm mostly doing it in the x-axis so scaling it horizontally because I can't really see on the z axis so I only want to scale it in that one axis I don't want to scale it uniformly so will roughly line it up looks like we need to move some of the vertices around the crotch a little bit over so we can select those and push them in and then now we can adjust the thigh here we go it's it's we're working in an orthographic view we can click and drag from the middle of the move gizmo we don't have to use the handles because an orthographic view there are only two accesses we can't accidentally adjust the depth from here when we're working with the vertices that are at the origin of the grid so like the center of the body we want to make sure we don't we only move those up in the Y we don't want to move them left to right also it's going to mess up our mirror but that's something we can always fix later if it happens so now we'll jump over to the side view and do the same thing adjust those vertices scale to pump up the shape all right and then let's take a look at our perspective view and see how it's doing not bad you can always hit 3 to see what it looks like smooth looks pretty good hit one to go back to regular smoothness now let's see we're going to adjust the leg a little bit so let's grab this edge here and bring it up kind of match with the picture a little better and then we're going to get started on creating the knee in object mode shift right click and choose insert edgeloop tool' and then we'll click and drag and we're going to make three lines so one at the bottom one at the top and then a middle one and then those three are going to be our knee because in a character whatever deformation happens we need to have multiple edge loops so a knee is a place where your character is going to bend so we put edge loops there it looks good so what we're going to do is we need only deform one way so we can target weld so we can target weld the edges in the back of the knee and it'll still be and we'll still get a good deformation that way so we'll shift right-click choose target weld tool and then click on the vertices you want to merge click and hold and then drag to the Mirta seat and then drag the vertice you want it to merge with and so we'll do this around the back of the leg here all right and so now we can adjust the shape of the knee and so something that's going to make this easy as if we use our move tool but we switch its orientation so holding ctrl shift and right click choose component and now the vertice is going to move along its normal so it's going to kind of move along the model a little better so this generally works better with just one vertice at a time rather than like a whole group because everybody has different normals so this is really great when you're working on a character model when you're working on a face using a component mode like this so we'll come around then move these vertices so we get a better shape of the knee we're going to pull out that middle one so we get kind of a point there so another tool that's really great for when modeling characters is if we wanted to move that edge up and down but keep it along the area we've built up you can select the edge shift right click and choose slide edge loop tool now we can drag the middle mouse button left and right and then our edge is going to go up and down but conform to the shape of the model so that's really handy for this type of work then just give your model a once-over see if there's anything that you want to tweak that remember you can always use component mode anywhere on the body all right so now we can work on the arm so right now our so first we'll go so first we'll go over to the front viewport and start lining things up it's our move tool is still set to component so we'll control shift right click and switch that to object there we go and now I'll just marquee select a kind of broadly move these vertices where they need to go and then we can use our scale tool to adjust our alignment to move them out move them in and then let's see let's see how the model looks in perspective view now I've just flipped it around so now I'm looking at the back part of the model and just adjusting the width of the arm how I see it there isn't really a top reference so we're just a bawling it we'll shift right-click insert edgeloop and put in an edge for the wrist then we'll insert another edge loop for the thumb to come out of then we'll insert another edge loop to help us build the thumb right click and choose two of those side faces and we'll extrude out a thumb from there so shift right click extrude pull out the depth and then use your scale tool to adjust the scale something that looks a little more round and we can just adjust its position we can align those phases and kind of flatten them out and then use our rotate tool to change the orientation of those phases because the gun but since the thumb has kind of a comes out at a different angle and then we'll extrude those phases to build out the rest of the thumb make you just move and scale to get it to look like the thumb now we can come in and select those edges individually and start messing with the shape of the thumb vertex mode is always good to get these vertex moment mode is excuse me gosh vertex moment is always a good way to go and we'll just adjust the vertices to get more of the thumb shape we can move back the wrist a little bit so we get more of this ramping motion all right I think that looks good so we can in object mode we can hit 3 to see our smooth preview to see how it's going not bad hit one to go back to regular mode now we can set up the elbow so it's very similar to the knee we're going to insert some edge loops since that's an area that deforms so we'll shift right-click insert edge loop tool and put edge loops around that middle edge loop that we already have so we end up with three then an object mode will shift right-click choose target weld tool and we'll weld the top edges together to the vertices in the center and then we'll go to the bottom and weld those vertices together and then we can double click to select those edges that we don't need and just ctrl backspace to get rid of them and now just like the knee we have extra edge loops so the elbow can deform then we can start tweaking the vertices to get the shape of the elbow you can ctrl + shift right click and switch to component mode now we can start working on the neck we're going to use the multi-cut tool to cut in our own edges so we'll shift right-click choose multi cut and then first we will cut out the hole for the neck right click when you finish your edge loop and then we'll draw a line between the corners of this new face so that way we've kind of drawn in our own little extruded insent now in vertex mode we can switch to the component mode and move these around to round out the shape of where the neck is going to protrude out from you can always switch back to object mode whatever it works now will select the top faces delete them and then we can select the edge around the hole we'll do a shift right click extrude edge use our scale tool to align them to flatten it out by scaling it in the Y and then we can use our move tool to adjust the neck we'll do a shift right-click an extra again now I want to make that edge in the middle a little smaller so I can use the scale tool to do that but it's going to create a hole on the lung besides so what we want to do is go to vertex mode select the vertices go to your move tool make sure your an object orientation so we can go to the front viewport to make this little easier we're going to snap these vertices to the grid so we'll use the grid in the front viewport so holding down X and then drag it in the x-axis while holding down the X key and then that way it'll snap to the grid and there we go now our vertices are back lined up now we can begin the head and we're going to go to create polygon primitive and choose a cube and then to turn this cube into something a little smoother and more like a sphere we can shift right click go to smooth and then set the divisions to two and then that gives us a nice fear and if we compare that to a primitive sphere we can see that the topology here is all quads the edge flow is nice whereas with a primitive sphere it's all going up to the top okay so now we can use our front and our side viewport to align the sphere with the head to scale it up just get the rough shape nope we don't want to make sure we don't move it left or right so we'll make sure our translate X zeroed out so that way that middle line is on the origin of the grid or now we're going to come in and start adjusting our vertices you still continuing to do our marquee selection to make sure we get the vertices behind there now we're going to add in some more resolution so we'll shift right-click it's our edge loop tool drag down an edge in the middle there that's going to help us and then one in the middle of that and then now we can start moving these down and changing the shape we'll switch to vertex mode so we can switch to vertex mode so we have a little more control and now we'll use that new resolution we have to create that nose and mouth area then we'll insert another edge loop higher up here see how that looks in the perspective view what it's how the head is coming along and so we need a lot of that resolution so that way we can get the facial details but for the back of the head there's not really a reason to have that so we can come in with our target weld tool and well the vertices along the side to just kind of get rid of some of those extra edges the left side and then that reminds me eventually we're going to end up duplicating this guy as well so let's just delete the left half the same way we did the other one click hold down shift and click to get the edge ring delete that and then double click to select the element and delete that select the other half and go to edit and duplicate special nice now we can just double click to select that edge loop that we don't need and do a ctrl backspace to delete that and now we can work in our component mode and start adjusting the shape of the head all right now we can model the ear and so we'll do that by creating a cube then we'll just scale it down get a rough size and move that roughly in position kind of just next to the head we'll match it up to the side viewport you can go to vertex mode and start getting the shape and then we'll want to extrude out more then we want to extra doubt more so we'll go to face mode grab the top face shift right click and extrude and then we'll do the same thing for the bottom face selected and extrude that now we're going to insert an edge loop along the middle of the ear so that way we have more resolution to work with we can make it a bit rounder so we'll drag down this bottom edge now we can grab this front part of the middle edge loop and then bring that in words that can be kind of like the inner part of the ear and then we'll grab the whole front half of it all those vertices and then rotate it forward and then of course we can just use the Move tool to kind of narrow it a little bit it's not bad oops we'll go to our target well tool then we can just weld those edges that we don't need all right and there we have a nice little ear so now we can just move it into place and it since it's a separate object it's just going to be penetrating the mesh so we'll go ahead and freeze the transformations so go to modify freeze transformations so now we're going to combine the head object with the ear so we'll select the head side the ear and then do a shift right click combined and then we can delete the history and now we've got those pieces and now that's all one object then we want to combine the head to the side of the body so that way we can weld them together so we'll select it do it a shift right click combine it's usually a good idea to model the body in the head separately and then attach them so we need to create an area where it's going to attach on the head so what we're going to do is go to face mode double click to select the entire all the head faces and then at the top of the viewport click the isolate button so that way always see is the faces that were selected and so now we can go to our multi cut tool then do what we did to create the neck we're going to cut in our own we're going to cut in our own area where that's going to be connected so we use the multi cut tool right click when you're finished with the edge and make sure you connect it up so it's all quads and so now just like how we created the faces the neck came from now we have a nice round area where the neck can now connect to so it's a little off well we'll fix it so let's adjust the vertices that make up that hole and use a side view to kind of align it a little better all right that seems okay it's a bit better so now we'll go to face mode select those two faces and delete them now we can go to target weld and weld the vertices of the neck to the vertices of the head all right and so it's a little funky but we can come in and adjust that we'll go ahead and insert an edge loop between them and then we'll adjust the way that edge loop looks now we've messed up the alignment of those middle vertices so we just go over to our front view hold down X and snap those to the grid there we go so now we're just coming in and tweaking it adjusting it making it look even now we're ready to delete our duplicate and actually mirror this guy so we'll still have delete it select it's like the half shift right click and choose mirror polygons and choose the access that we want to mirror it along and now we can select the whole object and go to mesh display soften edge just to get rid of any faceted edges so it's all smooth so we can come in and still keep tweaking away sometimes after combining it we can see things with that Center edge that we didn't notice before all right so it looks pretty good so now we can move on to UV unwrapping this

Channel: ARTV_Tutorials

Views: 1,008,181

Keywords: 3D, Maya, Tutorial, Character, Model, Chibi, Low Poly, How To

Id: xzmg0grXHyE

Length: 50min 5sec (3005 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 09 2016