MAYA TUTORIAL | Basic Modelling Workflow

hey guys welcome back welcome to another video as you can see it's really cold over here uh we're at about like five centigrades uh or is that the celsius celsius five degrees celsius i don't know what the fahrenheit conversion is sorry for all of you guys using the imperial system but it's really cold it's really freaking cold so uh yeah i mean let's jump right into our video i have a couple of announcements though before we jump first of all i'm a little bit tired today so that's why i'm not i don't want to rush things i actually want to give you a very nice video but it's been a long week and uh there's been some sleepless nights thanks to our baby that's still uh growing and you know she needs to wake up and uh be taken care of in the night so it's been a little bit tough this past couple of days but don't worry we still have good enough energy to continue and um couple of announcements so just taking a look at our calendar right here today is saturday i'm recording the sunday video for you guys tomorrow and uh this next week we are gonna have uh we're gonna continue with the lighthouse project we don't have anything special set up for this week so so i'm just gonna keep on going and i'm gonna try to keep it again uh approachable there were some comments in the in the comment section where you guys were mentioning that uh i was going maybe a little bit too fast or things were getting a little bit complex i don't want to do that i want to make sure that we can keep it as simple as possible so that all of you guys that are new to 3d new to maya can follow along if you so wish uh and also remember next weekend saturday 20 and 21 of november we're gonna have our second portfolio review for this one so i've been getting some pinks in my email for when people watch the past videos and they try to submit they try to access the folder but right now it's closed we close that folder so that we don't get any on unwanted attention over there and i'm gonna be opening it up opening it up tomorrow that's a little bit of a tongue twister there so i'm gonna be opening up the submissions tomorrow again on the folder so if you guys want to resubmit anything that you've been improving upon if there's new works that you want to submit if you haven't submitted yet and you want to show me uh some of your work feel free to do so remember if you submit the maya file or the zbrush c tool i'm gonna be able to open it and give you some pointers like actually work on your model so that you can see how i would like fix or improve certain aspects okay so uh after all that long uh intro there let's jump onto a very simple exercise i was thinking about and i want to bounce this idea with you guys maybe this is something that you guys are into i wasn't thinking about having another ongoing series and i want to call this maya modeling basics so these are going to be basic exercises that i think anyone who's learning maya should be able to model and learn uh so that later on when you do more complex stuff you're going to be able to just do it yourself and today we're going to kick things off with a very basic set of cutlery so this is one of those things that a lot of people don't think about like you never think that you're gonna get a job where people are gonna be like hey model some spoons and forks uh but if you're gonna do a kitchen or any sort of uh element that has uh like cutlery then this is definitely something that you you're gonna need so i'm pressing space clicking maya and going into my front view real quick to jump into my front view and then i'm going into view image plane import image to import my image and i have downloaded uh this one right here called cutlery you can just google this up it's a it's a it's just a simple cutlery uh thing now i'm not too worried about proportions right now that's i don't think that's the main like element and we're gonna go from easiest to i believe the hardest so the easiest one would be definitely the the um the knife right here so you know cutleries are the sort of like squarish shapes so i'm going to start with the square actually and i'm going to position my square right here in the middle so i'm going to try to get this thing this image blend right in the middle there there we go and i'm going to just screw this out and the way we're going to do this is we're going to be doing a basic box modeling process so box modeling is when we try to get everything into like this sort of like box shape and then we just like smooth it out so in this one uh what i'm going to do is i'm going to press right click face mode and i'm going to select the top faces right here uh which are this ones right there let's move this image plane over here there we go so front view if i select this make a selection box and then deselect i know that i'm going to be selecting this upper faces right here and i'm going to hit ctrl e to extrude and i'm just going to move this thing up and then we're going to go i'm going to keep this series super super basic guys so if you guys already know about modeling then you can skip ahead and just uh take a look at the like main things that you might not uh have an idea on how to model so i'm extruding these lower faces now and i'm just gonna scale them out so that we get like the sort of like the shape that we want and i'm going to extrude again move this down with w and then extrude this out extrude again you can also move this with a little blue arrow right here like so and then ctrl e again w move this out make them go closer there i'll make it go like that and then ctrl e again w move this down and scale so that we get like the basic shape of the of the knife now you can see that we're kind of missing a little bit of the curvature here here's where the knife tool comes into place because we can just cut this through like this i'm going to press shift oh let me go object mode cut tool press shift so we create a straight light and there we go now it's just a matter of grabbing these vertices and making them go a little bit smaller like that now over here you can see that things are a little bit trickier so i'm gonna again grab the top faces and i'm gonna extrude the first section and then i'm gonna extrude the second section okay and now i'm gonna go into perspective mode again one way too quickly jump you can press the space bar and then just press the space bar on the window that you want to jump but you can also press space bar click and then go into perspective mode right there so this is way too thick so i'm gonna make it thinner so something like i would say probably about there and then this guys as you can see you have this sort of like level right so i'm gonna grab a right click go into faces select the first face and then right click and shift sorry shift and double click on the face next to it that's gonna select the whole edge loop do the same thing over here so we select all of those faces or you can just do a drag or just like drag a box over there and select all of them control e to extrude and then we're just going to push this guys out okay now remember when we push this out we something get that distortion i don't want that so i'm just going to push them with thickness here now if the thickness goes too quickly you can just press ctrl and click on the name here and that's going to give you a smooth like expansion right here so about there i think it's fine which is like the first level and then i'm going to grab the next set of faces and i'm going to do the same thing again so just thickness and do this thing right here and as you can see we have this very basic shape now if we press number three uh which is a smooth mode you're gonna see that we actually get close to what we want but it's not exactly what we want so i'm gonna do i'm gonna grab all of the edge loops of the corner so i'm just gonna double click i'm just uh right click go into etch mode double click and select all of the edge loops right here like all of this guys this guy's this guy's and this guy and this guy all of those guys so that the loop gets like completed even up here i would grab like this guy i'm gonna deselect this guys so i just want the like the borders right here there we go so it's like the upper border and then that one over there and i'm gonna hit a bubble and i'm gonna say two segments and i'm gonna keep a small fraction and that's gonna that's gonna soften up the effect as you can see and we're going to get this sort of like sharp sharp pish uh like effects that we're uh going for so that way actually that's a little bit too thick so maybe i'll go with just one segment and one segment should keep it a little bit rounder there we go so a little bit closer to what i'm looking for now to really get this very nice sharp element over here i'm gonna do the same so i'm just gonna go into edge mode so like this guy this guy this guy and this guy and yeah those guys over there and i'm gonna bubble and we're gonna keep a very small fraction so when we smooth this out we get that smooth effect over there and that's it that's pretty much it that's all we need to do for the handle and now it's time to do the knife now some of you might be wondering could we do the knife from the exact same shape and the answer is yes we can just extrude this one from here so i'm just going to make this a little bit thinner because the knife is definitely not as thick and to keep this simple i'm actually going to extrude this out all the way to the top like this just all the way to the top and then i'm gonna go with my cut tool and i'm gonna start adding cuts all the way through the through the surface just a couple here and there and now if i go into vertex mode i should be able to to move the vertices around and position them where they're supposed to be following the silhouette of the knife that way instead of having to extrude and move extrude and move this so i think this is a little bit of a faster way to to approach it i had a teacher that mentioned that when you're modeling or sculpting it's always better to go for like the very big shapes first and then focus on the small shapes for instance here we have a small shape that means that we're going to have or need a couple of extra edge loops just to really hold this edge right here right like create this sort of like curvature effect right there and that's it now the knife of course is going to have a little bit of uh of uh of um of a sharp edge right like this seems to be like a butter knife right but if we want to give this like a sharper edge we can do so um as you can see here with a number three we're already going to get something very nice uh but what i want to do is i want to add an edge loop that goes across this line right here and then one that goes across the slide right here so that's gonna give me like a really flat nice edge over here it is gonna run all the way through the object so it is gonna go to this other side but now what i can do is i can go to the to the actual like uh sharp area of the object like all of this vertices right here and with scale i can bring the scale a little bit closer to to where they're supposed to be so now that's going to give me a sharper a sharper look so we see it from the top you can see that the knife actually has a nice sharp edge to it now if we want to hold this little corner a little bit more so that the sharpness like looks more intense we can of course add a support edge right here and that's going to give us another nice support and uh yeah that's pretty much it as you can see like this looks really nice uh you can see the little bit of of uh actually that looks kind of bad so how can we solve that probably with that with a bevel so we do a bevel right here and we just minimize the fraction a little bit that should give us a softer look there's gonna be a little bit of a pinch there which we we might be able to alleviate if we were to add a couple more support edges but i don't think that's such a big deal i mean the problem is that it has like a very drastic change another thing we can do is just grab this guys right here and smooth them out a little bit like like kind of create like a gradient where this thing goes from from thin to thick and that should also help with the with the transition and alleviate the pinch a little bit more which yeah as you can see works very nicely right so now let's go for the spoon spoon is gonna be uh we're gonna do a very similar um technique we're gonna be focusing on like the flat surface first and then we're gonna do the rest of it but i'm gonna show you a new tool here very very common um as a modeling tool which is the quadro this one right here so i'm gonna create a little plane right here we're going to flatten this out 90 degrees a good idea would be to actually bring this plane to the to the center of the grid so i'm going to grab these two guys and just move the spoon so now the spoon is on the center like the image plane and at this point i'm gonna change the divisions to one so it's just a square i'm going to position this right here on the border about there i would say it's fine now this tool right here is a really really cool tool to model because we can just click and add points and if we press shift we're going to add a new face so click click shift and we add a new face click click shift and we add a new face and what we're going to be doing as you can see here is we're going to create we're going to be creating this edge loop that runs around a d spoon and this one's going to be very important because we want to create this sort of like a round thing going into the spoon so that later on we can create the curvature of the spoon so it's going to be like that so we have one two three four five six let's do seven eight nine and i'm gonna try to keep it at ten so right about there and then we just like move these guys around to create this now eventually we're gonna have a line that goes pretty much across the the entire spoon and creates the the middle section right so this is going to be important right there so like this and then we close the loop right there before we go into the handle we can press shift to relax the topology a little bit and now it's just a matter of thinking okay how where's the middle point so one two three four five this is right here so i'm gonna try to combine this two guys right there and then it's just a matter of kind of like like filling a puzzle as you can see right here so we filled that one and that one and there you go so now we have this very nice topology it's a round dish topology that's going to be softening and smoothing very nicely and we should be able to create the curvature with this now for the handle super simple we're just going to continue whatever we had right here all the way to the bottom and again one quick way to do this is don't think about like going little square by a little square if you do that i mean it's one way to do it it's just going to take you a long time i find a little bit easier to just get it done with just one sweep stroke like that and then we just start adding a couple of extra strokes where we need them uh or extra lines in this case to um to create the silhouette right so this is it i'm just checking that my microphone is working remember when a couple of months ago i had to redo the whole video because the microphone wasn't working technology guys it's a it's a blessing and that's also so frustrating there we go so as you can see we have now created this very nice silhouette for the whole spoon the problem is this is completely flat and the center edge as you can see it's not perfectly aligned to the to the center so one quick way to do that i'm just going to click the top one click and shift double click the the lower one it's going to select the whole uh selection loop right there i'm going to press r to scale and i'm going to scale it so that they're all flat to the same surface like that and then with w i'm going to press x and just snap it to the uh to the grid now it should be fairly easy to just click right right click shift and say mirror and mirror x and negative world so that we create like the mirror of the spoon to the other side and that's it now uh we need to create of course the um the roundness of the spoon there's a lot of ways to do it but since we have this very nice like section right here what i can do is just select all of these faces and move them back and then select all of this like interfaces and move them back as well and when we press smooth you're gonna see that we get this very nice effect now you can see it's not perfect so we can definitely uh modify it a little bit this is a lot of uh like traditional again box modeling techniques where you're gonna have to like really go in there check which vertex need a little bit more like more pushing to one side or the other like here i'm in in subdivision mode which is uh number three and i'm checking how the curvature is looking in this case i think it looks good uh spoons usually kind of like follow the curvature a little bit towards the the handle so you're gonna see a little bit of a crevice here so i'm gonna grab my vertex here and push it a little bit there and again it's just about like molding the whole thing as you can see here and uh that's it now super easy the next step and that we're actually going to go right view it's going to be super helpful as well to to kind of like create like the perfect like the perfect curvature right so i'm going to go to the to the center points right there like this guys definitely need to be pushed out a little bit more this guy's just a little bit more and all of those are are going to be helping with the with the overall curvature some spoons a little bit flatter than others some are a little bit like a sharper so here for instance i think it might be a good idea to grab this guys and just like push them slightly back maybe even like grab this four faces and just a little bit more and again all of that is going to help with like the general uh curvature of the of the spoon and at the end of the uh of the modeling i'm just gonna press ctrl e to extrude this thing and just push the uh the spoon out like this now we definitely need to kind of like gosh uh is that a proper gauge it's gage or gotch how is it pronounced let's learn some english real quick it's gage gage i always say dodge gage it's to measure right gage gotch such a bad english from my part so it's gage such a weird word uh anyway so we're gonna gauge uh whether or not this is a thick enoch thick enough on the on the handle which i think we might need a little bit more so i'm going to go just a little bit higher and in the same way in which we uh soften the soften but sharpen the edges of the of the knife we're going to do the same for the spoon so i'm just going to grab the whole edge loop right there continue it all the way down to the handle grab this guy in this guy and i'm just gonna bubble this real quick and there we go so now we're gonna have this very nice soft spoon on our uh on our table ready ready to be used to eat some cereal my favorite cereal is lucky charms even though i'm not allowed to eat it uh because it's very sugary so yeah i don't i don't buy it very often but every now and then i'll buy it and i really like it now as you can see the the fork right here actually follows a very similar uh topology in regards to the handle as the spoon does so what i can do is i can actually duplicate the spoon and reuse what i have here with the um on the top of the element so i'm just going to delete the spoon side of things and you're going to see that we have this thing right here like this section we have a weird bevel right there that's curious huh looks like i missed the spot on the on the spoon that's fine you wanna see how to fix that real quick so i know that this size is okay but this one's not okay so i'm just gonna center the food point on the object and i'm gonna press shift click go into mirror options and i'm going to change instead of world i'm going to say object so that it uses the pivot point x positive so whatever is on the negative is going to pass to the positive and that way we get a proper spoon so easy way to fix one side of the object if it's uh if it's wrong now here it's actually a fairly easy um prop i would say probably the the what's the word the the fork is one of the easiest ones the only complicated thing is this area right here um because we're gonna have a little bit more topology than we're used to but i'll show you one quick trick here so i'm gonna start with a cube here and i'm gonna make one of the i believe they're called prongs i think that's the proper word so as you can see the prong starts like really thin right there and then it becomes a little bit wider once it goes down like that sorry oh my god uh sorry about that so i'm just gonna grab this guy ctrl d to duplicate it and have the other prong right here there we go now we need to define the thickness of the of the prongs so they're definitely thinner so let's go about there and i'm gonna combine them i'm gonna combine them into a single uh prong right here and the reason i wanna combine them is because i'm just gonna grab these two faces extrude them down like this and then delete these two faces right here so that i can select them and bridge them together with this little button right here which is called the bridge tool and that will uh combine the the prongs together into like the the body of the of the fork now as you can see here we're gonna have a little bit of an extrusion so from here we're gonna extrude to the center right about there and then at that point i mean we should have probably the same distance over there so i'm actually gonna move this thing a little bit backwards like this let's go to the front and i am gonna grab the object here let's send to the pivot point i'm gonna move it so that it's closer to the center because i want the same distance or as close as possible to be over here and this seems to be a little bit too big so probably about there so i'm just gonna move this there and now we snap these vertices right there to the center and we're gonna use which tool you guys know it the bridge tool no not the bridge the mirror tool we're gonna use the mirror tool because the mirror tool will allow us to uh mirror this on the world mode on x negatively because we're gonna go from the positive side to the negative side and we hit apply and there we go we have our four uh prongs very nicely there now i don't wanna bring all of this edges into the uh handle right here we could i mean there's there's no problem if we did but i really don't wanna do it so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to select this guy and this guy front and back and i'm going to say collapse or sorry um in the modeling tab mesh and we're going to collapse and what that will do is it will create some triangles and people have this sort of like aversion to triangles they feel like they they they're bad or they don't work they do work you just need to know where to have them and for instance that it's a perfect place to have them and then this one's though this one i am going to merge to center and same for this one merge to center and the reason why this triangles work is because they're in a flat area so all of this uh four faces that we have right here are flat they're gonna be completely flat and then we shouldn't have an issue so i'm just gonna grab those faces ctrl e bring them all the way down scale them in because that's the kind of like the let's center the pivot point and let's center the pinpoint on this guy as well because it's kind of like out of uh there we go so they're gonna go right about there right because eventually this guys we we're gonna have to find a way to connect them to this other guys over here now up here i am gonna add a one two uh let's say three maybe four and all of these new lines that we just added we're going to use the x scale option to scale it out and create the curvature of the cutlery there we go there we go so now it's just a matter of aligning this guy closer to where this is supposed to be now the forks do tend to have as you can see right here a sort of like curvature so i'm actually going to keep it there and what i'm going to do instead is i'm going to grab this guys right here it seems to be a little bit thicker just a little bit thicker there we go so i'm going to grab this guys right here i'm going to push them forward and then this guy's right here and push them forward a little bit and then this guy's right here and push them forward a little bit more and as you can see we're going to create this sort of like effect i'm actually going to grab all of the prongs here and push them including this guy probably just push them a little bit backwards there we go so we create this sort of like um again a little bit of a ramp i might be tempted to just grab like this one even and just like push it a little bit more so we're creating this very nice ramp right here there we go for our whole element now the big problem is if we take a look at how many faces we have right here we have 10 faces so four four and two sides and on this one right here if we check how many faces we have actually there's a little option that you can use which is uh over here in mesh um sorry display heads-up display and then polycount you're gonna get the the amount of selected edges and we have nine right here and we have nine because as you remember we fixed this one so i'm going to go again on this one and do a an object a mirror on the x positive so that we fix the topology and now we have actually 10 objects or 10 10 sides so it should be just a matter of grabbing like or combining both objects so if we combine both objects and i'm going to try to to move this guys like a little bit out and forward just so that they match a little bit more closely the the main like line that we have on the on the handle the bevel because i don't want to add a bevel on the on the prongs i'll show you why in just a second so i'm going to do something like this there we go and now we should be able to do double click double click and just a bridge them together and that should create a union on our objects right there now it looks very ugly that's fine because after we do that i'm just going to grab this guy and hit ctrl delete to delete it and now the as you can see the transition is going to be a little bit better so there seems to be a crazy vertex right there there we go a couple of crazy vertices so my we might need to delete them huh weird okay so this faces seem to have like a problem let's just delete those faces let's go into vertex mode or just uh etch mode and just grab this edge and this edge and again bridge and there we go look at how clean that fork looks now to keep this prongs a little bit nicer i'm gonna go up here and i'm gonna grab my cut tool and i'm gonna cut the one line across there and one line across it and that's going to give me this very nice like long prongs uh without that much of an uh of a problem and we can still go here and add one line there and one line there that's also gonna give me some like harder prongs that are not going to be affected or shouldn't be affecting the rest of my fork and that's it guys um i think i'm tempted to to give this prongs a little bit more curvature so i might just like push them forward like this and then if we really want to give them curvature i mean we can add like a couple of cuts right here let's go into vertex mode and just add a little bit of curvature to the to the prongs so it looks a little i think that looks a little bit closer to to a fork which is what we're going for and that's it but this wouldn't be a next to tutorial without a little bit of of a quick render i know we're going a little bit long now i was expecting to finish this in like 20 minutes but we're going to like 30. uh hopefully you guys like this video right here so i'm going to grab all of the objects freeze transformation delay history center pivot and let's just like rotate them down like 90 degrees i'm gonna move this guys right here like one next to the other and let's do like this or like instagrammy uh instagram image right so i'm gonna do a top view render and it's gonna be like a square render so let's go here to the square let's say uh 2k square is fine and let's do like this let's rotate them like like 45 degree angle so well first i am gonna like position them in such a way that they're like that we have a balanced composition like this i think that looks balanced yeah i think that kind of looks balanced does it okay let's let's do like exact numbers so this is uh seven units away let's do six units away and this is gonna be so from here let's do the history and that's gonna be six genes there we go so i'm gonna grab all of them ctrl g to group them and i'm going to rotate them now let's keep it let's keep them straight like like a super straight effect what we can do though maybe like why not just like rotate them 180 degrees and then move them like move them a couple of uh elements like this and then duplicate and move them like this that kind of looks like like a tileable texture right i think it looks interesting um now let's add a background because we definitely need a background so let's add just like a plane that's gonna serve as our background let's add our traditional like uh skydome light let's do a quick file here on the sky dome light and hdr and we have this yeah that decor shop is perfect let's go back to our top view so top view i'm gonna grab all of my elements right here all of my cutlery i'm going to select assign a new material arnold ai standard surface and i'm going to up the ior to like a 10 and now and i'm going to bring the color all the way down and if we hit render we should have reflections by turning the ior up we make it a lot more metallic so let's see let's see if this works so yeah were you guys expecting a 30 minute video about how to make cutlery maybe not but if you're just starting 3d and this is the first time you're using maya one of the first times again this is an excellent exercise to practice and get something uh looking very very nice look at this beautiful let's decrease the roughness because i want this object to be like super super nice we can even uh bring like the metalness up and let's bring the ior or sorry the color up and that also works you can see that we get this very nice like chrome effect you can do metalness or ior both of them work perfectly fine like they're gonna give you a good result uh regardless um and now let's add a fun color to the background so let's add like uh let's do our green like the next tooth green so i'm gonna go ai standard surface and i'm not going to go like the super intense screen but let's go for like a pastel tone and let's hit render let's hit render that looks nice um i'm trying to see where the reflection is going wrong because uh there's definitely some issues on the shading so i'm gonna grab all of this guys and let's say mesh display soft notch just to make sure that they're all softened let's do the history first transformation center pivot and let's see if that fixes anything could it be that the reflection is so perfect that we're getting this sort of effect i don't know maybe but the green looks very bad so let's change it to like a blue i know we normally don't do like blues but interesting right i mean it could work huh that's very weird okay let me let me go back to ior and let's go like a very high ior well not that one sorry this guy's let's try oh it seems did i notice i'm not this guy's right here or any you just grab any of them and you go ai standard surface um let's go instead of metalness let's go ior again yeah it looks that seems to be working a little bit better i'm not sure about the reflection looks very weird it could be the normals so let me show you one more thing that could be doing the the effect here so i'm gonna go mesh display i'm gonna say unlock normal sometimes for some reason normals get locked i can also go mesh and smooth them like create like a permanent smooth on the objects and let's see if this works better no could it be the hdr then you know what i think could be the the camera since we're in a perfect like orthographic view i think it could be that thing so let's go like like on a perspective view so that we have a little bit of a different uh reflection here and let's do perspective shape there you go see how that looks way way nicer uh now we can definitely change the color of the of the spoons we can do darker spoons no wait i'm changing a value that's not supposed to be the value let's go back here there we go so if we darken the spoons the metal is going to be like a little bit more like i would expect like for a cutlery and uh yeah i mean this is it guys i don't want to go like over this uh that much like i i think this is a good um a good ending point for this one quick thing if you have an nvidia gpu which i've mentioned before you can change this in arnold rendering system gpu and that's gonna give you a very fast render uh because it's it's gonna render in the gpu instead of the cpu so you might get uh better results depending on what kind of computer you have and that's it guys thank you very much don't forget to subscribe share follow let everyone know that we are doing two uh videos every day here at next tooth and uh if you're a beginner in three in in maya where in 3d don't forget to check the courses down here sometimes your discount and promo code so make sure to check it out because every now and then we add like some surprise or hidden codes so that you get a discount on the under on the full course we have a full course on maya like from the beginning interface basic tools everything so that you can also become a great 3d artist that's it for me guys i'll see you tomorrow let's continue with that lighthouse bye

Channel: Nexttut

Views: 785

Keywords: maya 2018, zbrush tutorial, maya tutorial, nalini kanta jena, character sculpting, zbrush sculpting, zbrush turorial, beginner zbrush tutorial, human anatomy zbrush, modeling tutorial

Id: xkjLTbadvbg

Length: 33min 12sec (1992 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 13 2021