Maya's Conform Tool

[Music] hey and welcome to this tutorial talking about the conform tool it is my goal this year to learn some new maya tools it's been a long time since i looked over the documentation and i hope to find some tricks which i can use day to day so what the conform tool does is it wraps the vertices of one object onto another so let's go ahead over the functions first but then i'll go ahead and explore an example and kind of explain a little bit of why i find the tool helpful especially when modelling so this isn't going to work on super low res meshes so as you can see i've given this plane some resolution right so now if we go to mesh conform and if we just go ahead and click the little menu box we get a couple of projection options along normals and closest points so what along normals does is it's going to snap each vertex to the closest vertex on the live surface but it's going to take into account the normals as a sort of guide so for this to work we need to go ahead and make the sphere a live object so we can do this by clicking the little magnet icon up here and you will see we get this effect which is great it sort of wraps as if it was kind of like a cloth i'll just go ahead and undo that so let's go ahead and try closest point which will again snap each vertex to the closest vertex but this time not taking into account the normals of the plane and you see we don't necessarily get the results we're looking for that being said it is good to know this as if you have problems you have ways to kind of trial and error things and if we actually just look at the wireframes you can see how it's kind of just following the topology of the sphere the next section is surface offset and that is basically just how much of a gap is left between the two meshes at the end okay so now we've kind of gone over what the tool does let's go over why this tool might be actually useful sometimes when modeling details onto a curved surface you're going to end up with imperfections and pinching so in this example we want something like this but currently we have this you could always model something flat and then conform later or the example we have here it's already got the right shape but as you can see it's not smooth i have over exaggerated the imperfections here but that's just for you know a better effect you can see here in the middle we have another mesh it's smooth exactly how we want the other mesh to be and i basically achieved this with a combination of the smooth and relaxed tools so what you're going to want to do would be first attach the front and bring it over to this section i'm just going to use a v on the keyboard to snap it and just go ahead and get it positioned well you don't really want to move it too far away from the live object because maya's going to do more guesswork and i found the conform tool works better when the two objects are close so once you've done that all we need to do is make the main object live go to mesh conform and click the little menu box make sure we have a little normal selected and like that simply we have a perfect smooth final mesh let's go ahead and hide this and simply like that we have a perfect smooth final mesh without all the hassle and fiddling trying to keep the curvature intact as we add the details and then after we had done this it would just be a matter of merging it back onto the old mesh which is what was done for this mesh here working like this or working flat can be fast and is definitely a good technique to know about be sure to join the discord server to chat with a great community of fellow modelers and be sure to check out my gun road 2 for access to the members only chat and a whole bunch of assets and tools well thanks for watching i hope you found this tutorial helpful if you did hit the like and subscribe buttons come chat with me on the discord and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Antonio

Views: 7,109

Keywords: maya, 101, basic, tutorial, how, to, videos, video, autodesk, modelling, texturing, lighting, rendering, model, modeling, cube, cylinder, plane, quick, and, easy, 3d, models, grid, mayas, how-to, tutorials, tut, tuts, straight, the, point, follow, along, conform, fix, bad, topology, smooth, mesh, fixing, topo, flat, curved, curves, car, panels, violin, cloth, shape, conforms, live, make, an, object, so, you, can, weld, seperate, sculpt, relax

Id: dUTv_6hgs2o

Length: 4min 34sec (274 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Iamasadlittlething]

Fuuuuuuuuuu thanks hahaha

[u/elpresidente-4]

You can also use it for fast retopology. Make rough retopology with big rectangles, conform, smooth, conform.

[u/Bilbo_Smaug]

This is great! Thanks for an easy-to-watch video