Model Low Poly Water In Maya | River | Part 1 Modeling

[Music] [Music] all right hi everyone welcome back to digital dream box today we have a subscriber request and it's how to make land that's connected to water and i thought we'd make a low poly river uh surrounded by a little bit of terrain so let's jump right in and check it out [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right let's start go up to your poly modeling shelf and add a plane into the scene we're going to use this to make our river channel as well as a bit of that terrain uh first let's scale this up so open up your channel box and we will scale it 24 by 24 in the x and the z axis there we go and then what we're going to do is right now the plane is fairly flat we're going to break up this surface and make it look a little more like ground by adding one of the deformers but first let's turn on our poly count display so go to the display tab heads up display and choose um sorry check the box beside poly count there we go and then right now we have this for the topology let's give it some more divisions open up the modeling toolkit and then click the add divisions button a few times i'm going to stop at around 200 000 triangles but you can definitely go more or less if you like um just be careful if you go too high it'll slow down maya might even crash it um but i find 200 000 is a good amount that will allow us to capture the details on it all right uh let's select the mesh again open up our channel box we have a bit of history here and we can freeze these transformations so let's click this icon to delete the history and this one to freeze the transformations all right so now let's give this a divor a deformer i'm going to select the plane so make sure it's selected go to the deform tab and then down here we're giving it the texture deformer so click on that one and then open up your attribute editor we're going to load in a texture uh right here where that checker board is click on that that'll allow us to create a render node and we're adding this noise texture that comes with maya so click on this one here right away you should see something right your um the plane has a bit of height now some deformation and what's happening is that i'm just going to lower this amplitude so you can see a bit better it's using this um texture to drive the height of the plane where we added all that topology so i've actually just selected the plane accidentally but i want to show you something as well if we select the plane we can get back to that noise texture by mouse wheeling down here however now our mesh is selected so we're seeing the selection outline which makes it a little bit hard to see our changes so what i like to do is i'll open up the outliner go down here and i'll choose the texture deformer handle and then i'll find the texture deformer from here and click on this arrow and this arrow will bring us back to that noise texture that we added on alright so now let's play with some of these settings i've already um played around some of these settings and i know what to set mine to but you may want to just experiment and see what you get also um this default texture that came with it um i'm actually going to change it to purlin noise it's going to give me more of the look i want from mine and then just play around with these parameters um you can copy mine if you choose to or you can just experiment and see what else you can create here but um for the amplitude i'm going for around 0.2 maybe a bit less for the ratio around point four depth max i'm going to take up to six that'll give us a bit more detail and then for the frequency maybe i'll bring that up just a little maybe around to nine all right so this is what i have for my ground that's um good enough for me and then what we want to do now is um delete that history so um i tend to delete the history a lot um because if you build up history maya starts slowing down so right now it's not too bad i probably don't really need to do it yet but i'm going to do it anyhow so i'm going to select the mesh and just delete history all right and then what we want to do now is maybe create a little bit of elevation in some of these areas on the mesh to make it look a little more interesting and not so flat and we can go about it a couple different ways we can maybe use one of the sculpting tools such as like the grab brush and i have a tutorial on how to create like a mountainous landscape if you want to check that out i'll post maybe a link at the end um but what i'm going to do is something a little bit different i'm just going to use the lattice deformer so select the mesh and so we're going to go back up to the deform tab and then down here um we're going to choose lattice and then you can change the divisions from here but i'm actually going to open up the attribute editor because i have to change something else here as well um over here there's something called lattice shape select that one and then for the divisions i'm gonna lower the t divisions from five down to two so we don't need all those um horizontal divisions and then we wanna give it some divisions going crosswise so i'm going to make it about 6. so 6 for the s divisions and 6 for the u divisions and how the lattice works is if we hold down the right mouse button choose lattice points we can grab some of these points and move them but what you'll notice is sometimes it doesn't create the falloff that we want because the way the lattice works is when you move these points rotate or scale them it deforms it proportionally and right now it hasn't really done much so i'm going to undo this what we're going to do instead is right here on this input uh click ffd1 and i'm going to turn off local and now if i move this you can see we have a bit more falloff that goes across the mesh so i'm going to undo that and what i'm going to do is start lifting out some lifting up some of these sections i'm not going to move it in the x or z axis because i want to preserve this square form for the look i'm going for because i'll make it look a little bit like a diorama for later um by extruding it down into like a sort of like a cube shape so i'm gonna box select some of these um later um lattice points and then um if you are selecting these just be careful because there's points on the bottom and if you're unsure just turn on x-ray mode so you can see that when you're selecting it but i'm just going to um eyeball it start moving some of these around and changing the look of this just a little bit so maybe my river will start over here and i'll sneak around to this side and maybe i'll bring up maybe some of these and bring up this one a little bit so you can see now it looks um much more natural right not so flat um i think that's pretty good i'll probably leave it the way it is maybe i'll bring up this section a little higher there we go i think that's pretty good like that and now um what we want to do is uh select the mesh and to get rid of the lattice we'll just delete that history all right now the next thing we want to do is maybe deform it a little more um what i like to do is um i'll select the mesh now maybe use the soft modification tool and that's down here and how this one works is you click on part of the mesh and if you hold down b and the left mouse button and click and drag you can increase or decrease that fall off and if we go into some of these sections maybe click on a section we can um just make it look a little more random so i'm going to add a few just hill areas here there we go you can also rotate and scale that as well but i'm just going to lift it up a little bit and i think that's probably good maybe a little bit here and there we go so now you can see it's um a little more random awesome and then um again we'll just delete that history so if we select this actually there's not much much history so we're okay all right next let's um create our river channel so if i select this mesh now and i go into vertex mode uh to get into vertex mode i'm gonna hold down the right mouse button and um this opens up the component modes i'm gonna choose vertex if i select a few of these vertices or even just one right we can move it um but what i'm going to do is press b on the keyboard b is going to enable soft select and just like the um soft modification tool if we hold down b left click and drag we can increase or decrease that fall off right and so what we want to do is just um select a section that we will push down and create that river channel and to do that i'm just going to click off here so we unselect we're going to use the paint selection tool over here on the left so click on this icon and now what i'm going to do is um first create the brush size i want again just hold down b left click and drag to increase or decrease that and i'm going to go with maybe like 0.3 or 0.4 so something pretty small and then we're going to start over here or wherever you like but i'm going to probably have my river come this way maybe sneak around this way a little bit and then come out here something like that right and you can see now we have this if we go into our move tool pressing w to go to my move tool we can push that down a little bit and we can start creating this um river channel what i'm going to do is not push it down too far just yet i'm going to push down a little bit and then i'm going to grow the selection and the reason i'm doing that is i don't want to push it down so much that it feels like this river is really steep i want to create something a little more gradual so i'm going to bring this back up to about here and then we're gonna um grab our um greater than sign key which will grow the selection so to get to that hold down shift and press period there we go and i'll bring it up a couple steps push it down a little bit more and then i'm going to grow it again and then push it down a little bit more so we have something like this and this is what i'll have for my river channel all right uh when you're done press q to go to your select tool and then press b to exit soft selection because that can slow down some of the processes if we leave that on and then let's go into object mode so now we have this right and didn't take us much time and looks pretty good and if you are making something more realistic this is a great technique as well but we want something low poly so let's change this to give it a low poly look so i'm going to select the mesh and then what we'll do is we'll remesh this so a little bit different from the method we did in the other tutorials right this time we're going to click remesh and we'll give it a second it's going to remesh this into triangles and what we want to do is just play with this max edge length so i'm going to first make it 1 right and just see what we get and just like that you can see that we have something that feels low poly now right uh we probably want to bring this down a little more but you'll just create the look you want for yours but i'm going to lower mine a little more um some some low poly art is very low and some is a little bit higher for terrain i like to go a little bit higher than um normal right so i'm going to increase this um sorry when i say higher mean like a little more topology than normal um so i'm going to increase this to 2 and see what we get and i think two is pretty good as well but i'll probably go with maybe 1.7 right there we go and i think that looks pretty good so now we have um some terrain and a river channel and this technique you can use not just to make river channels but um trenches or the river basin or even lakes as well so very versatile but yeah this is what we have all right now let's create the water for our terrain that we made first let's select this object press h on the keyboard to hide it and then we're going to add a new plane into the scene and let's um change the dimensions of this so we need this terrain to cover that water channel so the river channel and um we're going to press t on the keyboard we're going to change the width so let's make the width about three there we go and then change the height as well so for the height i want it to go a little bit past this um grid so i'm going to make this about 35 should be fine and then for the divisions i'm going to change the division height can make this about 400 we need quite a bit of topology to capture that water detail and then for the division width i'm just gonna maybe bring this up to like 40. there we go and then now i can hide the grid again and let's do the same thing we did to the terrain we'll give it a texture deformer so select it go to the deform tab down here choose texture deformer again we'll open up the attribute editor and then we want to add a new node and what we're looking for this time is the ocean shader there we go and with the ocean shader the first thing we want to do is give it a bit of height so we can see what's happening so down here for the wave height i'm gonna change this value to about maybe eight it's going to give us a nice um wave um detail and then what we'll do is we'll give it a little bit of turbulence so i'll leave that at one for now we may change it later uh for the wave peaking actually let me change it so you can see what's happening i'm gonna change this to two and you can see we can get a much more chaotic wave i'll bring it back down to one and then for the peaking i'm gonna bring this up to about four for now and we may change this later as well so let's change the scale so this looks a little more like waves so for the scale factor i'm gonna bring this up somewhere between probably 40 and 50 so i'll leave that you know 40 ish for now and then you can see right away it's starting to look like water and now i can see that i want a bit more wave height so i'm going to bring this up to maybe 10 and maybe even a bit more maybe 12. there we go so that is what i'm gonna go with for that and then for the num frequencies if we drag this down to zero you can see we lose all that detail so we just wanna drag this up and stop where we're happy and i'm gonna go with probably you know somewhere here is fine and then i'll play with maybe like a couple more values maybe the wavelength right so go with maybe something like that and you can see now we have a pretty nice looking water form when you're done and you're happy with what's happened or sorry the parameters you set just select your mesh and we'll delete that history all right so now let's um bring back the grid for a second i'm going to move this off to the side somewhere so down here and we want to make sure we don't freeze those transforms because we want to make sure that's in the center it affects how we uh curve warp so what we're going to do is let's bring back our terrain so select it press h on the keyboard to unhide it and we might as well name it as well i'm gonna call this terrain and i'll call this one water there we go and then for the terrain to make it a little bit easier to see i'm gonna change the color of this so i'm gonna hold that um first select it hold down the right mouse button and choose assign new material and for the new material i'm just gonna give it a lambert and i'm gonna make it green you can make it whatever color you like can make a little bit grassy and something like that should work that way we can see the water a little bit easier on this terrain all right so now we need to have this piece of water um warp around here right so snake around our terrain in this channel that we made and to do that we're going to use one of the curve tools to help us do it so what we'll do is we'll go up to the create tab go to curve tools and choose cv curve tool and how the curve tool works is let me just first go into the top view so i'm going to tap the space bar and hover over the top view tap the spacebar again and how the curve tool works is if i turn off the grid we just need to click on this viewport and i'll start laying down some curve points i'm just going to press escape to get rid of that so over here we want to have a curve following this channel so click on the viewport and start drawing out if you can't see your curve you can turn on x-ray mode that'll make it a little bit easier to see and i'm going to keep clicking and plotting some points and exit on this side once you're done press enter and now we have a curve following that channel awesome um let's tap the spacebar to go to our four panel view and we'll go back to this view as well and then what we want to do now is um select our mesh hold down shift select the curve and if you have trouble selecting it you can also select it from the outliner as well and then now all we need to do is go to the deform tab and choose curve warp and you can see that it's warped along the curve however um it's rotated in the wrong direction so we need to go over here to the curve one um tab and then down here there's a curve rotation option and we're just going to play with this a little bit and i'm going to go um negative 90 for mine and you can see now it's following there and if we want we could even turn off this and would it would go the length of the curve but our sir yeah the length of the curve however let me just take a look if i check that back on do i have enough yeah i have enough space so i don't even need to check that um but if yours doesn't follow all the way through you might want to uncheck that all right so now we have this and if we go into our curve tool sorry select the curve and then hold down the right mouse button and choose ctrl vertex we can move some of these points and have it like sit in that channel however what you'll notice is that actually it's working pretty well for mine um sometimes when you grab this the curve starts rotating funny right and so you may want to use the soft modification tool right to move the curve up and down to follow that channel but for me it's working right so what i'm going to do might be because i've selected on this end let me just try it yeah so if you select it on this end you can see that the curve starts rotating so you wanna make sure that you're choosing the points starting from the other side just gonna undo this and then what we'll do is we'll start selecting some of these points and have it sit nicely in this water channel [Music] all right and then when we're done we can select our mesh delete that history and then we can get rid of the curve and then i want to do a few more things to this before we wrap up first i want to select this mesh go into edge mode and then i'm going to double click this outside edge so that we have that perimeter and i'm going to go into my scale tool hold down shift on the keyboard and do a smart extrude down there we go and i think um we will scale the bottom as well so i'm going to go into the scale tool and just scale that flat and i'm not going to fill in the bottom because that won't be seen but now we have a nice looking uh dye ramish um uh seam and then with the curve sorry not the curve the water i'm going to do the same thing but first we want to make this a look low poly and right now it has a nice looking form to it so i want to keep that edge flow a little bit so we're going to make this look low poly a little bit different we're going to re-topologize it first so select the mesh and then we're going to go to the mesh tab down here open up that option box just going to reset this and i'm going to choose about 20 000 for the face count that way we can keep a lot of that detail and then click re-topologize this may take a few seconds or a couple minutes to finish depending on your uh computer and so i'll see you when this is done all right it just finished it took just under a minute for me i'm just going to minimize this output window and now we have this and you can see that the topology if i were to turn this on the wireframe you can see it's following this so we'll get an interesting triangle flow this time for this object and so now all we need to do is select this mesh and we are going to um first delete that history i'm just going to open this up right um delete the history we're going to go to the mesh tab triangulate and then we want to reduce this so let's delete the history mesh reduce and there we go and for now i'm just going to input a hard number here just to remove a lot of that triangle count because if we try and drag this percentage slider right now it's going to lag a little bit probably because we still have a lot of topology there so i'm going to bring this up to maybe 80. click enter and you can see that's reduced by quite a bit let's select it we'll go to the mesh display and try i'm sorry harden these edges to give it a nice low poly look and we want to maybe give this a color as well so we can see that um how it looks so hold down the right mouse button choose assign new material i'm gonna give it another lambert maybe we'll make this one bluish something like that for now and then maybe even a bit brighter there we go and for this one maybe i'll make this one um oops starting to lag maybe i have a bit of history on this one probably yeah i'm going to delete the history on this one as well and then hold down the right mouse button we can go back to its material attributes this way just going to make this a bit brighter there we go and then for the water let's select this and oh that's probably too bright actually there we go and then for the water what we want to do is maybe reduce this a bit further to make it a little more low poly so i'm going to select it go to the mesh tab again and i'm going to hit it with another reduce and i do that so that now we can drag this percentage slider and it won't lag too much if you find it's lagging and you know you need to um reduce a bit more we can just select the mesh delete that history again and hit it with another reduce there we go and now let's take a look at it and i like that but i want to bring back a bit more of that topology so i'm going to select it and lower this percentage slider because it reduces 50 at a time so i'm gonna go with probably for my water maybe something like this right where we can see those waves coming through so it feels like um there's a bit more realism there sorry there and a bit more impressionistic and then if you find any areas where your water is sitting too high you can go in here and maybe grab your soft modification tool and bring down the water or bring up the terrain so go in here and over here maybe i want this terrain to be a bit higher so i can go in here maybe increase that fall off a little bit and just lift it up right so it's up to you right but you can still adjust it that way and yeah so now we have this and then one more thing i'd like to do with this water is i liked it to sit in the terrain a little bit so let's slice it over here so select the mesh we'll go into the top view there we go and then we'll grab our multi-cut tool and then we'll zoom in a little bit and then what i'm going to do is click on this area over here so a little bit sitting inside the mesh hold down shift on the keyboard move this over here let go and it's going to add a cut right there um it's a little bit hard to see but um just we'll turn on wireframe on shaded so we can see there we go and we'll do the same over here so again select the mesh grab your multi-cut tool click down hold down shift on the keyboard and then move it over here let go it's going to add a straight cut and now what we'll do is we'll press q to go to our select tool we'll go into edge mode and we'll double click this edge we're going to detach that so hold down shift and the right mouse button detach components and then let's go into face mode double click this face here they'll select that section and we can delete it and we'll do the same for the top um let's go into edge mode we'll double click this edge hold down shift and the right mouse button and then we will detach those components as well and then go into face mode double click the space and delete it and then what we'll do is we'll go back to our perspective view and let's extrude that edge down so we'll go into um sorry select the mesh we will isolate it and over here we'll go into edge mode select this edge hold down shift double click this one and then go into your move tool hold down shift extrude it down and that should be far enough for that section and we'll do the same in the other area as well so let's go into edge mode we'll select one of these edges and then hold down shift double click maybe this one we actually will add this edge to it as well and then same thing go into your move tool hold down shift do a smart extrude down to about there is probably fine and now let's go into object mode select our mesh and we'll exit isolation view and let's have a look so and there we go we have some terrain and a river in this channel this water seems a little bit high but easy enough to fix we'll just um select the mesh go to the deform tab choose this and there we go we have a river uh sitting in a little bit of terrain [Music] all right that wraps up another one hopefully enjoyed today's tutorial and you can use the techniques to make great looking low poly terrain and rivers until next time this has been digital dream box your destination for game art [Music] you

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Keywords: Model a low poly water in Maya, Create low poly water in Maya, Maya water tutorial, model water Maya, Create a river in Maya, low poly modeling, Low poly Blender, Maya, Blender, 3ds max, How to low poly Maya, how to create low poly art, low poly modeling tutorials, low poly art tutorials, low poly water, how to make water Maya, low poly art style, model a river Maya, Maya for beginners, low poly Maya, Maya terrain tutorial, Model a low poly river Maya, create water in Maya

Id: nAHzjc2TbZA

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021