Modeling Essentials: Modeling a Wacom Pen

hey guys Hania Morton from flip normals here in this video we are going to be looking at how it can model a very simple Wacom pen this air is really intended for beginners who really just want to make like the first model or people who are still pretty new to 3d modeling in Maya the final result here is pretty simple but we're still using professional techniques and this is the way I was still model it for production so there's gonna be some good theory here this could be some good workflow stuff so yeah let's just get start with it all the super exciting Wacom pen and so the very first thing we're gonna do now we're gonna set up an image plane if you hit the space bar click in the center and go to your right view of the hotbox now we can just go to right here and let's select them set up an image plane here let's just select the camera click this guy here and then we go down to environment and image plane and hit create now we have an image plane here for this view and under image name we just go in here and we just paste in our path and we have a little Wacom pen here and let's just make sure it's set to all looking through in all views here so now we can if you go to perspective here now we can just see it here and I'm as primis will align perfectly in the center here so normally I want to put this up so it's actually resting on on the ground but for now we're just gonna keep it in the center of the grid just was a bit easier yeah this this works a little differently than if you create create a plane and apply a texture to it like using image planes just through the camera view it's just a lot more I think it's about handier yeah you can do the same thing with the plane assist you don't have to apply the texture and make sure it is the image plane it's just resizes to whatever image you apply it to yeah so it's pretty nice way of doing it yeah this is this is something you use all the time as well in general so let's just start moving it a bit off here so we actually have some room to work on here and that's great a cylinder the reason I'm making a cylinder here is that you want to have something which is similar to to shape here like you could start this with a lot of shapes but I mean it's a silver so let's start for us and then we just set this here to solution access to 16 I just want 16 segments here because that then you can introduce divide this equally into four it's four sections which becomes a bit important later on that's it's generally when you when you're modeling it's just power of two kind of thing when you're when you're doing any sort of modeling like this just it's really nice it is first of all it just looks good but math wise it just makes it easier when you when you're counting stuff duplicating things so what we would do now now we want to make sure this here the rotate of the other way so hold on the J key little snap it so just try this it's gonna be a bit fiddly but now it's just snapped - it's just continent agrees you can also just do it here but it's just keep it keep it simple yeah holding on the J key snaps at them default 15 degree increments and you can change it under where is it he's under here somewhere here this step size so you can change this here to 50 degrees yeah so that was the step size just gets activated when you hold on the J key essentially um it's no good to write just a right view here and now we can just scale this guy down now this is important that we scale this out on the center one otherwise it's gonna be squashed it's gonna look like it might look fine like this but uh that's gonna find make sure you're scaling on the center one Austin why a company yes so let's just do this and I'm just gonna scale it up so the way I prefer to model is from general to specific there is a million ways of modeling here but I'd refer to block everything in first so I'm just gonna block the entire length of this and just take this here you also don't actually have to hold over the handle you can just hold shift middle mouse button I just move it so you see the cursors all the way over here and you could move it like this it's important to note that if you're moving it like that then it moves it on the axis that you last moved on if you'd haven't moved on any axis recently it'll just do all three axes or whatever axis is axes that are visible well we also want X ray to be active we just do this by going under shady and then we just accept extra extra here this is one of these things you probably want map to Hartke we're just using vanilla Maya here so there going to be some things in this video we are gonna recommend YouTube nafta hotkey but we'll just keep it simple yeah who knows just move the image plane down a little bit this week it's in center and now you can see I didn't actually have to hit the manipulator here I just shift middle mouse button and just move over the limb this makes it a bit easier so right mouse button and descriptive vertex and then we just scale this down as well and then we just move it all the way down here it's gonna be a lot easier if you just stick to to general to specific here up a little here and now we can disable x-ray and then we can select all the points here at the end and this extruder out a little several ways you can do this you can this is my preferred way is select a point and then shift right mouse button two faces two faces or you can just go do this in one go it looks it looks like magic when you're doing it it just means you can just select it read it quickly yeah so now we can just hit shift right mouse button extrude you can see we aren't using any menus up here at all you could really work in like expert mode yeah dousset using the hotbox or using marking menus it's just a lot faster in general marking menus are even faster than the hotbox I would say yes and so when you extrude you can use all the gizmos here I just refer to this to scale by hand because I'm an old school like that so just go back into right view and just scale this up like so and we'll just extrude is one more shift you see this was just so quick now shift the right mouse button down you don't even have to wait for a manipulator and they will just move it out here now again we just scale it down like so so what we also have to do we have to separate out certain certain parts of this you can see here that certain parts here are different materials like this here is one material this is one this is one this is one here and this is one here and you want to you want to really separate this out based on how this is in real world so that a question you actually get a lot so I should I modeled like the general trying to thought there is if it's separate in real life then separated in your model obviously for games sometimes it can be different you would have the entire character be one with maybe the clothes or something even sometimes but as a good modeling practice if it's separate in real life and separated in 3d yeah absolutely so let's just extrude this in here as well now so select this one the end point click here and then we just go into shift right no control right mouse button to face it two faces and a scale it down and let's just look at the pen here that looks about right so then I'm actually looking at the real pen in real life for that now we just extrude this in here so now I have some geometry we also want to you see here how it's like shiny here I want to separate that out so if we go to the right to you and now we can go to x-ray so we use a different tool here we're going to be using multi cut this is just be in the item mode and then we go to shift right mouse button mulder cut and then we just make a little loop there by hold on ctrl key and click it really handy stuff even is very quickly as ad cuts to it so we've been doing this a couple different places here we are going to be doing this here as well there is this is a bit hard to see in the reference but there's actually a cut here as well which means to be self apart you can see this more easily in in the real world if you have if you have a Wacom pen and then we're gonna be adding a little notch here as well a tiny little title notch here and we also need this geometry just we can scale it up so double-click on right here and then we can just scale this up so it fits a bit better and then we need to add a loop here as well just so this here fits a bit better with the silhouette now you see just moving using the right mouse button to change the stretches and then we'll just scale this down a little bit here so now we basically have the overall shape off the pen here but one thing we have to do is whenever you you hit the three key one two and three on the keyboard you see now it's smooth here but it gets way too smooth here so we're gonna have to add supporting loops to all this yeah I will add that in a bit do you see everything just shrinks down here it's really like supporting loops is one of those things that it's almost like icing on the cake hmm you know you're painting it's like it's gonna it's like the white highlights yeah there's no reason to commit to these too early no if you're using something like creasing then obviously that doesn't that doesn't matter anymore what they also say here that we get a history here this is this is probably the number one beginner mistake in Maya that people don't delete her history this gets long as hell yeah after a while so you want to go under where is this edit and then we have delete or delete delete by type or delete all by type this will leave for entire scene and even set history or it's mostly here and you see the hotkey is shift alt T and I had to see it disappears it's just a really good practice that just is a good habit to learn to just have that hotkey in your mind and just just delete history once in a while yeah obviously there are some things that you might want to keep history on for yeah like if you're maybe your chamfering something at the very end of your modeling and then if you keep history you can keep going back and tweak tweaking the chamfering but it's general general know you know you want to delete history you also want to be really careful with this feature here delete all by type in his yeah is that if you have anything it was skinned and your model is going to eat everything any radius is gonna be destroyed from this yeah so a general just select the object and then shift off D and go boom and that's it so what I'm gonna do before adding supporting groups to this is I'm gonna just gonna split this into it a couple of new parts so going to poly mode interfaces and just select them here straight up just drag and drop I'll just drag here and then we go to shift right mouse button and then we hit extract faces and do the same for this as well you can see this is now part of all this so with the same thing here select these guys and make sure everything is selected and then hit extract faces again and same with this as well because we want these here to also be separate and extract faces so now we have a couple different different parts here which you can work with so this also makes a lot easier if your once your shading your model as well because I can just apply one shader which is which is this roughness value one which is this in one justice essentially just like from super sharp to mid mid and to very blurry yeah just makes a lot easier and then I also want to create this little thing at the end here so this here is actually movable and so it's you can't just keep it up as it was the same abuses here you actually have to separator out so same this before we are just going to go to select the middle one two faces and two faces and then shift right mouse button extrude and then we're just gonna scale this down like so and then we can use another feature called duplicate faces shift right mouse button and then we do where are you doing faces there we are so now we can select this guy here and we can just move it out and we can and we can dis extrude it you can see down that the pivot is in the center so you want to go to modify and the center pivot this is also 1dc probably one I had to hotkey and speaking of hotkeys control one is the default for isolate we actually made a video about this and that everyone who comes with like it's control one yeah so that's us because it's an I guess like before control one existed as a hotkey that we'd had a script for isolating things so super handy so the same thing is before we just select we just selected apart an extra graph and again delete history shift alt T and now I can just move this guy out here and how accurate you want to be here just depends on what you want to do if you're let's say working in the effects which is our background then you want this year to be pixel perfect if you're just keep doing this kind of for a personal project and you just want to be quick you can kind of do it by eye you I recommend just doing it properly but uh you don't have to align perfectly I'm just gonna delete this part here as well because there's no reason to just have this so just select select it and hit the Delete key mm-hmm gotta save those 16 faces mm very important so not we are going to extrude this out here and so let's just select these goes you're right to you the extrude and now we're just gonna scale it down on the central axis and just move it out like so and scale down a little bit and again extrude once more if you're confused about how we work extruding you can just go back into the video because it's real it is the same tool for using over and over again yeah so now you can see we have a bunch of triangles here and you might have heard of triangles bad for this it might actually pinch a little yeah so what you can do here you can select all the all the edges here you can all them the tab key and just go click or so you just drag on top and now we can just delete the edges and now we can use the multi cut tool to connect up again shift right mouse button and alter cut and you can just start to connect these guys up you need to right key or is right click to to commit to is to make commit to this which is quite handy another handy way of doing this as well is that you can actually take just every other edge every to other edge just delete that because you're doing it as the power of two mm-hm and that would actually create the similar looking result yeah that's the handy thing about working with power of two edges whatever you want to call it which is just super nice yeah it's just realize to cap this the the sort of advantage of capping it with quads like this is that once you start to subdivide you don't end up with that pinched triangle look that you can easily end up with otherwise absolutely we can also convert to verts and then we can use average verts which for some reason doesn't work there we go okay so that's again just select it an average work this just couldn't like emerged some just average them together himself enough and really good hotkey Henning was just using there was G G just repeats the last action of the tool so if you go to average vertices then you don't have this and we averaging now then you can just hit G and it keeps averaging it which is really really nice really handy yeah it's it's hard to do these basic modeling videos when you just be doing it for so long it's nice to have a second pair of eyes on this yeah it's always helpful yeah it is so now we just want to move this out a little bit as well this would get a little bit of fun of the bolt here mm-hmm and then we just want to add a loop here in the center and you can see you know if I hold down the ctrl and shift key it's gonna snap so now we can just snap it here in the middle ish like so and then we can scale it up you can see whenever you're doing any kind of modeling this is a very low level it's not necessarily like super fancy tools or anything crazy you just just kind of using extrude yeah and that's mostly hit scale is up a little bit more and delete history delete history favorite this as well you really we don't need history for these kind of things it just becomes crazy yeah it's the one number one thing that will mess up your scene is rogue history and some objects yeah that just makes my crash it really is so let's isolate this guy swallow and let's just extrude this in a little bit here select this double click the edge and again isolate is just control one so let's do this and then extrude and now you can scale down or you can just drag on this axis here the blue one and you see that's just a local offset which is quite handy and the reason is once we start smoothing this you can see that now we and you you want to add some supporting edges to this this is something we talked about that we actually had a hard time in the beginning with understanding supporting edges so it wasn't really something that was talked about like even in tutorials the tutorials that I followed back in the day was just like yeah just make these edges okay cool yeah so the way we can just sharpen those up here is add supporting edges to it but you can do with multi cut and is click and click but I finally started a bit more elegant version of it because now you can see the spacing here is mostly fine but if you want to be like perfect you can select one edge here and you can do connect and it's just going to connect the entire loop here hmm now if you hold on by default it's a two segments so you can hold on middle key and now you get two segments and now if you hold on control shift right mouse button you can save to pinch and I've again hit middle mouse button this is gonna pinch it here hit the Q key to commit to this and again we can hit the G key just to do this and now we can just do the same thing here just set the pension what if this is too complicated just add the loops by hand which is perfectly fine as well thank you yeah multi cut tool is I prefer the multi cut tool president yeah that's what we saw for our like there's a million ways more than meeting yeah so like I'll also just do certain things here like this is multi cuts because indeed it's just a bit faster sometimes yeah so it's just whatever you prefer so I can see now it's nice and sharp and smooth nice and hard nice and hard so we do the same with this as well we just selected the edge here I don't - here then just isolated control one extrude we're gonna 6th root and then like so actually we can we can do one instead of extruding stuff adding the supporting loop we can just add to support a loop now and then we can just extrude it down like so efficiency oh so efficient yeah and now we could do the same thing here connect all and we can just set this here to pinch then I can just pinch it all the way over like so and segments and I'm set to three so now we get one in the middle as well so now this one here is nice one the key things well which I see beginners dude they make stuff too sharp like this here might actually be a bit too sharp so if you see that you can just double click it here and you can just scale it in kind of hacky Buddha just what 3ds or 3ds is a bit rounder here yeah because most most things really aren't razor sharp and the same from this this scale is end you sure you should have a good idea of how to do these kind of things mmm by now if you dinner a few times yeah I mean it's basically we're doing the same thing over and over again in this tutorial so that's why I think it's a good subject matter yes it's such a simple one to really do add one here and add one here so we just get a nice or a little smooth fall-off here yeah and the same thing here oh here's another thing you should probably avoid modeling in when you hit the three key to preview smooth avoid modeling in that because it's weird like you might think your mesh looks fine because you've stretched it to the extreme but then once you unsmooth it then you realize oh crap I don't have supporting edges that are good enough yeah absolutely it's a work in this mode not this mode because you see how different the model is now if you're modeling like this you're like ah where is it oh it's like kind like that and everything changes yeah but if you work like this then full control you full control of it so now I'm just in it honestly you don't need this perfect symmetry I showed you before this is a nice tool to have with a connect tool the connector is super powerful so now you can just add it by multi cut yeah stuff I usually map the hot keys is multi cut to connect central pivot yeah so far of what we used x-ray x-ray as well thanks for that super handy isolate selected which is not until one control one is a terrible hotkey yeah it's so hard to like it's really not it's really uncomfortable you don't see here the reference as well there's a tiny little notch here so let's just add this here select this and then we just scale it down a little bit here and we also there's also like an actual hole for the for the nib here so we do the same thing here select the center one so control right mouse button two faces it was gonna extrude then same thing as before and extrude her end just pull it in here so the other one was actually gonna be visible so that one I would actually quote up this one I'm not gonna bother ya because it's inside something there so we can use to connect thing here connect tool about the triangle yeah oh my god you've got like 16 mm yeah so we have a different video on triangles are yeah which essentially triangles are perfectly fine everything is a triangle under the surface so as strong as you know how to use triangles yeah you're fine just go add a little bit of like extra geometry here as well do these sort of sharpen up a little bit especially when you're doing hard surface things like this I mean triangles really you can put in a lot of triangles in this and you wouldn't even be able to tell yeah isolate as well they don't have to isolate I just prefer to work in smaller chunks makes it easier to see what you're doing yeah exactly scalar in and now we can just add a loop here and the loop here and we are almost there so now we have to make it's not exactly the same but we're not going to waste your time with that so now we just gonna make the nib nib as well control control right mouse button two faces this extruded in a little bit and I was gonna control right mouse button and duplicate face and we have a little guy here if you're having trouble mics we're selecting it you can just select both like this and control drag and I get the selected make sure nothing else is selected here and then we go to modify center pivot you're gonna see why is useful to put this on a hotkey yeah all the time when you're creating new objects from other objects yeah so so just select it select the entire thing again and just extrude and you see now it becomes black and that's because they're normals are flipped I think we've been talking about it for like four years they were like hi this is for hanging your morbid normals in this video we are we talked about how to fit moments if your normal are flipped or reversed you can just go under its weight in reverse mesh display they're calling it yes they're totally ruining our branding terrible like the G key super handy reverse I just hit G again you just see you adding more things here super handy so you really would want your normals not to be reversed because I flipped or flips the colloquial term and we just extruder out here you don't have to duplicate faces you can just make another cylinder and just tuck it in there are just things easier I'm just reusing as much as opposed to account extrude down scale it down and then let the self so if you were to sum up this tutorial it would be extrude and extrude and scale it should expand yeah probably better that's pretty much it to be fair that sums up a lot of modeling yeah exactly extrude scale add supporting edges to it yeah that's it so I mean this is pretty much it we have one more thing which it's been annoying we have this little thing here that's the little button how are you gonna solve that well we could have easily solved but not showing you but we are now you mentioned it yeah I mentioned it so the first the first thing we can do is we just cannot go to multi cut shift right mouse button multi cut and just hit the ctrl key when this is up here so now we get an approximation of where the hole is and depending on how many cylinders or segments your initial cylinder had you might your hole might be too big or too small here this is something you kind of want to plan for yeah and yeah that's just that comes with the whole part surface modeling cutting things cutting holes into things that around it's just one of those things that will suck yeah even though this model here is gonna be alright now but it's not gonna be perfect cuz you just require a lot of fiddling with us yeah which is above the scope for this so you're never gonna guess next up maybe it's extrude and move down not have known so we are also just going to now you can see what happens here though if you just stop so bit about it thank ya not done okay we do so you can see now let's add some supporting loops multi cut tool add a loop here add a loop here and now we're gonna see what happens still doesn't look super good so we can add let's see if this works we can select these it's like these it's like this and then we can just scale them down a little bit like along the length of the pen yeah right because you it's easy to serve supporting groups around the cylinder but along the length of the cylinder that becomes tricky this yes exactly let's say you want you to scale this down the entire hole you have to scale in like this now you've broken the curve oh yeah exactly and once you start adding supporting loops that run along the length of it then you've broken that cylinder shape yes and it's gonna look nasty that's the tricky part so the way we've fixed us here is we just add more loops at supporting loops like so and so so now we have a nice little hole here but do you see we get some pinching here and this is just one of the things you're just gonna get it's just a tricky issue yeah the way you would solve that here would be run something like along it like down there and then you would try to conform it to like that new shape yeah either that or you start making a cylinder that has like more size to it and then that problem would already be solved there yeah exactly it's just it's just a bit of a shitty issue yeah like this is one of these words it is on this list a bit more line so you can't see it too much here but if we assign a shader which you can do this to everything here this is a sign of blend shader to it which is more reflective our function so we can assign a function and just make it a bit darker so it mashes do you know what the funky shader is I have no idea what a funny jitter is it's there yeah anyway now you can see the issue now you can see the issue here and one of the ways we always solve this production is just by having dirt on top is this a bit of a shitty issue but let's move one for this so hopefully something we can do it tutorial on oh yeah and the producer so now we can add a loop here as well for it cuz now we would and so now we just get this nicer hold here so again let's for the buttons here we are just going to be using the base geometry here for it select these two here and then we just do duplicate face and select it all and then just deselect it and make sure this the only thing selected and then we go to modify center pivot that's like the fourth time I use in the tutorial so hotkey it I actually have a hotkey for both centering pivot and putting the pivot back to the center of the world hmm sometimes I want that that's useful yeah so now I can see this R is bent here all like has a bit of a curve to select this and delete that was pretty easy that was pretty easy and now we just need to build this button here so we can select this fully and it's extrude it up this is what we do want to just go into our our view here right for you and just go here and select x-ray so we can see a bit better so we want a loop here so we can move this part up so we've moved this up here like so I move this down here a little like so there move this these back here do you see that there is nothing fancy here it's just straight up just move an extrude some points yeah disabled x-ray really what external hotkey and let's just look at this here the button in real life it's so much better to look at stuff in a real life than I used to look at it in on a picture like this until it's like five hundred but six months old image it's terrible yeah and it's like a marketing picture and it's tilted right and like it's yeah it's not great so let's scale down littles that fits in here and then when you see you had tiny little notch here done a little like bulge I'm just gonna be a bit cheeky and just add this and add one in the center to it that was deep very cheeky and then just move it down like this this is the tricky part because instead of instead of actually working with this like a certain a cylinder and connecting up we're just adding more loops to it and just moving this down here moving this like so just inventing the curve of a cylinder yes exactly how do you see again the problem here you need to add supporting loops to it so let's just do that add a loop here add two loop here you really don't want this here to be too tight so we add loop here and the loop there and add a loop here where you need to add loops becomes point two ative as you've been doing this and just requires a bit of practice so we just need one more loop here and one more loop there and we are mostly good so we can you can always just refine the shape here like this here is no way in no no way like perfect internship but it's pretty close representation of it you see if I missed anything here let's just disable take quite a grid here so I mean now we have a companion around what is this half an hour which is fairly clean fairly easy to use so we really hope this er has been useful if you if you want to see any specific shapes for us to model anything you have questions about feel free to just ask in comments yeah and if you want to see more videos like this in the future make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe thanks you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 23,707

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character, texturing, painter, designer, pixologic, nuke, cinema4d, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, drawing tutorials, wacom pen, wacom, modeling, modeling essential, modeling tutorial, modelling tutorial, 3d modeling

Id: K3YTQoIHMUg

Length: 33min 2sec (1982 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 13 2018