Modeling in Maya - 5 Ways to Create Pipes

hey everyone today we're going to look at my top five methods for making pipes in maya i will cover various techniques that i've used over the years in my modeling career and show you the benefits of using each method i will time stamp each technique so you can jump to whichever technique applies to your own workflow at the end of the tutorial i will cover an efficient way to detail and apply thickness to your own pipe systems so with that let's get started alright so here we are in a blank scene of maya so i'm going to go ahead and hit space bar to maximize my perspective viewport and we'll start by creating a cylinder so if you hold shift and right click you can go ahead and bring up a cylinder all right now i want to go ahead for this cylinder is make this a little bit bigger and we'll give it a radius of 5 and a height of 10. and so we're going to work with this for now all right so i have this here and what i want to do is also you can see i can change the subdivision axis a good rule of thumb is to work with powers of two especially if you're going to be subdividing so you can set this to maybe 16 and we'll use some different subdivisions depending on what we're going to be doing all right so with these set here i want to go ahead and ctrl d to duplicate and then we'll just rotate this 90 degrees now the way that you can do this is going to the modeling toolkit here going to step snap and typically it's set off so if you don't have that off you can set it to relative and set it to about 15 degree increments and then now i can rotate this 90 degrees now for this method i need to get make sure to give this a little bit of room so i'm going to kind of move this up and over like so all right now typically when i'm working with uh creating a complex piping system i will duplicate these the original ones and group them and kind of keep them so i can come back and pull from this set of geometry here from these sets of meshes so i'll go ahead and hide those so they're just in this group hidden so now that i have these i can go ahead and select both of the meshes hold shift and right click and then run a combine okay now with these two here i can go ahead and now select these faces uh that i want to bridge okay i may want to actually move this a little bit more forward but i think this is good enough now so i go ahead and marquee select these two faces and control select the faces that i don't want making sure i don't have any extra vertices selected or faces selected then i can go ahead now and run a bridge command all right so hold shift right click and then do a bridge faces so you'll see right off the bat it looks a little bit weird but first we need to give these divisions now these divisions are important because i typically want to be working with at least five divisions and we want to make sure to set the curve type to blend and there you go you can see that you get a pretty nice smooth transition between the two and if they get a little bit too close here you can simply undo that command move these faces out a little bit more to give some room and go back to selecting these faces now another method that i like to use is selecting vertices like this this centered one and holding control right click and then going to two faces and then two faces and it'll convert that selection okay and then you can again run this bridge set the divisions to five and then use blend and there we go we get this nice clean transition okay so that is one method that i've typically used over the years um the next one that i want to show and i'll go ahead and delete history on this and hide this one here all right and i'll hide this and i'll just call this you know method one bridge and i'll go back to this original set of cylinders here and actually what i want to do is not use cylinders for this next one the next method that i want to use is a torus so if i hold shift right click we can go ahead now and create a torus okay so if i go ahead and create this and let's go ahead and give this again a larger size here and we'll just kind of multiply these by 10. so i'll go ahead and give the main radius to about 10 and the section radius which is going to be the radius of uh this cylinder here of this section i'll go ahead and make this five so we get something that's uh fairly thick here and then what i want to do is you can change the subdivision axis here now what matters here for when we do this is this section here because we're essentially going to use this as our pipe and you can see that we have one two three four five faces here but instead of five i want to go ahead and make those six so what i want to do remember if we're just adding these to have six in each for these quadrants we're just going to want this to be 24 so 6 times 4 is just 24. so i go ahead and create that and then now we can select these edges here so you can see and we have 1 2 3 4 5 6. and so these now each one of these faces are 15 degree increments so each one of these are 15 degrees so this just keeps it clean and you'll see why this matters later when we use another technique okay so i'll go ahead now and rotate this 90 degrees and i can bring this up and what i can simply do is select all of these faces or excuse me these edges here i run a shift and then i'm going to shift right click and go ahead and do a detach component okay so now you'll see i have this so i can kind of separate these faces like so okay which is pretty nice okay and what i'm going to do is move these faces together away from each other these away from each other and then you can kind of have these nice sectional you know pipe areas here that you can use for creating complex piping systems what i mean by that well now if i go ahead now and do a shift right click and do a separate we can go ahead and separate these and move these as we need so i'll go ahead and start with kind of grabbing this here this left pipe section here if you go ahead and hit insert now we can go ahead and go into pivot mode and hold v and just kind of snap this on this top center edge here so we can kind of adjust those as we see fit for all of these kind of like that and i'll move these and you'll see why we can also move these and vary these um as we need so i'll go ahead hit insert and move these like so and hold v as in vector and just kind of snap these there you can see as i'm hitting v you can see this is also enabling here which is the snap to point so that you can also use that now if you don't want to hold the keyboard command all right so basically what we've just done is create kind of a little tool toolkit or these little kit of sectional pipes that we can use to build a complex system so what i'll go ahead do go ahead and do now is duplicate this and move this okay and you can see now i can grab this other piece duplicate and move so now we have something like this and what we can do again is duplicate and now rotate again rotating with our snap on is rotate this 90 degrees so we get something like this and i can kind of bring this down here we can move this or rotate this so it's facing the other way and it'll actually connect okay and we want to make sure just to kind of snap it there so i'm holding v with move and then you can see again we can move this wherever we need okay so once i have something like this i can go ahead and select all three of these hold shift right click combine and then now we can start bridging again so if we select these faces here or these edges here hold shift right click and then do a bridge and there you go and you can see that it bridges really nicely and really clean and you can see that i can do that with these uh faces here so i can go ahead and hit g to repeat last and there you go and you can just keep doing that and building a more complex system all right so this is really helpful um and really easy to move and adjust your your piping systems and you can just kind of continue to build on top of that and this is one of my favorite methods i've actually seen andrew hodgson who's a hard surface model at ilm uses similar technique with this kind of taurus cross section here so it was definitely nice to see that so i want to make sure to kind of share that tip with you guys so with that i'll go ahead and keep moving on to the next tip okay so now that we have this what i'll go ahead and do is just hide these and we'll call this kind of just taurus method and we'll go ahead hide these and then now i'll grab another cylinder i'll go back to these original ones here duplicate this and kind of show you another way to to do this the next method is using the uh curve tools in maya so what i'll do is actually hide this second one here and we're just going to work with these uh this original cylinder here what i want to do is actually go to the an orthographic view and we'll go to the front view and we'll grab a tool now you can see that there's a tool here which is creates a curve or you can go to create curve tools cv curve tool and what you want to do is make sure to create this right here right about on the top of the the cylinder face here and it's a cv crypto so it does need three points so i'll go ahead straight up again and kind of create a point here and then i'll rotate this or move over 90 degrees to something over here okay and then you can see i can go ahead and create another point and then we need three including the starting so four points total okay so we get something like this and what i want to do now is just kind of use these points and you can see i can go ahead now and adjust these points just like i can vertices okay so if i select this curve and hold shift right click you can see i have control vertex so now i can kind of move these up and around and up and over and you can see i can move these to kind of get a nice rotation so our nice arc is what i'm trying to say so you can see i have these points here so i have one two three four and then you can even scale these in the same position and you can see it interpolates the points and you get this nice curve okay so with that i can now take this face here and i can go ahead and extrude now the way to do this is you hold the face or you select the face like so and then you shift select the curve like this then you go ahead and run and extrude so you can select extrude here or shift right click extrude face and there you go now of course just like the last time we need to make sure we add divisions oh excuse me not offset divisions and though you get something like this and you get something that you can um have a lot more control over so now if we go ahead if i'm like you know what i don't want this to be a perfect 90 degree angle i can go ahead and just kind of move and position this however i need and so this definitely gives you a lot more organic control over your pipe so it's not as mathematical and as you know 90 degree turns and everything and gives you a little bit more freeform control so i definitely have been in a position where i've used these um to to create nice complex piping systems so in this case you know to do something simple like that i would just you know use the torts method but i can go ahead if we want to do something a little bit more complex i can go ahead and create this point now that you see it kind of working so i'll create these points here and just kind of go and you can of course turn on grid snapping so that that also helps so you can see i can turn on grid if you want to be precise but typically when using these i want this to be a little bit more organic and then i can kind of maybe now from the top view just continue on right and then you can kind of see i can create more of these points so we get something like this and i can have the control vertices here i typically create three points at any any time i do a turn and you get something like so alright and i'll go ahead again and select these faces here and shift click or ctrl shift click the curve and do an extrude and add some divisions and there you go now don't worry if it's you know it looks like it's kind of pinching in some areas that's where we can go and just kind of space things out with this curve tool so i can go back and select the curve tool as long as you don't delete history of course and kind of just move these where we got a little bit more room here okay so definitely a nice a good way of having a lot more control over your uh piping system okay so you can see this and i can go ahead and move this okay so it's not as clean but it's definitely a method i've i've used when i needed to kind of get in and kind of snake some piping in through complex scenarios okay so i will go ahead now select these and this is the extrude spline method and we'll just uh we'll keep moving so i'll go ahead and hide this and we'll take a look at our the next method which is rotate with extrusion so if i grab now this here i'll go back to my original ones and duplicate these and hide the original now i'll go ahead and zoom into this cylinder and what i want to do is i'll just move this maybe over to the side okay this next one is a really handy way actually i just was uh preparing for this video and seeing jm musee um post a video of uh kind of doing pipes which was you know convenient timing um but uh i think this technique i i referenced from his video so definitely take a look and uh kind of see what he has videos what he has in his video which is really really great content so what i'm what am i talking about we'll go ahead and select these faces here and we have this uh the selected and what i want to do now is we're going to mess with pivots okay so what you want to do is uh hit e for rotate okay and then if you hit d you can hit or create and custom pivot for this sub object and what i want to do is move this out in the z so it's a little bit further out like so okay now of course we can shift move faces like this when we extrude right holding shift and then move well the same thing you can do with uh with rotate so if you hold shift and rotate look at that we can just continue to do that and what's nice is remember earlier i said use six subdivisions or five subdivisions to have six faces to give us a nice clean 90 degree rotation for our pipes and you can even continue that all the way around to 180 degrees if you wanted to loop this all the way around and then just loop it like so and then of course you would have to make sure to reset the pivot once you're done so you can go to set this back to world and to reset the pivot typically you can just open up your tool settings and just reset it there and go back to normal okay so that's one way to do it is using the rotate and move and you can remember again of course go in uh all complete different directions if you wanted to maybe extrude this down now and if i hit d and i want to go in the up other direction now i can go ahead and hit e again and just hold shift with this 15 degree angle snap and we can just continue so this is a really helpful technique and works really really great so you can see i can create a nice complex piping system just using this rotate snap and move okay all right and i want to cover one last way of creating these uh piping system okay and what i'll do is go ahead and bring back those original cylinders that we had and i will go ahead and duplicate these hide the originals and probably hide this one here all right so here we are we're with we have a 16 sided cylinder and what i want to do is just go ahead and you know reset my pivot here and move this over up here remember to reset your pivot you can just grab your tool settings and just simply hit reset and then we can we can keep going here so what i want to do is just kind of show you how to create a pipe extruding from one from this so where you don't have an arc rotation so instead what i want to do is go ahead and control middle mouse control middle mouse and grab my multi-cut tool so actually let me let me show that again a little bit slower shift right click multi-cut control middle mouse and there you go and you can just add these uh here and that adds them about the halfway point and what i want to do here is select these these faces like so and you can see i can grab about eight of these faces here and if i want this pipe to kind of come out i can do an offset so you can see i'm kind of even it doesn't matter where you are here so you want to make sure that you're nice and planar with the axes and we can do a shift right click and we can do an extrude now for this extrude instead of doing it with thickness i want to just give it an offset so i'm going to give it a little bit of an offset and then what i can do is hold shift right click and give this a circular rise now circularize is fantastic and it creates a perfect circle and if we take a look at this you want to make sure to well of course adjust some settings here now you want to set the alignment to surface average okay so you get something like this now we need to make sure to bring in this radial offset here and it's going to kind of scale it in nicely there and we can go ahead now and do an extrusion okay so you get something like so that's a little bit that's fairly clean and maybe just a nice even minus two now i can do a control e or shift right click extrude and just move this straight out and so now we get this nice pipe coming straight out there so circular rice is a really strong tool to use and it makes things perfect cylinders on curved surfaces now make sure of course to kind of space things out a little bit you can see that i'll need to move these out a bit here and a good way to do that is just turn on symmetry and in this case i want world x and we're gonna go ahead and just kind of move this uh like so all right so we get something like this and if i hold three on the keyboard we're looking pretty good and i can shift or i can just hold right click and assign a fong material so it's always going to be working with these high materials that gives you nice highlights then i can go ahead and give this a nice bevel so hold shift and bevel edge now in this case i do want to make sure that i well you can work with chamfer off uh or on either way it's fine but i'll go ahead and turn it off for now and this gives me some nice holding lines here okay and now we can just kind of finalize this method okay so i will go ahead and delete these faces here all right and so we kind of get this t uh pipe here which is really nice um really strong i've used those quite a bit for creating complex pipe systems so now what i want to show you is okay this is great and we can connect it to other piping systems but how do we finalize and detail this okay so what i want to do or what i can show you is if i go ahead and let's go ahead and give this maybe a little bit more detail so what i mean by that is let me go ahead and pause and add some more detail to this piece here okay so here we are and i have this uh this piece this t pipe extruding out and then just the standard uh curvature around here so you can get an idea of how to use this next set of uh techniques to detail final pipes right so what i want to do is go ahead and delete all the caps on on here so i'm actually going to go ahead and turn off my grid like so and delete these now before i do anything else i want to at this point uh go ahead and give this thickness so simply hitting ctrl e or shift right click extrude and move these inward okay now i'll go ahead and maybe give these maybe a minus point five and you can already see it's starting to work really well on these uh these caps here okay and what's even nicer is typically on these pipes they're going to be nice and smooth and they're going to offset on these normals okay so this works out really well then of course you can see that it's black and black faces indicate that the normals are reversed so we need to go to mesh display at the top and do a reverse okay so we have this now and then what we can do if we wanted to kind of give this some more detail is i can go ahead and double click these faces or edges shift right click or control right click two faces two faces then i can do shift period and grow the selection okay now what i actually want to do is do that to all these corner pieces here add some nice detail to this pipe so control right click two faces here we go and grow this selection like so then i can go ahead and control e extrude okay now i can go ahead and give this a little bit more thickness and now i'll go ahead and maybe give this a 0.5 and we can take a look at this on the side we can see that it's pretty good pretty planar um you can of course if you want go ahead and actually scale these in even more just so it's nice and perfectly flat and even so one little extra step just to give us some nice flat details to these pipes otherwise it may cause some artifacts but honestly either way it's fine if it wasn't perfectly flat i think you'll be uh it'll be fine i'll just make sure to set this to world just in case your object or pivot has some rotation on it in my case it did not so i can go ahead and scale these like so okay great so we have those all set up and now what we can do and you can see that inside it really worked pretty well here for uh moving these on the normal i can go ahead and select all these edges here and it kind of depends on how you want to do your bevels if you wanted to just do these bevels like so and then just tighten them up so you can select all your edges here like this and grab these and we can just add these as our holding line so you can see if i hold three just make sure i grab all of these for our holding lines and all i'm going to do is a simple bevel you can maybe if you wanted to extrude these edges in to give it some more thickness but i think right now you can get you get the idea um and if we do a nice bevel here you can see that's fairly small so if i go ahead and increase that a little bit more we can go ahead and move it now what i want to do is actually jump to our channel box editor turn off fraction and just type in a an offset here um maybe like point one or point you know something that's pretty tight maybe point one is fine here and depending on how tight you want this you can give this uh another segment uh entirely up to you uh then we can go to our edge mode hold shift right click and multi-cut and i can hold ctrl and middle mouse uh click to give these more holding lines and this is of course if you plan on subdividing sometimes just uh doing a simple bevel on a higher poly cylinder uh will work just fine but i do plan on subdividing this here so i want to make sure i add in some extra holding lines and i think i'll just add a couple more here so don't forget that you need to do the kind of the same thing on the inside so you could add those on the inside if you wanted to uh ins in some areas okay so i think right now this will be fine i won't worry too much about the ones running here but yeah so now what i can do is simply hit three on my keyboard turn on edge faces turn off edge faces and take a look and there you go you have a pretty detailed pipe with all sorts of bevels extrusions and what not happening so uh one last reminder is if you want to do something even more complex like maybe having them coming in at an angle or something like that i'd recommend looking at my boolean tutorial that i released last week or i can throw a link to that in this video and that'll be uh really helpful and with that in combination with this workflow there really shouldn't be anything that you can't you can't model at this point okay when it when it comes to pipes and booleans and hard surface objects okay so if i go ahead now and grab my piping system here you can kind of see that this is using uh basically the or the exact same technique that i just demonstrated okay so you can create an entire complex system and you can knock this out pretty pretty quick i mean i did this here in a simple matter of minutes i mean maybe maybe 10-15 minutes um and you know just to then finish that icing on the cake is to give that final detail uh here so as always i i hope this helped um i'll probably continue a few more videos here on hard surface modeling techniques or just modeling techniques in general hopefully help you guys out um from you know basically just sharing the knowledge that i've learned over the years so if you have any suggestions please drop it down below i have a running list of videos i plan on making over the next few weeks and next few months and as always appreciate any like and subscribes i'm almost at a thousand subscribers so that's pretty exciting a big thanks to everyone that's been following and continue to following continue to follow so as always appreciate it so everyone stay safe and i'll see you guys around bye

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 12,181

Keywords: 3D, modeling, 3d art, autodesk, maya, topology, edgeflow, hardsurface, hard, surface, tips, workflow, best, easy, subd, subdivision, sub-d, pipes, pipe, piping, thickness

Id: JVIEzFsJz2g

Length: 30min 2sec (1802 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021