Modeling in Maya - How to Model Tires

hey everyone today we're going to look at how to model a tire in maya i've been modeling vehicles for over the past 10 years and today i want to show you my favorite way to model a tire we will cover the best way to use reference how to use radial symmetry with duplicate special and instancing and how to model tread using quadra at the end i will also show you an easy way to model lug nuts and valve stems so make sure to stick around for that so with that let's get started alright so here we are in maya and the first thing that you're going to want to do is gather reference you can see here on my pref i have the reference of the porsche carrera wheel here and i have it from different angles and then i also have the specific tire that i want to model okay now you can get all that information almost always from the side wall you can see that this is a good year eagle f1 tire and actually right here the 305 30 r21 that's the top the size of the tire now in this specific instance the rear wheel is wider than the front wheel so we're going to work with uh just uh one of those wheels all right now that information is broken down here you can see that in this case we're going to do a 245 wheel that's the width in millimeters and then this is the percentage of the sidewall height and then the r 16 here is just the diameter of the rim so we have a 21 inch wheel and this is going to have a width of 245. now just a quick tip when you're searching is to just search for the tire itself so you can get better reference okay because you can see i've gone into maya or excuse me photoshop here and i've broken down the reference in the front view and the side view and i've went ahead and counted tread now for this specific example i'm going to be using 72 pieces of tread for radial symmetry just because that divides into 360 by five much cleaner and then you can see that i am visualizing the pattern of the tread that i'm going to be modeling so i kind of just take this front view here and then i go ahead and just do a quick and dirty all right here are the repeatable patterns that i'm going to be working with and it's pretty close it doesn't have to be 100 perfect but it just helps me plan and visualize and get ready for doing all this work in maya so i'll go ahead and hide this tire tread and now we can start modeling the tire so like i said let's go ahead and begin by creating the cylinder or the main body of the the tire so i'm going to go ahead and shift right click to create that cylinder and i'm going to go ahead and increase this radius quite a bit now 21 inch wheel comes out to a radius or a diameter of 53.34 i'm just going to type in 26.67 centimeters as of the radius uh and then the height here remember is the width of the wheel okay now if you're not modeling based off specific dimensions that's no problem you can just simply use reference here so you can see that i have the reference here so don't feel like you have to have all the specific numbers uh down it just helps all right and now that we got that the height remember is 245 millimeters i'm going to just do 24.5 since we're working in centimeters and there you go it pops right in to about the width of the uh rim that we have here all right now that we got the width all set up i want to update the subdivision access since if we go back to my photoshop you can see that remember i said that i'm going to be working without 72 instead of 70. so i'm going to type in 72 subdivisions all right and this is just going to kind of help it keep it nice and easy clean and then what i want to do is go ahead now and shift click and grab all these faces here and i want to go ahead now and just create the sidewall i'm not going to be using specific dimensions i'm just going to use my reference here so i'm going to hit uh control e for extrude and just move this out so we're going to want to get we want to leave a little bit of room here for the tread since we're going to be extruding out so about right here about four four and a half should give us what we need and we can adjust that as needed okay the next thing i want to do is just grab these faces here and we can just straight up delete them okay then we want to grab these inner edges here and we're just going to scale these down i'm going to use just the the x and z plane and just scale these in just a little bit so it kind of gets right in on the wheel okay and it's going to be a little bit different between each sides typically which isn't a big deal so i'll go ahead and do that now that we have that we're looking pretty good and we can see that now we want to go ahead and really round this out and if we look at again our reference we can see that there it's routed out now it's we can't use this reference for a one to one here because we're working in orthographic view from the front view but we can use it for our tread pattern and i'll show you what i mean so let's go ahead and actually just load that in so i want to go to my front camera i want to go to view image plane import image here and then i want to find that reference here and it's going to be this eagle f1 asymmetric and i'll go ahead and hit ok all right then i go ahead since i know that this is roughly the right size from the front i'll go ahead and just kind of scale it up here now again you can see that there's a bit of a distortion because we're not using an orthographic camera which is fine so what we're going to want to do here now is go ahead now and use multi-cut and control right and middle mouse drag now remember i hold shift right click in sub-object mode shift right-click and i can quickly grab that tool or you can go to the modeling toolkit here on the right and then you can select the tool from here whichever one you prefer keep in mind i am using the workspace modeling standard okay now just to make sure that this reference image doesn't get in our way you can select it i'm going to actually throw it in my rough folder here go to attribute editor here so you can hit uh this or control a and then what i want to do is go to image plane and i want to do looking through camera so that makes sure that it's only showing through the camera that that i want so if i go ahead now you can see it still shows up here in the front view but not in our perspective view all right so what i want to do now is add in another multi-cut so i'll grab my multi-cut tool and i'll control middle mouse so it'll put it right in the middle there which is good which is what i want and then i'm going to do that again right along this side wall here now we can be working with symmetry too that's fine but this is basically all i'm going to be doing with this tread here or with this tire all right now that we have that i'm going to grab my move tool and one of my favorite things to do is grab my move tool w hold ctrl and middle mouse drag and look at that we can start to get this nice moving on the normal here for the tire tread all right so that's going to help you can kind of see that it basically stays flat here on the main part of the tread and then it starts to angle down and then we get more of that curvature here okay so we get something like this um and you can kind of play with this this pattern here but i think for right now i'm going to probably grab these ones here these edges right in the middle um i am going to grab actually let's grab our multi-cut tool and add an edge right above the rim because again if you look at our reference a lot of people miss this detail but you can see that there's this lip here on our reference okay uh this lip that is almost almost always on every single tire so you want to make sure that you're not missing that and that's a big a big tell um and something that you always want to include in your wheel references okay so i'll go ahead and add that on the other side and i'll go ahead grab these faces like so and i will do an ctrl e or shift right click and just do an extrude face i'm gonna just move these in here a little bit so there's that lip that we were looking for and we can do maybe minus .35 something like that and what i want to do is actually delete these bottom faces here okay i am using alt x for x-ray um i that is a custom script you can see that in one of my other tutorials where i show you some modeling tips to quickly move around so make sure to check that out if you want to see how i'm using x-ray otherwise you can just use this button up here all right so so far so good we're getting kind of the base of the the tire here now we want to get into kind of the core of the modeling which is modeling the uh tire tread okay so the way that we want to do this i recommend is you work with this as your live surface all right if you haven't used that before just select the tire go up here to this magnet and do make selected object live surface now we can start using quadra so if i grab my quad draw tool here now i can start modeling the piece of the tread now we can see that this tread here goes roughly about maybe about halfway or maybe 40 down the sidewall so we want to make sure to keep that in mind as we're modeling it and then we're going to continue to model these patterns and then it's going to be kind of uh a different uh pattern on the other side so let's just start like this where i'm gonna actually do it right about here on the midway i think that'll be a good point a good point of reference and i'm gonna start with just modeling this tread pattern and again it's not going to be a one to one but it's at least going to let me know what i need to do to make this symmetry so what you need to do if you haven't used quad draw before is just left click four times to draw four vertices hold shift to left click and there you go i'm not going to go into crazy amount of quad draw here but if you're interested check out all the keyboard mouse shortcuts but those are basically the main ones that i'm going to be using along with tab and if you hold tab and drag you can see that it just extrudes an edge out okay what i am going to do for the first sake of simplicity is i do want to hide my rim so all i'm now looking at is the tire tread so i will select my faces and let's go back to quattro and now we can see this clear as day alright so i want to make sure i'm also lined up with the base mesh here so we can see i'm going to be working on this pattern that i have here all right and i'm going to be going here and doing the next set of faces okay there we go something like that and we're going to keep going here to the rest of these faces right now if you want to get these more or better aligned you can for sure but i'll show you how to adjust these uh in just a moment okay so you can see i'm just making my way now this one's interesting because it's just a straight line there's no debits but we essentially are going to do the same thing and do a cut now normally you'll have issues if you try to do this too close to another face so just simply hit left or tab hold tab left click and there you go you can just drop a face on there all right so i'll go ahead now and create this tread pattern here and then we're going to create this last one which i'll go ahead and do so like this and you can see this one has a little bit more curvature like so okay so we're just continuing on actually i'm gonna just tab left click to drop that face and we got this here and we're just gonna move these vertices into position remember i'm using the tire edge flow as the guide and then i'm dropping these faces here okay remember don't get too caught up with the differences in distortion here not a big deal and we're going to fix that this is it right this is the pattern that i have right here as you can see and then now you can see i duplicated it and now we're going to use duplic or radial symmetry with duplicate special to to get this okay now you can of course if you want to model some extra detail but i'm going to keep this fairly simple all right so here we are so we have our thread here now i'm going to go ahead and turn off make selected live objects and what we're going to do here is use duplicate special so with this tread selected make sure just in case that your pivot is the origin keep in mind that i am using the center zero zero zero as my world origin uh and my main point of symmetry so in case you're modeling this off of the existing existing vehicle and you're not at the zero zero zero you're going to have to adjust it make sure that that pivot point is the center of this wheel which is what my zero zero zero is so let's go ahead now and select the tread we're going to go to modify uh sorry actually edit and duplicate special duplicate special i'm going to go ahead and hit the dialog window right here you can see that i actually have this this is what duplicate special is then by default if i reset settings you can see it's set to copy i'm going to set this to instance okay then i'm going to use make sure that i use 360 degrees right so if you can see we have 72 pieces of tread so i'm going to do 360 degrees divided by 72 which gives us 5. so i want this to rotate 5 degrees and i want this to rotate or 72 versions of these so in not including this 71. with the original that's 72 and once i have that instance the right amount and we are using the z-axis here or x y z when we rotate just to verify before we go any further you can see that it's rotating on the z so we go ahead and hit apply there you go and then now we have the copy of our tread here okay so what you're going to notice is it doesn't exactly line up all the way at the end here which is no big deal so this is where instancing or the power of instancing comes back into play what i'm actually going to do is select the object our tire turn on make live again and go back to our original um surface here and i'm going to go ahead now and use this here you can see kind of what's happening it's kind of overlapping a bit so i'm going to go back to our modeling toolkit and this is my favorite part is with instancing and with quad draw look at that we can start to align this and get this to look exactly how we want it with all the correct spacing that we want right so we're just adjusting like so and then we're going to move this down we'll get that space if this is overlapping then we'll just create more space here like so this one is basically going to be lined up exactly because we're going to merge these at the end and we're going to go ahead and do this trick like that and look at that it's updating throughout the entire set of tread here this is my favorite part there we go okay now keep in mind you want to always be looking at your reference so if i pull up my purif again take a look at what we got okay and you can see kind of how our tread is modeled and how it looks and we're going to keep this as our reference here on the side all right and you can see that we want a good a good noticeable amount of gap now what i also recommend is just to go ahead and kind of scale it so these edges become planar like so so it becomes nice and straight i'm just selecting each one of these edges and scaling in the x-axis completely straighten them out all right something like so and we can actually do this in the opposite direction maybe this one yeah there we go uh and the end is y and then we'll continue to do these all in the uh z the x-axis okay oh sorry i said x-axis uh meant to see well i guess it's set to object you can always set it back to world and get that to be based off the x original xyz and not local all right so there we go we're setting this here and we can keep that to world and there we go now we want to make sure if we check our reference here from the front i'll turn off the grid and the nice thing is you don't need the original model the original piece you can use any piece on here to adjust accordingly okay so we can kind of see uh now we're going to have to extrude to get this going here and what i want to do is move this up just a little bit and we're going to want to actually extrude this out all right so i think this is good enough i think you get the idea as far as how to create the pattern using quad draw now go ahead and select one of these pieces and shift right click and let's go ahead and do an extrude so i can go ahead and do oh i want to click off of this actually turn off make live so we're about good done with that and then shift right click extrude all right and boom look at that we got our tread right now we're gonna have to obviously do some adjustments here uh but i basically wanna extrude it to right roughly about that you know 1.5 1.3 ish um maybe 1.25 right right in the middle i think this is good enough here okay so that's looking good there and i think you may be wondering well why don't you just model the tread into this original base mesh you a hundred percent can but i'm gonna tell you right now um that's not necessary honestly all that's gonna do is over complicate your geometry and when this thing is modeled you can cl see clear separations between tread between sidewall and i've been doing again renderings for for quite a while and we always just keep the treads separate from the the base sidewall or the donut of the wheel and there's has been no benefits at least on our end when rendering to to have to do that to keep it complicated if you wanted to you can just apply the same technique just all with one combined mesh okay so what i'm going to do now is just kind of hold ctrl shift middle mouse drag this and we're going to bring this down here and i'm going to bring hold ctrl middle mouse i'm just going to move this on the normal here and you can kind of see what what we're doing here right so again if you kind of look at it from this uh this front view here you can make your adjustments um there and just making sure that we kind of have this nice curvature and fall off that goes uh down right we don't want it to be because this is what it looked like before and here's where we're at now all right so just kind of a nice gradual move on the normal and bring this down control middle mouse slide okay so here's where we're at and i think i'm not going to spend too much time here but you get the overall overall idea i'll just kind of clean these edges up here something like that and you can see it's matched up to our original surface here right uh so what i then want to do is actually go into face mode and delete these uh right by smooth preview i actually want to delete the back sides the original faces here like so now what i actually do recommend is if you're working in experimenting go ahead and just take this tread and duplicate it and and save it just in case you want to come back and make some modifications okay so again we're just kind of going back and i'm going to delete these faces on the back side delete and then what i want to do is go ahead now and add my holding lines okay so i'm going to add these holding lines like this and you can see them adding on all of my mesh here and we get something like so all right um be careful not to add them here right we don't want that that's supposed to smooth out pretty nicely and we'll just add more holding lines here and we're just continuing to to do that on the rest of the mesh and with instancing again we're saving a tremendous amount of time and being very very efficient now here remember this connects with this here so i'm actually not going to do that yet until after i combine it because what i want to do is delete these faces on the inside right because again we look at our reference you can see that it's one solid piece like so and delete that and now you can actually hold select move and vertex snap and look at that we can snap these so they're basically all perfectly in the same position and when we go ahead to merge this there won't be won't be any issues and we've got to make sure we delete this i'm just toggling three for smooth preview alright so continuing on here we have this like so and we're just gonna go ahead and finish this off all right i think that's good enough now hit smooth preview and take a look at our tread right and we'll fix this one here in a second all right so now that we got that i would say our tread is pretty much all good to go we now want to bring back our rim okay and we want to finish detailing the rim now remember based off our reference you can see that we have this nice bead that runs across here and you can see that in our reference a little bit hard to see that in that one actually here we go there's a high res one this bead that goes across you typically find that in almost all uh tires so i'll go ahead now back to multicut and right it's always right where that tread uh ends up okay so i'm to go ahead and add that and right here this should be good enough and what i'm going to do is just kind of grab these faces and just kind of scale them so it's a little bit more flat and then i'll do the same thing on this side i'm scaling them in the z so flattens it out so look at the difference between here and here great then i'll go ahead and grab that face again for that bead and hit the extrude face and just move these out here a little bit just like so this is a really subtle detail and maybe even 0.1 extrude something like that all right then we're going to want to go ahead now and multi-cut shift right click and control middle mouse right in the middle here and right in the middle and this is going to give us that nice edge to control the surface and roundness from the side view so if i go ahead now and do that move it like so and i think that's good there and we can maybe move this edge back here i think you get the idea we're just kind of moving and manipulating these edges like so now back to our multi-cut and we're going to add holding lines so you can see where i'm adding them i'll isolate this with ctrl 1 grab multi-cut and then just i will start inserting the edge loops basically right around here to hold this form and then now if i hit 3 take a look at that we got this nice bead that kind of runs around and we're going to want to add it on the other side and it's not perfectly symmetrical which is why i'm not using symmetry but you probably can to get away with it and then adjust it but really really easy modeling functions and then i'm just going to add some holding lines here you can see i'm adding this like so so we get that kind of divot here and you can see kind of what what that does is that goes around the lip of the wheel like so all right and if we wanted to you know you can make sure that matches more closely and i'll grow my selection with a control period and i'll actually deselect this and move these back just a hair all right so we're getting into just the final detailing here like so and it goes right around it so it doesn't clip the tire okay so you get something like this which looks good smooth preview the tire good all right and that's looking pretty nice just got to finish this part out here where we have this coming off on the tread and i'll just make sure to move that accordingly there we go and add the holding lines all there we go so that's it for the most part uh now we can of course bring this down a little bit more so it's uh there isn't like this hard inset remember it is much more subtle so you can bring that down and i'll bring this like so uh what i'll actually do is remove these two edges like this and bring these vertices here and really shorten that lip here we might even delete this one too control backspace then it's just a simple matter of fact of just adding those back okay and you get something like this and if it's clipping a little bit no big deal you can just move that out like so all right and then you get a really really nice looking tread and we can make sure to bring these all down just a little bit so there's no they're not floating and here we go last bit here and i can show you how to kind of wrap this up and maybe deselect that one i'll come back for these ones and just move these down so they start to intersect on the original model okay something like this all right so just a little bit of cleanup there okay and you can do the same thing to that lip on this side but i think you guys get it um all right and what i would typically do here is save this so i would save this and then save again as an iteration so control alt s so that saves that work iteration because now i can always come back and let's say if i wanted to do something or you know change this in in any way i can later but if i'm happy with what i got now this is good all right and what i can do is go ahead now and just combine all of all the tire tread all right now because these are instances you have to go to modify oh wait actually delete history freeze transforms or no freeze transforms don't work because instances but delete history modify and then go to convert and then do instance to object instance the object great now we can combine these because they're all objects and you can shift right click combine and i'll control one isolate now what i can do is grab these faces here and give a bigger a little bit bigger view here okay make sure i only have those and control right click and uh go to vertices and then shift right click merge vertices and go to merge vertices boom and use something like .03 uh just to make sure to grab those last bits of edges and if you hold three right that merged fine now we can add in our holding lines boom boom and then just everything's going to look good all right control 1 exit isolate mode there you go okay so things are looking good there oops we missed one right here oh i didn't even combine that so i missed that combine that was my fault so there's double checking and combine i will have to redo this part here okay and then i fix that i'll go ahead and just add the holding lines again all right so there we are with the tread um oh i guess one tip i would recommend is to make sure to unwrap the tread before you delete or before you combine that way you have them unwrapped but otherwise that was it for that and we have this all set up and we have our tire tread and there we go that is essentially how i do uh complicated complex tire treads with the side walls and it's way easier to unwrap this way way easier to texture and you just get uh overall really really good um high quality tie tread all right now the last thing i wanted to quickly show you is how to get kind of complex lug nuts so what you're going to want to do create a cylinder now if you can take a look at the reference here you can see that this is a six-sided cylinder and then it starts with six hard edges and then gets into uh smooth edges so what i typically do you can see i have this here is i would start with um these say says 60 but uh that's five so we have a 12-sided cylinder here so if i go to this cylinder i'm going to move this out here like so rotate this 90 degrees and create a 12-sided cylinder okay so this is going to be for the smooth side which is great and uh we'll keep it with the radius of one and we can see actually i'd want to bump that up maybe a radius of you know 1.4 ish okay and set this back here onto zero and the zero y all right so now that i have this what i can do is go ahead and extrude control e or shift right click and do a a quick offset okay so we're gonna do this part here and this is the part that we have to flatten out right so what i want to do is go ahead now and extrude this out like so and you can kind of see what i mean here so i'm going to do now what i'm going to do now is essentially just select every other right and what make sure is grab symmetry for this one and do it with world x okay so we grab every other edge like so and if we look at a reference we got a flat bottom flat top and out on the corner the bottom top okay so i'll do other all right and if i control backspace this and kind of see what happens and you want to make sure to continue that down like so all right and what i actually want to do before i do that is add an edge right here on the middle okay that's going to stop this from continuing on here all right so like i said i'll do this these sets of edges like so all right control backspace there you go that is essentially the lug nut shape that we're looking for and then i can grab these right here right and then this is the one that kind of extrudes in but before i do that right we want this to subdivide we're creating this as a subd model we want to make sure now to take this and to cut this and get a nice corner so what i'm going to do is extrude this and offset it a little bit so maybe 0.2 is fine then i'm going to add an edge right here okay this edge on a flat surface is exactly what i need to create this hard crease here so what do i mean i'm going to go ahead now and connect these like so and we're just going to cut this and take a look at that and then this is going to give us that nice transition to go from nice circular geometry to nice hard geometry now the good thing is because this is on a flat surface a triangles are perfectly fine okay so triangles are perfectly fine here like so and we're just going to finish cutting this there you go all right so what i mean is this edge right here is holding all of these triangles and looks it will work completely fine and because they're not on the edge it's not going to cause any artifacting so i move that and then i will offset this a little bit something like so now comes everyone's favorite part which is adding the holding lines holding line right there and then we're going to add one right here add one right here okay so if you go ahead and smooth preview you get something like this okay and we can add one there as well that's how you quickly create a lock knob now what you can do is take this edge here and scale that down a little bit so that kind of is a little bit more tighter or what i actually probably recommend is just going in here and beveling this edge so i'm going to remove this one and we got this edge here if i go ahead and do a bevel and turn on chamfer let's see what chamfer does there you go and we may want to tighten that up a little bit and chamfer is going to see if you see the difference here it's going to make sure that it keeps that right angle which is what we want in this case go all right um oops looks like i missed this but we definitely want to make sure just to go in and add these uh this part here and as usual on a hard surface object we'll make sure to add a fong material i would say probably funk one oh that would be fun too all right anyways i just so we can kind of see it a little bit lighter and adding these nice holding lines there you go so look at that circular hexagonal circular and you get a perfectly nice luck nut and if you want you can do an extrusion back here um but that is essentially how i created these lug nuts here okay so i hopefully that was helpful and literally for this part here all i did was take the hexagonal shape like this all right and i will grow selection until right about there and delete those and i will extrude uh extrude again but this time i will merge the vertices to the center so shift right click merge merge to center move this out a little bit actually i want to do this again ctrl e offset that a little bit move this out and there you go that's it i mean the valve set is basically the um in this case the lug nut just with an extrusions out instead of inward and then i can do this last bit here where i do a really small maybe 0.1 offset here point one and just move that in like that right and you can get some something that looks like this this little dimple uh there they we see uh in the reference right mine is a little bit too big but uh you you get the idea that's exactly how you would do that uh there i'll just hide that but okay all right i hope that was helpful these are a lot of the tips and tricks that i use for modeling wheels lug nuts valve stems tire tread let me bring that lovely tire that we have here that we originally modeled and yeah i'm really happy how this all came out and this was quick and efficient probably you know just a couple hours with the work and a little cleanup and uh you can get a nice high res high detailed wheel for your cg render so if you guys found that helpful and enjoyed the tips and tricks and anything or if you hey if you even have any recommendations um throw it down at the bottom below and this wraps up my modeling wheels so uh series mini series so if you guys have something for the next set of tutorials i'm all ears let me know down below and we can go go from there thanks again everyone and stay safe

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 24,065

Keywords: 3D, modeling, 3d art, autodesk, maya, topology, edgeflow, hardsurface, hard, surface, workflow, wheel, rim, automotive, car, vehicle, radial, symmetry, tire, tread, sidewall, lugnuts, lug, nuts

Id: VwWGP5RHz7E

Length: 42min 7sec (2527 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MexGame]

EPIC

[u/Sergartz]

Amazing!