Perfect 90 degree cylinders in Maya LT

everyone what is going on today I just wanted to make this video as a bit of a follow-up to another video I made a couple of years ago about making pipes that are perfectly in line with the grid the method that I went over in that video I'll actually cover it again here with this first example but while it does what you want it to and it's actually very solid and I think there's still use cases for it I've actually been discovering a few more methods that are just as viable if not more viable maybe a little bit quicker to do sometimes and so I just wanted to cover these three examples here that I know at least I'm sure there's still millions of other ways to do it because my is a complicated tool with a lot of things that you can do and everyone kind of has their own way of doing things but I just thought I would show you some new tools that I've been learning because that is how I best learn to the program as a whole was just seeing people do a bunch of different ways then I could then pick and choose how I wanted to use those tools when I was creating the things that I was modeling so we'll start here with the first one basically to exactly recap what I did in the last one actually a little bit differently I mean last time what I did is I beveled central edge but I'm gonna use the insert edge loop tool here and we'll say we're gonna put eight divisions along here because we're gonna be using the bend modifier and you're going to need some geometry in order to obviously have that work so the goal we're trying to do is say we want a 90-degree Bend pipe and we want it to be able to be in line with the grid so that the central point is always going to be in line I have my grid set currently to having grid lines every 50 so this is a hundred meter one hundred centimeter long pipe and this is a hundred centimeter long pipe and we want it to be able to have a perfect 90-degree Bend that would still leave it being modular so that if you were building a level out and unreal or some other application that it'd be really easy to pick and choose where you want to place these things around and they should snap together as long as you're in your other program using a similar grid to snap to okay so we're gonna go ahead and select our bend modifier here of all preliminary things I'm going to set this to 90 that the low bound is zero and the high bound to two and then I have angle snapping from my rotation set to absolute 15 degrees which is nice you can find that in the tool settings for the rotation tool or you can hold down J and that will toggle so for example because mine is on if I hit hold down J it actually turns it off temporarily so if I ever was trying to free rotate something I could do that in this case I don't want to do that we're actually gonna flip this guy just because it looks like the low end is on the wrong side perfect going to move what's happening who did this what is happening there is okay change the curvature to 45 the low bound to zero and the high bound to two I believe and then we're gonna go ahead and reorient our bend modifier so that it's bending the correct way we want it to and then actually we want to snap the modifier to the very beginning of the pipe so that's where we want the beginning of our transition to start now great we can see that we have the ninety degrees but it's of course not inline with the grid so then what you're gonna do is you're gonna hit D to edit the pivot go ahead and click this thing hold down V and then hover over hold down V and then middle mouse click and drag over that so that it snaps within that line go ahead and hit W again to go back to our translate tool continue to hold V and then click and drag to line it up with that edge there so that's the same thing I showed in the last video there but now we're gonna look at a couple of different examples or a couple more examples the first one is actually going to be a lot easier and maybe totally passable for what you want to do you can have your two pieces like this it's the same setup that I started with over here they're both 100 centimeters and they are separated by 50 in either direction I'll snap to the grid and what not what I'm going to do is I'm gonna select each of these faces go to the bridge face is a thing which is shift right click to open up the hotbox and get there and you can see that obviously it creates a weird straight line but if you change the curve type to blend and then we'll set the divisions to something like 8 to have something similar to what we did over here and you can see obviously that did that did amazing and actually I think that that's probably the preferred method for me in most use cases you can see that it does create a slightly different kind of bend then in our original example so you might be looking for something different and might like how that works better so there's another option for you the final option I'm going to talk about is actually a new tool recently I just learned about called the wedge tool which is really fantastic you can use for a lot of different things for example if you go ahead and hold down right click and go to multi which lets you select vertices faces and edges all at the same time you select a face and then select an edge for example and then you're gonna go shift right click wedge face you can see that it creates a perfect wedge from the face down to that angle and you can change the divisions you can change the angle this is kind of nice if you like one a perfect 45 degree angle or a perfect 30 degree angle or perfect other kind of angle like it's it's nice and mathematical and you can set it like that which is awesome but for our use today we're gonna actually be we're gonna be able to use the wedge tool to get a perfect bend that would be in line with like a cylinder for example these both I think do not actually line up well with a cylinder you can see that like the bend is not actually following the smoothness of a cylinder and I think that you'll see the same thing for you over here it's closed no cigar it's it's close but even if you want to get this way you have to do the whole convoluted thing over there okay so enough trying to explain it whatever what we're gonna do is go ahead and select this first guy I'm gonna hit right click hold down right click and go to multi I'm gonna select the face here and then I'm gonna shift right click while hovering over sorry just just right-click and while you're hovering over another mesh and then it'll also put that into a multi then I'm gonna shift right click on this edge there which is the edge that I want to end up on but actually the wedge tool is based on the centralization of the pivot point you can see that it's kind of weird right here so actually I'll show you what happens here it always wants to go the wrong direction for some reason so you just change that to a negative but you get this weird Bend so it like obviously that's not what you want unless it is no no judge but if that's not what you're looking for then what you actually want to do is have like I said select the face select that edge you can see the pivot point is not there so if you select this opposite side it now should be centered because these edges are both equidistant from your face then we'll go to the wedge tool again set this to 90 and now you can see that that is perfectly in line with the with the cylinder and you can also still do the 8 divisions so let's actually compare this I'm curious I think that the method that I showed off in the last video doing this will probably get you the same results just with a much slower method and so I think this is probably my preferred method for creating a cylinder that's in line with the yeah you can see here it does look like the the way that when I did the insert edgeloop tool' on that original bended this new pipe that we ended up bending we have some different placement of those different subdivisions so that's not quite in line but you can see that it is the same Bend so they do end up with the same result but obviously with the much faster method so now just to show you how quick it is I did want to do this from scratch creating things out so say I want the radius of my pipes to be 50 we're gonna go ahead and hit deed it and edit the snap I'm holding down shift to James just the position holding down X now snap it to the grid I'm gonna select this face again hold down X to snap to grid and move it to here so that should be a hundred meters or hundred centimeters um and then I'm gonna ctrl D to duplicate rotate it 90 degrees move it out there and move it out there okay so we have our two pipes where we want the bend to begin and end we're gonna create another cylinder that's also a radius of 50 I'm going to rotate it so it's facing upwards perfect and now what we want to do is I'm going to select that edge there and we are gonna translate it there and translate it there we want it to I'm sorry no no no select that guy and then move it to that think of it and the reason we're doing that is because then we have just this strip here that's going to kind of be the definition of our curve so now we do the same thing we had to do before right-click and go to multi select this face I'm going to hover over this and do multi again don't want those I'm gonna select that edge and then that edge to centralize the pivot oh hold down right click wedge tool invert and you have a perfect 90 you can have the divisions it's wonderful could see now that yeah it's perfectly in line we did it we're geniuses so that's that's that it was an exciting tool just recently discovered and I was excited to share that like I said I do think those other options are viable and everything has its own use case it's just a matter of figuring out what works best for your workflow and what you like to do and what feels comfortable to use so hopefully those three different methods will help you in some way and I hope you have a great day thanks for popping in and listening

Channel: Braytonks3D

Views: 8,323

Rating: 4.9510202 out of 5

Keywords: maya, LT, modular, pipes, tips and tricks, perfect, cylinder, game art, 3d, modeling, hard surface, tools, wedge, bridge, bend, deformers, cylinders, Autodesk, 3ds Max

Id: 7pRqV2vStLw

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/joe8349]

Nice video.

[u/IntergalacticTRex]

Thanks!

[u/pospicek]

Perfect, thanks for this! Maya has much secrets, we need to find them all :)

[u/CartoonBeardy]

As someone who has to do a lot of pipework on models on a daily basis those tips are great... I usually use the first method with the bend deformer and on occasion extrude a disc along complex paths but that second method with the bridge and the third method with the wedge tool were new to me so thanks for the share.

[u/Manhattanbat]

Saved the video for when I need it. Thanks!