Retopology for Beginners in Maya

[Music] hey guys heading in Morton from flip normals here in this tutorial we're gonna check out how to read apologize something in Maya this is not going to be in terms of the deep principles of topology is purely gonna be what tools to use how do you get started with route apology and just some general good practices from doing it so we use in Maya 2018 for this this is gonna work for pretty much all older versions as well for it so the first thing we got to do is we're gonna have a model in here this comes straight from ZBrush this has just been decimated from ZBrush so that we we retain all the details but a pull account as well very first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna make this life this means that geometry will snap to this surface so first we just select it then we go all the way up here and you see to the right here you have a button and a little magnet here and this will make it live it's no longer selectable and a got a little message here saying this object is now live this means all all geometry will now snaps to this you can no longer select it there's nothing you can do to it anymore except when you make new geometry or like new planes or something it'll stick to this mesh yeah so if you do want to select it for for whatever reason you can do this through the outliner only so the tool we're gonna be using now is the quad draw tool you can find this up here so this is where we have the general modeling toolkit here so now you can see that something has been constrained to it here we have a live surface so the Quadro tool is Alwyn on bottom right here it's a pretty handy tool and it's been in mind for free versions when they when they acquired the modeling toolkit here modeling Maya sped up like ten times I think was next before yeah I think so and it just got so much better yeah a Quadro is is easily one of the best additions to the modeling toolkit in Maya for like for a long time I think it's it's a very very powerful tool yeah a little pro tip with this general toolkit here on the bottom here you can find all the hotkeys for for all the various tools here so if you're in doubt about the hotkeys we will cover in this tutorial you can always just go to the bottom here and you can see them if you go to connect it this is going to change or if you go to to multi-cut you can see that you get different hotkeys here so let's talk about quad draw this is hide this one so the moment you activate this and you just start clicking on a model you can see that you get points here these points are now snapped to the model and this is the essentially the base for your apology if you hit the shift key now you can now make polygons between these you can also just gonna do this and you can just drag this in one go and this is essentially how we get started all forms of rate apology here if you use just a left mouse button on the geometry crater now you can just move it around you can move it around on if you had to face it's gonna move face edge edge and you guessed it divert it's gonna move third I guess I mean one of the nice things about this versus sort of say old school read topology tools sometimes they wouldn't be live on the surface and you would have some sort of adjusted to it this just no matter what you do if you drag along you drag the face along the the mesh it'll just snap to it perfectly yeah yeah it's a very very useful tool here so if you want to if you want to keep working on this now if you want to add more topology you can always just add more points and then you can hold on the shift key and you can just click here but this gets a bit cumbersome sometimes and it's not the ideal process it just takes a bit of time to do this though this is this I often start with this if you want to add new geometry now you can hold on the tab key and you can just drag on an edge here just to extend the edge out this is a very useful tool and you can you see it it automatically like here it automatically snaps to this point here if you want to drag it a whole loop of this you can hold on tab key and middle mouse button and I was gonna drag up the entire loop yeah this is super useful if you're doing an arm so you don't want it you know you don't want to have to draw around the entire arm all the time just do one loop around the entire arm they can just drag out and insert some some more loops yes so let's say you want to do this entire pack here you can just hold on the tab key and you can just drag it in and you can just move it and you can just keep extending this out so pretty nice stuff if you want to delete something if you hold on the ctrl + shift key you can now see you get a little X here and whatever is mark now if you just just mark with your regular of cursor or tablet it's gonna delete all of that if you do the same thing ctrl shift and you hold and hover over an edge here it's gonna delete the entire edge loop super useful stuff if you hold on the ctrl key and you just hover over some polish here some edges you're gonna see that you can insert the loop and this snaps automatically to it so you can see that it conforms perfectly to this so the way I'm Rita pologize anomaly is I just keep it very low res and then I am like if your topologies like this I just make sure that it's super Lee even spaced like this and then we can add more loops because then the next loop is going to be super clean this is gonna be super clean and all that if your loop is if this is your geometry super nice and you add a loop you're gonna see that everything becomes messy so the cleaner or your bases the cleaner everything will be down the line that's very nice thank you yeah one thing that can help you sort this out like I say you've been read to pologize you just all over the places you can just smooth out your mesh at the same time just you know to get a little bit of a to help you so you don't have to manually move each vert yeah so let's say this was a lot heavier than this like you obviously not gonna be able to just do this like that it's just not helpful so what you can do if you're on a shift key you can see now it's it's just relax here so by default you're just gonna paint across this and it's pretty handy but it's bit annoying that you have to move across all points here but if you hit the B key you get a soft selection if you hold on a B and just drag left to right up or down it's going to just give you a radius for this so now you can hold down the shift key and you can it's just gonna smooth out whatever you have here so nice it is really a nice - it's really handy if you if you just hover on the on the regular polish here it's gonna smooth the internals so you can see here that it the border edges are locked but if you hold on a shift key and you smooth them on the borders it's gonna smooth border edges here this is due to the setting here called auto lock you can also change this to all verts that means that everything is going to be smooth when you do this but then everything shrinks a little so sometimes you don't want this because everything this goes a bit crazy here so if you set this to auto lock you might have more control there's now we can smooth the internals and then you can smooth them the external border I just like this it's pretty handy stuff you can see now that soft select is also currently on this is not your smoothing if you want to move stuff around this will totally works with soft selection like this so this is an incredibly handy way of doing it I didn't know about the soft select thing for a long time so I just moved to vert by Bert it was really nice yeah yeah that's gonna take some time so you can also use the Quadro tool let's say you're doing some kind of digital double or if you have a mesh which you need to conform to something else you can totally do this and you can just use you can just use the move tool here or you can just move the points around and just shift shift paint or shift drag just to to conform the points to the model below it so this is incredibly handy but it can also be really annoying if you do let's say you're moving this and it you can see it snaps automatic like this super handy that it snaps automatically but let's say you want to preserve the vert order of this like you don't you don't want the actual model to change you can go here and you can just hit auto weld so if you disable this you can see that it's not going to it's not going to snap together but for most of the time if you're starting out with the reat apology and you don't have a haven't already completed mess you probably want to keep water well yes yes like it's a really cool tool Quadra not just for read apology but like an excess if you're doing a digital or you need a mesh that we need to conform to another mesh yeah you can do this as well yeah so we won't get too much into detail here in terms of like actual like good edge flow and all that but we'll just generally just show you how we would approach a general reader poll to hear like we all recovered the entire tool here now like there are very few additional options here like it's it can do they can't do a whole lot it can do it can you can add topology to it but it's not a very advanced tool in that regard I guess that's not you don't really want an advanced read the polity tool you want it to be kind of simple yeah because it just needs to do one thing really well it takes you a few minutes to learn this and then that's it but the way I'm starting to actually retail for this kind stuff would be big surfaces don't start small I've seen people start doing this or you also protip speaking of doing small if you hold on there's a tab key you can download on strips like this it's pretty handy stuff I never do this yeah never I've never done this is it like the second time gliding elections or not because I want to start off broad because you start off broad it's a sucker we're talking about in our sculpting videos as well you want to start from the general to specific it's a lot easier to change the edge flow if you're starting off with big strokes yeah what's important in the beginning is just your loops it's not necessarily details it's not you know you get the nipple in there doesn't matter yeah I've seen people I mean even in production starting they're going super granular and you're starting actually working on this you really want to just work on the big shapes the problem with that is in one part it's gonna take you way longer to reach apologize and it's gonna be much harder to change yeah further down the line if you have any changes you want to do let's say you mess up how you did the shoulder that's you have to rework that entire area yeah so the way I wouldn't do this you wanted to start off broad and then you want to test your topology let's say you're doing a pair like this you want to just make sure that the disappoint here works you want to do a quick rigging test on it so you just do that you don't finish it and then you test it so SuperBrawl here now and now we're just adding another loop here and I can see this is super cleaner because the foundation was cleaned you can add more loops to it and the foundation is still cleaned and if for some reasons stuff gets a bit messy can always just smooth it out just move out a little like this using shift shift paint I honestly think that's my favorite feature of this tool yeah it's really good so now you can see here you get a bit some unexpected results because of the curve here we can we're just adding this and now we can just go in here and just massage all this into place very very handy stuff what you can also do is you can just start off super low like this maybe you need you need more loops because maybe you need one additional subdivision level on this instead of going in and just adding loops like this and just smoothing out you can just use just select the model here shift right mouse button and you can just smooth that's just gonna smooth everything everything once so I don't think when you do this I don't think it conforms immediately no and you have to go in and conform it's our thing so so what you can do now and now you can just hold on the shift key and it and just smooth it and I was gonna snap to this so now you get you have the advantage of super clean topology but it looks it looks way cooler and this is something we've talked about before but the advantage of having a REIT apology tool within a modeling software or within a 3d software is doing this kind of stuff if you wanted to add extra detail as you want to add a spike or something like you wanted to extrude a face that's most of the time you can't do that and in spoke read topology software's yeah but if you have it in an actual 3d software you have the freedom to like let's say subdivide it yeah exactly so what more was there let's say you actually want to do an extrusion here or you want to sub the letter here please so you want to extrude this you can disable make life and we can go in here and we can actually extrude something out here this is something you can't really do in something like 3d coat or various offers because you don't actually have poly tools if you're doing something like if uses some like topogun you can't really do use this for this example here obviously you wouldn't want to extrude here because thats that's a bit silly but let's say you're doing something like the interior of the ice here you don't just want to you don't just want to leave it here you actually want to have like a like an eye bag on the inside say with the mouth as well you want to actually have a proper mouth which goes from here and goes all the way in yeah it's incredibly annoying having to having to use a tool like like I have to go between something like topic on and Maya when you can just do this in Maya those tools might be marginally fast for certain things maybe but the performance is a bit better but the fact that you do have a full suite of modeling tools here is incredibly useful so that's pretty much what we how we free to pologize regardless whatever you are repolarizing this is gonna most likely be sufficient here again remember that you have hotkeys on the bottom here so useful to please will you just learn some some of these just before the video because there are just so many and there they're just super handy so I hope this has been useful for you and in the next video we or next week apology video will cover some more theory behind topology will go through a face and how to actually do this nicely not just this random shoulder a piece for an ogre so thanks for watching remember to Like comment and subscribe if you want to see more content like this in the future you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 282,849

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character

Id: xpDWta5O3n8

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2018