Master Maya Curve Modeling in Maya Using Sweep Mesh

hey guys henning from fleck normals here and in today's tutorial we are going to check out a new tool in maya called sweep mesh sweep mesh is an incredible new tool which makes modeling with curves much much easier you can find this under crate and sweep mesh and before we get properly into the video i just want to let you know that if you are interested in learning more about maya we have a really solid 12 hour course where we go through essentially every single feature you need to know in maya from modeling rendering re-topology uvs using xgen and finally creating this project here entirely within maya using arnold procedural shaders and proper subdivision surface modeling and some extent at the end so if you're interested in learning maya please check out this course link in the description now we are going to explore this tool by showing a few different things we can model with it instead of just going through every single feature of it so we are going to be starting off with creating an ep curve now you can create any kind of curve that really doesn't matter as long as it's a curve we're going to be going to the front feet then we're just going to be creating an ep curve just real quick then we will go back to the perspective view and there we go so the way we use sweep mesh is that first we have to select the curve we want to use then we go to create and sweep mesh and you can see it is nice and green like this if you have the what's new feature and highlight what's new so create and sweet mesh and now you can see that this creates some kind of tube now the first thing i prefer to do is i prefer to shift right mouse button on this soft and harden and harden mesh just so i can see the polygons a little bit better like so then if we go to the outliner you can also see that we have a new mesh called sweep one here now this is going to be named differently if you have multiple sweep meshes then if we go into the attribute editor you can see we have a node here called sweep mesh creator this is the one we're going to be using most of the time when it comes to sweep mesh so this is pretty easy to use you can see here that we have the different profiles which is going to be poly we have rectangle we have line arc wave and then we have custom which we'll explore a little bit later on the one i use by far the most is a polygon and then later on it's a rectangle poly allows you to have a perfectly nice circle like this or you can change it to a star we can change this up like so maybe if you want to make toothpaste this would be a fantastic way of doing it or you can just set this back to circle and you can change the segments up and down what's cool about this is that the curve is still live so if you now select the curve right mouse button control vertex and you select one of these points you're going to see that you can still edit this curve so you can still move this around to your heart's content which is fantastic this little tip as well this is something i only learned recently actually if you go to curves and then you go to lock length now you can go in one of the cd points and now the length of the curve has been has been locked so if you drag on a point now you see that you're actually not moving the point itself you are dragging the entire curve you can still see the starting point here is also locked so if you now were to drag this you can just drag this around like so which is really cool just a nice little curved tip for you now go back to the curve and then you can just go back to curve and unlock length so now you can just start to go in here again and you can start to move this around to your heart's content so what's cool about this is that you have so much control over what's going on you can go in here you can just scale of it you can change the rotated profile which doesn't do a whole lot right now but we'll get to that later on you can add twist to it and you can taper to it as well the most relevant here would be the taper because this is one you can see more directly when we're dealing with um just a straight tube like this so taper is really cool because it allows you to just taper this entire thing down so let's say you want to make some kind of tail or anything like this you can really do that we can also go in and we can set the taper curve to something very specific so if you want to have the beginning of this taper down instead or if you want the end of it to go down you can do that or we can go in and we can start to add taper points at very specific areas like this so this means that you can really control the exact mesh you are creating from this you also have the interpolation this is more a fancy way of saying the pole account now by default this is going to be set to precision which simply means lower number means lower polar count and higher number means higher polycount this is by far the easiest one to use simply because it's a slider you can also enable button here called optimize optimize is fantastic because it will look at the shape and it will give you a more optimized version of this it will basically preserve the silhouette of the model and optimize the poll account based on that then we have uvs as well if you make sure this is just at the default and we go to uv you can now see that this has unfolded our model beautifully so you never have to do any of these weird tricks for getting uvs to look right on tubes like this so let's leave this guy both of them select them both hit delete then we'll go to the right view and then we will make another curve here this we have a fresh starting point so then we'll do the same thing again we will go to create then we'll enable sweep mesh or make it a sweep mesh and now i want to show you is the rectangle this is really cool because this allows you to really sharpen off the edges and create really cool results so we can now just enable wireframe or we can hit alt and f5 there's a little tip as well you can see down here as well all hotkeys and so what this allows us to do is you can change the uh the width the height you can change your corner radius so you can really create some cool stuff here let's say you need some kind of railing for some kind of road or really anything architectural you change the the radius of it as well and you can just segments of it as well so you have a lot of freedom here already now you can see that we created quite an intricate shape just from this then we have another feature which we haven't talked about then we have another feature which is fantastic as well it's called distribution so enable distribute this is just a second the second drop down here and this allows you to duplicate the shape you just made now what you can see immediately happens is that this scales down to 50 so if you want this to stay the same in certain size just go back here and change this back to one we are just going to be leaving this to 0.5 so what this is doing is it duplicates the mesh around the curve around the curve we had in the center so this is cool because we can now change the amount we can change the scale like we did here you can change the rotation of them and you can see coverage coverage looks like this so it will just rotate them around like so so this is really powerful because this means you can create very complicated shapes really fast and non-destructively as well so for instance if you now go back here and change the the width or the height or the radius or anything on that this is now updates on all of them but the coolest thing for me by far here is the fact that you still have all the options like the twist and tapering sorry now we've created a cool twister this shape here will honestly take quite a lot of time to make without this without this feature without sweep mesh so you can create twist here something to be aware of as well is that while this is at two now this is a max you can just input whatever number you want to so now the 10 becomes the middle number and now you can just change this up to whatever you want to so this just means you have a much bigger range so you can always change this number to be higher or lower depending on it you're not locked to the top and then we can also enable a taper as well so now we can just taper this in and you can see we're creating a really complicated shape with just a few clicks here just creating a random curve you can also of course go in here we set the taper back to one and then you can of course go in and you can change the specifics of the taper as well and we can of course increase the polar count as well so now we have a really cool organic shape within essentially a few minutes next up we will look at how we can use a custom mesh on a curve so for this we'll go to the front view i'll just enable the grid i have a custom hotkey for that just for shift and g which makes that a lot easier then we're gonna go to see the curve tool and we're just gonna be setting the curve degree to one this just means we get perfectly straight curves so i'll hold down the x key and i will just make a few points like this so it snaps to the grid and then i will select the curve shift right mouse button and open and close curves and now we have a perfectly closed curve so what we'll do with this is we'll create a custom mesh which we can then use to make a really nice image a picture frame here so select the whole thing go to create sweep mesh and now you can see that by default you get a mesh around the curve which is cool but we want to use a custom mesh for this that's it you can also really create cool stuff with this as well just purely procedurally using only the rectangle so i highly recommend experimenting with that but what we'll do now is we will create a cube shift right mouse button cube and we'll just move this guy over here then i'll select the um i'll select the polygon the first polygon i'll use a custom hotkey for inverting the selection you can also just hold down shift and drag on top to invert the selection and then we'll delete all of this what's cool about this is that this is interactive so once we select the the mesh to be used whenever we change the mesh it's going to affect the result here as well so go back to the object to sweep one then we go to mesh sweep mesh creator then we'll do custom now here you can either select a curve a poly object or a poly face or poly edge now we are going to be selecting a poly object now simply we select the poly object we want and what's important now is that we hit ok because if you deselect and now we reselect something else it's going to be using that much so hit ok and i'm deliberately using only one face here then i'm just centering the pivot and then we can start to model this up so you can see now if we start to just change the model this changes drastically the result here you can also go into the sweep mesh creator and you can change the scale as well so for instance if you don't want this exact size you can always go in and make this bigger or smaller so what we can do now is we can for instance go in and we can bevel these corners so we can just chamfer them like this ctrl and b while the corners are selected select the two corners and hit the leaky then we'll select this mesh and just shift right mouse button and soft and harden and hardened edges as you can see a little bit better what's going on then we can extrude this down a little bit and we can extrude it in and then we can make some cuts here so i just want to have a simple cut like this and now you can see we're getting a more complicated shape as by the minute basically i'll just split the viewport in two so i can have one view for the front view and one v4 perspective so go to panels layouts and two pane side by side and then we can make this be the front view and then we can just evaluate this in perspective view then we'll use the multicut tool which you can access just object mode and shift right mouse button and multicut and just hold down the shift key to do angle snaps like this and then we can just do some nice little cuts in here now we are not creating the cleanest topology but honestly that doesn't matter one bit because we are not creating we're not aiming for a clean topology we are aiming for a cool shape here and the topology here will be fine so now we can just create a cool shaper now whatever we're doing here it doesn't matter exactly what matters is just that you can see that you can create use a custom mesh to create a cool frame you can also create this with curves as well that's totally fine so if you want to make this mesh with curves that's awesome i just personally prefer to model with polygons so now you can go in here you can also rotate it so now you're getting a whole different result just by rotating this and you can scale this in you can scale this in different ways as well to really change the result now if you want to create this shape here with curves that's easy to do as well we're going to be using the cv curve tool and then we can just snap this to the grid just i hope just putting on the x key so you can create some really cool sci-fi looking shapes like this open close curve and we can just move this if you want to move this like so and then we can instead i'm going to scale this down and then instead of using the mesh here we can use the curve so sweep mesh creator custom type and set this curve object and there we go and now you can see that we have the shape from this guy here as well and you can just rotate this this guy around as well and now you are creating this the shape from this using a curved object which is incredibly cool it means you can create something like this procedurally and really fast the only thing we have with this object here is we have two curves that's it we have a curve here and we have a curve here and based on this we can change anything so you can change the original curve or you can change this guy and you can now create shapes really fast so let's just delete these things and then the last example is going to be a more of a practical one as well we are going to be creating a staircase now i will assume that you know how to create some of these curves these are very simple we have one curve in the center like this which was made simply by doing this hold on on the x key with the c with curve tool x and then just snapping this to the grid so i just made a curve which goes like this and then we have a curve which is just a straight line from here which is duplicated so there are two things i want to show you now the first one is how we can create a base staircase from this mesh and then how we can use sweep mesh to affect two of two meshes or two curves at the same time so the first thing we'll do is we will select the middle one then we'll go to create and we'll go to sweep mesh and then we can set the this to rectangle and then we can change the width here to something much higher remember this is not the cap this is more like the suggested cap so we set this to something like 10 and we'll see how this works so this is a pretty pretty good starting point we change the height as well so if you want this to be a narrow staircase you can do that you can change the depth if you want this to go more outward like this also select it shift right mouse button and harden edges so you have a lot of power directly in this and of course if you were to change the curve you would indeed change the entire shape like so and you can see it keeps adding spans to this so whatever removing this it will keep adding spans at the same density as the other places so let's actually just leave it like so we can actually do the same with the bottom one as well so now we have a starting platform and an end platform so you know you can just experiment with this also setting as well i forgot to mention is cap this will basically cap the ends pretty self-explanatory so then we can change the amount of segments as well to make this shape a little bit more interesting and a little tip as well is right now it's actually a little hard to see the mesh simply because there's so much green stuff here but if you deselect it now well and we disable the wireframe still now you actually can't access the sweep mesh because now you deselected it but if you select it and you go to show and all the window bottom here we have selection highlighting now if we just dock this over what this allows us to do is it allows us to select a mesh without the [Music] selection highlighting so this means you can now see what's going on it's really important to be able to do this because now you can change the radius of this you can change the segments we change the depth you can actually see what's going on without having to worry about not being able to see your mesh a little tip as well is we selected a mesh before and we went to soft and hard and we used harden you can see here now we have some softer edges so what you can do is soften harden and then soft and hard and then you see that these here become much softer so now we have a pretty cool result here now what we need to do is we need to select these two and then with both selected we go to create and then we go to sweep mesh and you can see that whatever we do in one it's going to affect the other one what's that what's technically happening here is we have one sweep mesh which is affecting two output meshes so now on the rectangle we can make an interesting shape here as well we can set this to be chrono depth select both of them shift right mouse button and then soft and harden and now you can change the width of them and you can change the height and you can change the overall scale as well of this whole thing what's cool now is that we can also go under distribution make a couple of them and then we can add a twist to this as well so now this is going to be this really wacky handrail then what we can do we can take the the rails here as well we're going to scale the group in so this fits a little bit better and what we have and then we can go back into the sweep it doesn't really matter if you suck both because this is this is the same note for both of them so if you select this you see it's called sweep mesh creator 2. so now we can create change the amount of instances we can change the um the tapering like so and then we can change the scale of them as well and the overall coverage so if you want something like this really easily make some really interesting shapes using sweep mesh so again the cool thing about sweep mesh is that this entire thing is procedural if you need to change anything here you can do that so easily so if you have client changes or anything like that you can make really cool environments really fast some other examples of where you can use sweep mesh would be if you need to create some kind of road system if you need to create some some game here you can easily create curves like this and you can create a sweep mesh and you can set this here to be a wave or just an arc like this and now you can use this to to create like some actual some actual game here or you know whatever it is you want to you can just use this as a starting point for all sorts of cool things so yeah that's sweep mesh for you it's an incredibly powerful and very simple to use tool it allows you to work with curves in a really effective and procedural way and you're never going to go back to the good old extruded cylinder along a curve like that so if you want to see more videos like this in the future make sure to like comment and subscribe and we'll see you in the next one you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 39,555

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d

Id: 6RIHSfW5x2Q

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021