Maya for Beginners: 3D Modeling

1. Course Overview: Hi, my name is Lucas Ridley, and this is my new course, Maya for beginners. In this section, we're going to be learning about 3D modeling. I have experience working on movies like The New Avengers, Infinity War, Ready Player One, transformers, Suicide Squad. I've worked on commercials for Clash of Clans. This is the experience that you will be drawing from to learn this software and 3D animation. There will be more sections to come as I complete them. But I want to start with 3D modeling because it's the basis for learning 3D software. In this case, it's Autodesk Maya, which is the industry standard for animation and visual effects. Every studio I've worked at uses this software. If you're serious about learning Maya, but you've never opened a 3D program or you've always thought it's too hard and too complicated, this course is for you. I go through step-by-step, all the tools that are most important. This is for the complete beginner, someone who has no experience in Maya or in any 3D package. This is something that I wish I had before I went to film school. I don't know if I even would have gone to film school to learn 3D animation if I had a course like this. Through this course, we are going to be doing all kinds of cool stuff and making all kinds of cool things. By the end of it, you're going to have a level of comfort with the software that you will be able to do many things. You will have a generalist background, and so if you get an idea, you'll be able to create it. Just this first section is about 3D modeling. Come along with me and let's start this journey in learning a 3D software package, which is the industry standard Autodesk Maya. You'll have access to every file that I'm using I know you're watching in this course. If you want to skip a couple classes and move ahead, you will have the Maya scene file to use for each of these video lessons. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the course. 2. Download Maya: 4 Options: Hi and welcome to this updated version of the lesson on how to and where to get Maya. Maya is a software created by Autodesk. You can go to autodesk.com/free-trials to get a free trial of Maya. Now, if you're a student and you can prove that through their criteria that they require on their website, you can get a full version of Maya for one year for free if you're a student. The only thing that it has is a little pop-up window that says, "This is a student version of Maya, you can't use it for commercial purposes," which means you can't make money using that software by the work you do with it. The next best option is the indie license. That you can get if you go currently, the URL is makeanything.autodesk.com/maya-indie. Now, the indie license is a relatively new thing and is celebrated by Maya community because it is so much cheaper than the other license that you can get. Maya Indie has no restrictions except for how much money you can make. I think it's maybe $100,000 where it varies depending on the country that you're living in. Details will be on the site after you pick what country you're in and download the software. But basically, it's a full version of Maya. There's no lack of features and it is one-tenth to one-twelfth as expensive as the traditional license. That's why it was so celebrated when they decided to take the indie license and offer it to more people. It was just something they did on a trial basis and they decided to keep it around. So grab what you can, it's a one-year license for roughly US $250, and that price varies depending on the country you're in. Now, the alternative, the final option that you have that I doubt anyone will pick if they have indie version available is the full subscription of Maya, which is $1,620. The indie license is a steal based on the traditional pricing that we're used to with Maya. So I highly high recommend you go grab the indie license on the makeanything.autodesk.com/maya-indie website. If you're not sure if you want to put down even that $250 or whatever it may be for the country you're in, definitely get the free trial for 30 days and you can get through some of this course and see if it's something you want to continue to pursue and put down that money to get the indie license. But I encourage you if you are interested and you're committed to learning and using Maya on a yearly basis, $250 per year is a bit of a steal, so definitely go check that out. Thanks for watching this updated lesson on how and where to get Autodesk Maya, and I will continue to update things as they change. This course was made in 2018.6 Maya version. The latest as I'm recording this lesson is Maya 2020.4. Not much has changed between the version that you're watching in this course and the version available today. From 2018 to 2020, there's not been a ton of updates in the core features of Maya, so everything still applies. As there's new features, I will update the course and will do my best there. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Interface Intro: Welcome to this first lesson of Maya, where we're going to cover the interface. It's the first thing you see when you open Maya, so it's good to get familiarized with it. As you go through this course, you will become more and more familiar with it and comfortable using it but it's a great place to start, just so that we know what we're looking at because it's easy to get intimidated when you're first starting to learn 3D. I know I was when I opened up a program. You see all these buttons and all of these menus and you have no idea what's important and what's not. It just looks like some crazy alien interface and where to even begin with that. That's why I have this lesson. You're going refer back to it, but it's also just to ease your fears, like you're not going to need to learn every single little button and menu option here to be successful and Maya and use it. I'm going to show you the things that we use the most. In this interface, I'm going to show you how to visually categorize these things so you can know, okay, I'm probably not going to use this so visually I don't need to worry about that chaos of all these buttons up here. Let's just take an overall look at this. Normally when you open up Maya, you're going to get some type of a view like this. You can see down here that it says PERSP. That tells us the camera view that we're viewing in the viewport. That's what this middle section is here. This is called the viewport and you can see the axis down here on the lower left. You can see y is up and z is to the left. This is where we're going to see everything that's happening in our scene. Down here we have a timeline for when we start animating. We can scrub this, we can play it over here. We can set it to loop back several times by clicking that we're going to turn on Auto key, turn that off, change the frame range. All of these things but typically when I'm using this, I use it just like this. I scrub, I look and then I can change frame range, clicking and dragging that or typing in numbers here. These two numbers actually just mean the in and out points of what we're looking at versus the whole scene. You can see we can adjust this and slide this around, but it doesn't change the first number. That's why that's the absolute values of the in and out of the scene. We can temporarily change that scale so we can see a smaller scale of the timeline. It's easier to scrub a smaller section if it's a very big shot or something like that. If you double-click it it will jump out to the whole thing and maximize to the entire length of the frame range that you've set. That's the bottom part. You can see down here in the bottom left, this will be very helpful as you're starting. This will display short helped tips and tools and selections. If I'm going up here and I don't know what this is and I hover over it, I'll get a tool tip that will pop up bu if you're looking in the lower left as well, it'll say the same thing so if you're a little impatient for the tooltip to pop up, you can just look in the lower left and you can see as I scrub my mouse through, I'm not clicking anything, I'm just hovering over everything. You can see as showing me what each one of these tools is named in what they do. If you leave it over there, the tooltip will also pop up. That's one quick way to figure out what all these little things do up here. Don't worry about what each one of them does yet, we'll get into that later. Just know that these are different tabs for different sections. These sections are also related to these different drop-down menus here. Maya tries to organize the menus into different disciplines. You can see modeling, ringing animation. It's all separate it into their own menu sets because typically, if you're doing one, you're not really going to be doing the other. In a production, normally this is the linear workflow of how things are made anyways, first you model something, then you ring it then animate. For example, you can't really animate something that doesn't exist, so you have to model it first. If you're going to ring then you need to ring before animation. They tried to do it in a way, an order that makes sense for how you're going to create things, animate things and render things. That's why these are ordered the way they are. You can see that they change the menu options up here, but only after Windows. You can see watch windows and as I change the options, windows stays the same so everything from file to Windows is never going to change. Everything after that will and a lot of these things. I'm in the animation tab here and the dropdown menu and I'm on animation shelf here. You can see there's play blast. There's different options and a lot of those things are also here. You can see play blast is here as well. It's the same icon, it's the same tool tip. Even though there's all these different buttons, they actually just put them in more than one place. It makes it look more complicated than it is, because the same option is put in several different places. For example, with play blast, I could actually even right-click on the timeline down here, and it's off the screen. If you do this on your Maya, you can go down to the bottom and you can see an option for play blast again. Play blast for example, as in three different places. This is also another reason why not to get overwhelmed while these options, because visually it looks like there's a ton of them, but really they're just the same ones over and over in different ways. Depending on how you want to work or select options are, or menus, or how you want to select tools then they try to give you as many options as you want to really, which is a little too much. Typically you're only ever going to use this up here or the shelf. It's whatever you're comfortable with. I find it hard to remember what each one of these icons are and then to wait for the tooltip to pop up. Typically when I'm going through the menu up here. I'm not using this as much but it's definitely nice to have sometimes on a couple different things like, in this course I'm probably going to make, a couple of spheres just to show you how things work. We'll get into manipulating things in the next lesson. Besides that, I don't really use this shelf options all that much. Now that we have this shelf option and some of these menu things covered. Let's look at what's in between them. We can see this dropdown menu that we talked about. Then there's all these buttons up here and they all do different types of things that we're going to get into a lot later. Right now, just know that you don't really have to worry about any of these things. We'll slowly cover these later. These aren't super, super important and getting started, so we're just going to skip them now for the interface, don't worry about these. The next thing we want to look at are these different windows as well. We have a blank window here, we have blink window here. They have their own little tabs here. Then there's these tabs on the side. Again it seems like there's a ton of options, but it's really not. For example, with this tab, this can actually be closed down by clicking it or double-clicking it to open it back up. If you notice here, this little button gets highlighted and unhighlighted as we're clicking it. It's the same thing like we were talking about earlier in the play blast. It's just a different way to select menu options here. You can do it from up here, or you can do it from this tab. You can see the modeling toolkit. We can go back to the attributes or we could select over here. Why this is significant is because if I create a sphere, this is going to tell me the name. It's going to tell me where it is in space. Is it on, is it visible and the history of the object and any inputs there are. I can see what the inputs are. This is a quick way to see what's the status of this object where it is. If I go to the attribute editor, I can see this information displayed a little bit differently. I can see, translate as all-zero. If we go back to the channel box, we can see that's shown here as well. Just the same thing shown twice like we were talking about earlier. I want to help simplify this stuff in your mind so you don't feel like that, this is something different than this. It's not, it's the same thing, it's just in a different place. Just to emphasize this again, I want to show you something that I use quite a bit. If you hold down the space bar, you'll get the hotbox menu, what Maya calls the hotbox menu. I'm holding down space bar and have all of the menu options available to me. You might be able to tell that it is the same exact way that the tabs over here ordered so modeling, you can see mesh, mesh, edit mesh, edit mesh, mesh tools, mesh tools and so on and so on. You can see rigging, animation, effects and rendering. That's the exact same way this is laid out over here. It's just a quicker way to get to all of these menus is by holding down space bar. I use that quite a bit. It took me a couple of years to get used to it and actually use it. Because I think it does take a little familiarity with Maya to feel comfortable with this, but the sooner you use this, the quicker you'll be in Maya and I would highly encourage you to use this instead of having to hunt around for stuff up here and changing menus, you can get to everything right here by holding down space bar. That's a pretty useful tip that I think will be useful even more later. Now that we know what the channel boxes and the difference with the attribute editor, let's jump over to this section and we can see the viewport has its own options. If you hover over each one of these objects, you'll also get the tool tip. I won't go over each one of these because to be honest, they're not very helpful as a beginner starting out, these aren't really that important, but I didn't want to talk about the different views in Maya, so if I don't hold on Space Maya, just tap it. You can see I get multiple views and typically what you'll see, just click this over here is something like this when you're just starting out in Maya. If I hit Space bar again with my mouse, just hovering over a different window, I'm not clicking anything with my mouse. I can jump into those views and you can see what the views are by the camera name, top y front z side x perspective. We can jump between different perspective views. If we need to see something top-down and modeling, we can do that. That's one quick way to divide up the screen as well. If we wanted to divide the screen in a different wave and go to Panels, Layouts and we can say two panes side-by-side. That's what I had earlier that you saw. Because this is the way I like to animate sometimes. I can get back to the perspective view just by hitting Space bar and these buttons over here just like shortcuts to these different modes as well. Instead of hitting space bar, you can jump through. One of the last things I want to talk about is the out liner and out liner you're going to have open and spend a lot of time. Because it's basically a table of contents of what's in your scene. You can see that we have these different cameras that we saw earlier when we are in the four view setup. They're all gray because they're hidden. We can actually see them in the interface. We can see that the P sphere 1. That's one way that we can select this object, or we can select it just by clicking it. Left mouse clicking. That's two ways this like things either through the out liner or through the viewport. That is a quick rundown on the interface. I hope it got you a little more familiarized with what you're looking at when you open up Maya, it's not as intimidating as it seems. If you follow along with this course, you will just pick up these things so that I won't have to walk through each little button in a dry away will take a project-based approach so that you'll get more familiar with the interface as we go along. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we will briefly cover manipulators and how to move stuff around and Maya, thanks for watching. 4. Manipulators And Movement: Welcome back, and let's quickly cover how to move things around in Maya. There's a couple of things to understand, especially in 3D, that's important. So let's jump right in and cover that. From the previous lesson, I still have the sphere here. If you don't have that, I can just delete that an we can go up here to this polygon sphere and click that. You can also get to it by going to Create, Polygon Primitives, and Sphere. One other thing that's fun with these menus is you can actually tear them off. So you can see there's this little option here if I hover my mouse just above this, and most menus have this, this one has it. Most of these menus have this little option here. So if anyone's going to make a lot of primitives and a lot of spheres or something, just as an example, I can just click that and I'll have this menu turn off. Now I can just click this a bunch of times, and if I open up my outliner, when those Outliner, I can see I made a bunch of spheres. We only need one, so I'm going to shift select all of those below it and hit delete. I'll select the sphere here. I'm also going to click and drag this Outliner and let it hover here and let go. So it'll docket in the window here. I'm going to close this menu that I had hovering and now I can get back to it up here if I want. Now that we have the sphere, you can see that there's these squares and different things going on here. So let's take a look. The way that we manipulate things in Maya is basically through several different tools. One of which is you may have already seen by hitting "Q", you can get to the Select tool or you select it up here. It's just the cursor option. I can select the object here just by left mouse clicking. I can also select it from the Outliner here. So we've got the objects selected, but now I want to move it. How do I move it? I can hit "W" on my keyboard to pull up the shortcut for the manipulator. I can also select it over here. You can see the Move Tool is what the tooltip says. You can see as well that in parentheses it says W. So we can also see the shortcut is listed there. Now with the sphere selected, and if you notice even with the Move Tool selected, I can select different objects. You don't always have to have the Select Tool selected to select new things. You can have the Move Tool selected and you can still select stuff. You can also click and drag to select things in a group. So now that we have this one thing, let's move it around. I can click any access and it'll be isolated to that axis. I'll undo that. You can see it's isolated because the axes manipulator turned yellow. If I click the vertical one, it turns yellow or the z-axis, it also turns yellow. So now I know, no matter if my mouse is going up and down or something weird, that it's only going to go along that axis. But if I want to have a free movement, I can just click in the middle and move the thing around wherever I want it. The other thing I can do is isolate on two axes and that's what these little squares are here. That I can know I'm only moving it in the vertical and x-axis. I use these quite a bit actually because in 3D space that's hard to tell where you're moving something sometimes. So it's hard to tell if that's actually vertically up or if I moved it back in space. By selecting these, you can tell that I'm not moving it up, I'm moving it in the x and z on this flat plane, this grid. If you can't see this grid for some reason it didn't default to that. You can also turn that on here and turn it off if it's distracting. That's just one of these little options up here. So now that we know how to move things around, let's rotate it so we can hit "E" on the keyboard and similarly we can find it over here in this little Tool Box window, and you can actually turn off these options from windows UI Elements, and you can turn off the Tool Box. Now you can see that disappears. You find yourself not using those as nice to turn them off and you have more screen real estate for the viewport. But for now, since we're all beginners and we're just starting out, let's leave that up. So I'll go back to the UI elements, meaning User-interface, and I'll go down to Tool Box and bring that back. So with the rotation, it's very similar that we can isolate different axes and they turned yellow, and we can click in the middle here and have a free form option. One thing to keep in mind is because we're working in 3D, watch the x-axis. If I click the z-axis and drag the red one down. Now the red one is where the green one used to be. Did you see that? I just undid it. So right now the green one is going around, and if I bring the x-axis, the red one down, now that's replaced it. So who's to say which axis is which now? Because before I rotated it, the green one was down here, the y-axis. But now because I rotated z, the x-axis is down here. So this option, this kind of view that we're seeing is based on the object. Because the object is rotating, the axes are changing. That's something very important to keep in mind because that'll be important later in animation and stuff. So just keep that in mind that because now we're in 3D, these things actually matter and we can control them in different ways. If we hold down E, which is the shortcut for rotation, if we hold down E on our keyboard and then click left mouse click, we can drag to the world option. So now you can see the manipulator pop back to have the green going around here like it was before, even though the object is rotated. So what this is saying is, we're now rotating based on the world axis, which never change. So even when we move an object around, you can see the manipulator itself is not changing. So we can always have the option, even if an object is rotated weird to isolate based on the world axes, we just need to change that by holding down E and clicking and choosing this option. If we go back to object, you can see it's still kept all those changes. Now based on the object's rotation, we can see that the axes are moving all around. So that's just something to keep in mind for later. When we get an animation, this will be important and I'll explain later in animation why that is important. The other thing is that, just for myself I like to do is I like to only ever stay on the channel box unless I'm doing something very specific because you can see this attribute editor here, you can see it says attributed editor right here on the side. It takes up a ton of room. There's just a lot of stuff going on and we don't need it, so I like to keep the channel box open because now we can see the values. We can zero them out, we can click and drag them and then hit "0" and zero everything out. This is way more useful when we're moving stuff around than the attribute editor, and also can slide that down to free up more space for the viewport. Similarly to the rotation axes being different, the move axes can also be different. So right now you can see even though the object is rotated, the axes are pointing relative to the world. So if we hold down W, similarly, like we held down e earlier, if we hold down W and left-click, we get the same option, World object. So now we can see it's following the rotation. So it's following the object axes now. That's just two different ways to manipulate the same object based on its own axis or based on the world axis. So that's important. The final thing we're going to talk about is the scale. If you hit "R" or you can go over here and click the Scale button or the Scale Tool, we can scale uniformly, and we can also scale on axes. That's pretty straightforward. So we've gotten this far and we haven't moved around anything. How do we move around? We have an object now let's move around it. I want to zoom into it. How I zoom in. I can mouse scroll, which I don't use that much. But the other option I have is to hold down Alt and right-click and then drag my mouse and you can see I'm doing the same thing. I'm zooming in and out, and this is why you need a three button mouse. Because now if you click and hold the middle mouse button, I can pan around. Then if I still holding Alt, if I left-click, I can rotate around an object. So with the combination of these three things, I can do all sorts of moves and zoom in on things, and say get way out here, and I can't really see what I'm working on. I can click and drag and select the thing. I can select it from the Outliner and then I'm going to hit "F". So hit "F" and I jump back to the selection that I have. Now I'm free to move around again and do all that. You also get to that option from the View menu here and go to View Frame Selection. One other thing that's very helpful is Look at Selection. For example, if we're over here and I'm rotating around, I'm not rotating around the object anymore. Why is that? That's because my center of interest is somewhere over here and I can't rotate around the object. So if I want to rotate around the object, I can go Look at Selection. So the position of the camera didn't change, but now it's just rotated looking at this selection. Now I can pivot around that object. So that's one way to help control your camera. If your camera gets too crazy, you can always select it from here. Select camera, which is whatever camera this viewport is, we'll select it. You can also select it from the Outliner because we know it's persp. You can see on here P-E-R-S-P, persp, perspective. You can see now we have all the values here and we can just zeros out if things got too crazy, and of course now we're inside the sphere because we're at zero world space. Now you can see I'm rotating from some crazy point out there. I can select my object, hit "F", and now I'm rotating around it and I'm back. So that's a quick introduction on how to move scale, rotate, and move the camera around. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next lesson. 5. Stepped Snapping: Welcome to this quick tip on how to snap at intervals using the manipulators in Maya. If I hold down J, that's the hot key, that's the big secret here. If I hold down J, then I can get the manipulators to snap at a certain interval, move and rotate. But let's jump a little deep and to see how we control that more. If I hold down J, you can see under the tool settings which you can open over here in the top right, the step snap options. It says Absolute and one for the move tool, if I hit E and move to the Rotate tool, it says Relative and 15. If I reset that tool, it'll go to Absolute. The default is probably absolute for you, and if you want it to move relative, you'd have to change it here on the drop-down menu. Now, what's the difference between that? If we already have an object that has rotation value, we can see here 38.415 whatever, and if this is set to Absolute, it will snap it to that interval of 15, of that absolute value of 15. If we want it to start at 38 and add 15 or take away 15 for every rotation we do, we need to set the step snap to Relative by holding down J and then choosing Relative. It will also remember what the last thing you chose is. Every time I hit J now it will be relative. Just remember, that's what's going to be happening. As we rotate that we can see it's now adding to the number we already had. That's what relative means. Now the other little quick way to do this, if you don't want to go into the tool settings, I've found and have used recently for making sure cameras are matching the world axis. If I hold down E and I go to Gimbal mode, and then I hold down E again and go to Discrete Rotate, it will do a similar thing. Now it's going to be using whatever step snap options you have here, so just keep that in mind. Thanks for watching. Bye. 6. Intro To 3D Modeling: Welcome to the first class in 3D modeling. The reason why I've structured it this way to have 3D modeling at the beginning of this complete beginners series, is because simply we need something to work with later. We might as well learn modeling up front at the beginning, so that we can use models later down the course and have an understanding of what modeling is and why it's important. To get going, I wanted first to describe some concepts about 3D modeling suit. You can begin to understand how to approach 3D modeling from a theoretical standpoint. You know what tools to use and how to approach whatever project that you come up with. In your imagination and projects down the line and all that thing. Let's take a look at an example that I've created. All of these scene files that I'm working in are available to you for downloads. This one might not be that useful because it's pretty basic, but it's going to be made available to you to download so you can follow along or open it up and dissect it and see what is inside. I'm going to show you an example that I made real quick, so we can cover two important concepts, hard verse organic modeling. When I first describe this, you can probably already guess what it means, especially by looking at these two examples. Let me first quickly cover a couple of little tricks that I like to use in Maya view port so we can look at this a little better. I don't know if it shows up in your video, but the edges of all of these polygons are not super smooth. They are jagged and they're not anti-aliasing as we like to say technically. There's actually an anti alias button here that you can turn on for the view port. It has this little one right here. If I hover over it and you can look at the bottom left and it says multisample anti-aliasing and then the tool tip will also pop up. If we press that, and you can follow along and do this in your view port. You can see that this is just for us. This doesn't affect the funnel, render or the model itself or anything like that. This is just to make it easier on our eyes as we're using Maya. I'd like to turn on anti-aliasing. I also like to turn on the ambient occlusion because you can't really see where these lines and gaps intersect on this model very well. If we turn on ambient occlusion, watch this area right here where there should be lines popping up, but we can't see them because they're all facing the same direction. That's just how Maya's rendering it in the view port. We turn ambient occlusion, which is this little button up here, which is just next to the anti-aliasing, we get ambient occlusion, which basically shows us areas of geometry that are close together and darkens those corners and inset areas. Now we can see that model a little bit better. Now that we have those two kind of view port options turned on. Back to the topic at hand, hard vs organic models and modeling. Why is this important? It's important because we need to understand how we're going to approach a project or a model. The tools are going to use to create it. Let's first talk about what hard vs organic really means. You can get an idea from these two examples. Hard is straight surfaces. They can be curved as well. You can see there's a cylinder here, so it has a rounded surface on that side. But there's pardon here. Things, you know, mechanical things, things that are bolted together and made by humans typically are hard surfaces. Imagine a transformer here and the organic shape on the right. There's no pattern really here. There's a lot of swooping shapes and it was made clearly not in the same way or the same tools that the one on the left was made. You can see there's two very different type of models here. Just to drive this point home, it's probably already pretty clear what these two things are, but It's good to just drive it home at this early stage of learning about modeling. I have a couple of pictures here that I wanted to show you. Just take a guess at what this would be hard or organic models. You can tell it's an organic shape. There's a lot of branches and fine texture and bark and leaves. This is going to be organic. The type of tools we'll use to model something like this will be much different than modeling a hard surface. Like me wearing the Darth Vader helmet. It has some curved shape to it, but it's a hard surface. There's not fine detail and texture on the surface itself for the most part, it's glossy. It's, like a hard plastic. But if we're looking at this and looking at my hand, the hand would be on an organic model because it has very unique shapes. There's no pattern or uniformity to it at all. It depends on what we're looking at in this picture. If it's my hand or the helmet on what's going to be organic or considered hard surface. Just as another example, here are some more helmets that are all hard surface models. For a more historical example, you can see there's both in this as well. The statues in the middle, in the foreground and the inset at the front of this building are organic models. They have musculature, they have flowing robes, and there's horses, but when you look at the building itself and has very flat surfaces, very smooth, there's no organic detail. Unless we look at the top of the columns, we can see the floral patterns that are incorporated there. This is again, marrying those two types of models in one example. This is also a famous sculpture that's in the Vatican. You can see the robes and all that type of thing would be considered organic even though organic, you might think of nature or something like that. You know, clothes can be considered organic because they have these kind of flowing irregular shapes and the folds of the model. Lastly, we have both together where this structure on top of the mountain is a hard surface. Then when we look at the rock, we can clearly tell the difference between the pattern and the type of surface that this building is versus the kind of irregular surface of the rock. I think we understand what hard verse organic means and I'm going to mess with this little cluster handled is show you also that this is important to understand for later down the road when we're talking about rigging and animating. If it's a hard surface, we're probably not going to flex from the middle of this object. It's probably going to move altogether. That's going to affect how we're going to do things later with rigging and animation. Whereas if it's organic, you know, this thing could move all different ways. We would need to rig and animate to reflect the type of organism this is or shape or model. It's also important understand later on what this implies for other aspects. In this course, now we're going to jump into actually making things now that you have an understanding of how to use Maya's interface and how we're going to approach modeling. We're going to make one hard surface model that we're going to continue to use throughout the course. Then we're going to model an organic character, a skeleton guy. We're going to use to animate later and make a pretty cool animation so far along in the next lesson. We'll get to creating stuff now. Thanks for watching. 7. Ghostbuster Trap: Welcome to this three modeling class where we will create a ghostbuster trap. We can start to learn the three modeling tools inside of Maya. Anytime you start modeling something, you want to look at reference in case you don't know what a ghostbuster trap is, you can just google it and find some images. We're going to use this just as a template, not really as an exact match that we're going to try to get. There's a box here that has different knobs and handle on it and that kind of thing and that's the general direction we're going to try to model this object in so we can start to learn some Maya. I'm going to switch back to Maya. Anytime you start using Maya, you want to set your project. This is something to remember from here on out. This isn't just some thing that you want to do sometimes. From day one when I was learning Maya until you work in a big studio, you want to set your project. Actually, well, big studios have their own way of doing stuff, but a small studio maybe you want to set your project. If you go to file, we'll go down to set Project and the reason this is important is because anytime later down the road you have textures say you're doing a CLO simulation and you want to cache that out or all these other technical things that we'll into later, we need somewhere for Maya to save all those things to reference into the scene. In my directory I've made a Maya folder and I'm going to set that. It will ask you to create a default workspace. Typically, this just means it's going to save unimportant stuff like what view did you have open? Was it a perspective or a side view? What preferences maybe you had for that workspace? You can just say create default workspace and you won't have to do that again, you'll have to do that first time you set a project. We're also going to go to the project window. The other option here under project, you can see project in gray. We only have two options. We've already done set project. The project is set, so let's go to project window and we get all of these different folder options here. If you don't see these names typed out here, you can go to "Edit", reset settings, and it should fill all of those out for you. This will create folders, like I mentioned a moment ago, for caches, for images. Mostly we're going to be using for scenes because when we save a Maya file, if we just hit "Command S", like you would in a word document or whatever, just to save the file, it's going to save a dot MB or a dot MA and that's M for Maya and A or B depending on if you save an ascii or binary file, but that's not that important right now, let's just hit accept and it'll make all these folders. When we go to file save, let's go file save scene and because we haven't done it yet, it'll open up this dialog box. Now we have this current project. It knows where our current project is and we have all those folders that it had listed out. Anytime we're saving a scene, we want to save in the scenes folder and you can see that it is under our project that I defined as Maya. Now I can name it whatever I want and I can choose to be an ascii or binary. It doesn't really matter to be honest for our purposes so I'm going to name that ghost buster trap and hit "Save". Now we have the project saved and that way, if we need to move the project to another computer, it'll have reference, a path to the project settings so it'll know where the textures are or anything else like that. Let's get started and model this ghostbuster trap. Let's take a look at this reference and we basically have a rectangle with a cylinder handle. Let's start with the most basic elements first, and then we'll add detail later because anytime you do modeling, whether it's hard or organic, let's start with the simplest shapes first and then add detail later. We don't want to start with the detail on really anything. The same is true for animation. Most art, you start with the basics first. Let's create the rectangle and the handle because those are the biggest most obvious things. In Maya, there's a couple different ways we can create things. We have this shelf here, the poly modeling shelf and there are curves and surfaces here which it looks like they have similar things, but these are called NURB surfaces and these aren't very useful for modeling and animation. They sometimes are used to create controls on rigs, to create paths, to revolve the shape around, or constrain a camera to a path, or fly a plane down a curve path, something like that. But for our purposes, we're not going to be using NURB surfaces. We're going to be doing poly modeling where we have vertices, edges, and faces. Let's create the rectangle. We can click this rectangle right here and zoom-in by right-clicking and holding down Alt and left clicking to rotate around, if you remember. We could also create that by doing the polygon primitives and we could pop this off if we wanted to and create a bunch of these cubes, that's another way to do it. But now that we have this, we can go over to our channel box here and we can see we have a poly cube one. We can see it's called pCube1 here, and it's also called pCube1 here and it's highlighted so we know this is what's highlighted. I point out these things because we can translate this thing around different ways and that's reflected here. But there's also other options. When we pop this down, we can get subdivisions. If we wanted more subdivisions, we can go to subdivision width, height, and depth and those will do different dimensions on this depending on if we need more geometry. But we'll get to that in a minute. Let's first make the basic shape. I'll go to width and I'll make this a little longer and a little wider and tall. Now we have something that approximates the size and I'm going to go ahead and turn on the anti-aliasing and the ambient inclusion to help us visualize this. I'm also going to lift this up. We can see depending on the width, height, and depth, if I just change this to 5 and these to 2, then I know the height is 2. That this thing go up one to be sitting right on the floor because it's measuring from the center. Wherever our manipulator is, that's where it's measuring from, so if it's a height of 2 and this is in the middle, then it's one to the floor from where the manipulator is. If we bring this down to the floor, it's going to be at 0. That's one way to know how it's calculating what these numbers are exactly. We have that rectangle. Now, let's create the handle. We can click the cylinder here and drag this up. You can hit "W" if you don't have the manipulator selected yet. You can hit "E" to rotate this over and to get it exact, we can just type in 90. You can do negative 90 or 90 for us it doesn't really matter right now. We could scale this down or we could use similarly these types of attributes over here. We could reduce the radius or we could just scale it down the scale tool by hitting "R". Let's move this to one side and move it up. Then we can make another cube a couple different ways. We could duplicate this one. We can hit "Command D", and now we have another one that we can scale and do all these things too but you can see when you duplicate just with the shortcut, you don't have that option anymore. We don't have that poly cube input that we had here so sometimes it's nice to just use the basic tools to make sure that we have this history here that later we can go back and then change if we want to. Let's bring this here and scale it down a little bit. Let's talk about some ways to align things. If we wanted to get this to be exactly on this edge, it might be hard to use the manipulator back and forth. There are a couple different things we can do to move things around and be very specific. Of course, we can go up here and type in a number, but we could just be typing all day and we might not get exactly, visually, what it looks like. To know that we have snapped to that, we can use the snapping tools. But the snapping tools go based of, of where the manipulator is, so for example, if I hold down "V" on the keyboard, that means vertices. It's going snap to vertices. Just to show you the components that we're dealing with to know what a vertices even is, let me break this down even further. If we take this square, I'm just going to isolate it with this little button here.. Isolate select. I right-click. Now I can see and change my selection mode to edge, vertex, vertex face, face, or back to object mode, which is what we're currently in. We're in object mode and it's also denoted by this little button up here on the top left. If we want to go to component mode, we can click this button and again, it will show that if you hold it down or if you hover over it rather and you can see the different components that we can select here. We can isolate those so now we're selecting the lines, or if we go back to this one and de-select the line, we get the vertices. Now we can edit the basic components of all the polygons here. If we wanted to do this quickly, we can right click and hold, drag up and go to edge mode now, and now we can adjust the edges. That just gives you a quick idea of what the components are that make up a polygon. I just went to object mode to get back in so I can select the whole thing. I can also go up here and click this little button to go back on object mode, I'm going to un isolate this now so we can go back to our model. The next thing we need to understand is how to change where the manipulator is. If I hold down "V" like I was describing earlier, and I middle mouse drag, if we click and hold on middle mouse, this is going to snap the vertices. You can see its trying to snap to the corners of the box or the vertices of the cylinder. But we don't want the center to snap to it, we want the edge to snap to it so we're going to need to change where this center pivot is. To do that, we can hold down "D". Now we get a different type of manipulator here. If we hold down "V" while we're holding down "D", we can also snap the pivot to a vertices without the object moving because we're just changing where the pivot is now. If I let go of both, now we get the regular manipulator. If this doesn't come back, you can hit "W" to make sure that pops back to be the manipulator. Now we move this, the whole thing goes around. Now what we can do is go and hold down "V", and middle mouse drag and isolate the up value. We're only going to go up and you can see it snapped upward. Now we can hold down the x-axis and it will snap to the backside, which it seems like it has. Now, we don't want this pivot here anymore, how do we get that back? That's not a big deal. We go to "Modify" and we go down to "Center pivot". When we click this, now the pivot is back in the center and we can move the pivot around later again if we want to but now it's there. Also remember, you can see that the axis here is yellow so if I was to start middle mouse dragging, it's going to be isolated on this no matter what I do or where I move my mouse, if it's middle mouse dragged. You just want to make sure that you understand how it's isolating these axes as you click them. That's one thing that stumps a lot of people when they're just starting out, like, "Why can't I move this in a different axis?" It's because we selected that one and now it's thinking we are going to isolate that. This looks very basic right now but I want to give you a quick introduction into how to create things, manipulate them, snap things around. In the next lesson, we're going to take this further and start adding details and learn a few more modeling tools inside of Maya. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. GB Trap - Insert Edge, Extrude, Append: Welcome to this lesson where we will continue making the Ghostbuster trap and learn a lot of new tools. Now we have the basic shaped done. Let's choose a view and a piece of reference to try to add more detail in. Let's go back to our reference and look at a view like this. I'd like to move my viewport to get a closer view of what the reference view is like. It's a three-quarter angle like this. Let's focus on this edge here where there's a lower level here and then it goes up and there 's a bevel here as well and then it goes out. We have this higher rim and a lower area here. It looks like the back area here is the same level as this edge here. Let's just focus on that. Anytime you have reference and something that's complicated, you going to break it down into its components and simplify it and only work on little sections like that at a time. Let's do this edge here. I'm going to go back in. If I go into my face mood right-clicking and going down a face, I select that and move it around. I can't really move this and divide this in different sections. I need edge loops here. If we go into Edge mode, right-clicking and dragging up, I can move individual edges. While we need more of those, we need an edge year to get that border. We need two edges here so that we can divide this section in half and have an angle between it. Let's add more edges. To do that, we need to go to Mesh tools, Insert Edge Loop. What I'd like to do is to add tools that I'm going to use a lot to my custom shelf. Let's move over to our custom shelf and go down to the mesh tools and hold down Command and Shift and then click "Insert Edge Loop" and watch your custom shelf. We get a new tool here so that now we don't have to keep going back to this menu. If you do this backs that in the future or you just want to delete it, you can right-click and go to delete. Let's click that. If we click and drag this, we can make these two areas where we're going to have the lower section and the upper section. We have this angle here. We need to have two edge loops, one here and one there so that we can make this division. It doesn't really matter where they are exactly. We can move that around later, but let's just get him in there now. Now we have those two edge loops. The other thing that we're going to need to add are the edge loops of the border here. Let's go back to our Insert Edge Loop tool. I'm going to hit Q to get off of it, to just go to the Select tool. I'm got an object mode and select the object. You can see the last selected tool down here. I'm still selected on it. Let's go to the Move tool. So now it's de-selected. I can go back to the last one by selecting it here. Or I can hit G is the shortcut to get back to that. It'll do the same thing. Let's go to the Move tool and I'm going to hit G on the keyboard and it will go to the last used tool which is the Insert Edge Loop tool. If we want to have this to be even on both sides, you can try to eyeball it a little bit. That might be good for our purposes but let's learn new stuff. Let's get more precise. Let's go to the tool settings here, which is next to this button. It will pop-up the tool settings panel. Depending on the tool that we have selected, it'll give us different options. If I change the tool here you can see this menu will change every time I have a new tool. With the Insert Edge Loop tool selected, which I can get to there or there or I get G. There's bunch of different ways which is the theme of Maya. There's a lot of different ways to do the same thing. It's just whatever you're more comfortable with or is quicker to work with for you. Now that we have this, let's go to the Multiple edge loops option. I've set it to six. Let's go to six. If I click here and I drag, it won't matter because we're doing equal distance from each other. When I let go, you can see now we for sure have the same distance from the outside edge for these new edges that I made. But what if we don't want these interior edges? If I go to edge by right clicking and dragging and keep in mind, you do need to have your cursor over the object that you want to change to. If I was to do this up here and go to edge, it'll change to this object. We don't want that. We want that object to stay in object mode. Let's click this and go to Edge mode. If I select this now, it's just going to select that one little section. But if Double-click the edge, it'll select the whole edge loop if it goes all the way around. If it doesn't go all the way around, I won't select the whole thing. If I hit Delete Now because I don't want that. Now, you can see it still has a division here. There's got to be a vertices here. Look, there's a vertices there. We don't want that vertices. I could go through and delete each of those vertices like this. But they're on all the corners and it's stupid to have to do that. Let's undo this and get that edge loop back and I'll show you the right way to do it. We'll go to edge loop. We will double-click each edge and hold Shift to select more than one edge. Now I'll hold down Shift and right-click and go to Delete Edge. This is how you delete edges from now and forever more. Use this because it will get the vertices as well. Now this is one solid edge, still divided up in a weird way. The next problem we need to deal with is the fact that these faces here should be at the same level. They should be down here somewhere and not just those but these here. Because we noticed in the reference, this back area, it looks like it's at the same level. It goes across this. You can see this little edge here. This is a better view. Look at this back edge. It's flat here and then it looks like it lines up to this flat edge. It's more like this is an extrusion than anything else. There's a bunch of different ways you could go about doing this. We'd actually just select these two and extrude those up, which is probably the easiest thing to do. Let's go ahead and do that. Conversely, you could extrude everything else down. Like I had selected earlier. Though fun thing you knows about Maya as I'm undoing, its reloading in the last selections. Includes that and let's undo history, which is nice. We could extrude these down or we could just extrude these two sections up. Let's go this method because it's the less amount of things that we have to do. Which is always good in 3D. Let's extrude these up. To extrude, it's another tool like we did Insert Edge Loop tool, but this one is in the Edit Mesh option here. I'm going to Command Shift it because I'm going to use this more than once probably. To that point, there's a ton of options in here to do stuff. This is why I like adding things to my own custom shelf because I'm not going to use most of this stuff. We're not even probably going to cover half of this stuff. Because you just don't use it that much. I like to create my own shelf of the tools I use the most. So I don't have to keep hunting through all these things up here. I'm going to click the Extrude tool. I'm also going to turn off this Tool Settings here, so we get more view area space here. Now we have this little window. That gives us options for our extrusion. You can also see those options here and the inputs similarly when we were changing the size of our original cube. We had that input down here, the poly cube input, and it's still there, 5, 2, 2. Those were the things that we changed in the previous lesson. It keeps all these inputs and we added those split edges, what they call split ring. I don't know why they change the type of language that are using instead of saying Insert Edge Loop for the tool. Now here they say they call it a SplitRing. This is the history of what we've done on the object. You can see we added edges to this and then we deleted some, and now we've extruded it. It keeps the history of the object. What we'll do at the end is delete all the history. It's a lot cleaner when we're done with the model. There's multiple ways to use this. We can just click and drag this. You can see it also changes here. We could also change the thickness is pretty similar to the local Z Translate that does the same thing. If you're having trouble clicking and also remember if you're doing something like this, you can click and drag on it here. You can also middle mouse drag it out here. If it's going too fast, it's probably because of this little pie chart thing. You can change the speed at which it moves. This is the slowest one. If I needed to go faster, I can click that a few times and it goes up. We don't need it in this little window, it's actually also changing the one over here. You can see that if I change this one or if I change that one, it'll update the other. You can get it to in two different places. This is going to be super, super handy animating modeling. This is a very useful tool to get more precise. Let's make the thickness something like that. Now the problem we've encountered is we have this kind of stair step look instead of a straight edge, that diagonal that we're going for. If we look at the reference. Let's get a better picture. Now that we have a better picture, we can see that this is a slow but somehow a stair step. How do we resolve that? Lets go about it and learn another new tool. Let's go to the face and let's just delete these faces. Also be careful you're not selecting faces through it. It can be a common thing. You can see if I drag my mouse over here, I'm actually selecting things on the bottom side. To double-check that you can also just go into Wireframe mode. Let's hit Four on our keyboard and now we're in Wireframe. You can see through the object and make sure you're not selecting something on the opposite side. Let's delete that and let's go back into the shaded mode and hit Five. You can also get to these modes up here by toggling through them. This is a texture mode. We don't have texture, so that one doesn't matter. Now we have these holes that we need to fill. Will go to Mesh Tools and go to Append to Polygon. I'm going to Command Shift, add that to my custom shelf, select it. Now you can see there's these highlighted borders. I don't know if that's super obvious in your view. But this is a thinner green and this is a thicker green. That's telling us where we can select. If we hold our tool out in the viewport or if we look down here on the bottom left, it'll say, "Append to Polygon tool to activate the object, then click on the first border edge to append on." Let's select one of these edges and then just select the other. Now we have this bridge that we made. Let's hit Enter and do the same for this other side. Remember, if we hit G, we can pull up the last use tool and we can do the same thing and make it a little bridge here. Let's hit G again and do the same for these holes. You can see that we just have to do that for two edges. Then it'll fill in the third edge. Let's hit G again. Oops, I selected the wrong thing. I just hit backspace and hit G again. It's trying to go to another. Who knows why it's trying to go out there that I didn't pick up. I'm trying to hit that edge. One thing I like to do is go to View where there's nothing behind this thing. That's pretty much the only thing I can select if you're having trouble with it and hit Enter. It looks like it didn't undo that goofy thing that it did someone undo that. Hit G, select the object, select the Edge and there we go. The other thing to keep in mind, let me just hit backspace to undo that. These purple things are arrows, so it's telling you the edge direction. If I select an edge, you can see the arrows are pointing in a certain direction. They're going in this direction, they're huge. It's hard to see. If I chose this one, might still do it. If you have a problem where you have more than two or three edges, look at those purple arrows and see which direction it's going in if you're having trouble making that work. Now we have this type of slant to our object. I'll close that. We have this back area. Is at the same level as those. In this lesson, we learned the Insert Edge Loop tool, the poly Extrude tool, the Append to Polygon tool. We learned three new tools. We learned a lot. Those are tools you're going to use over and over again. In the next lesson, we're going to continue to refine this. We're going to bevel some edges and keep adding more detail. Thanks for watching. 9. Update: Retopo Remesh Tools: Welcome to this update class for Maya 2020. We're going to discuss the rematch and read topologies tools. These are pretty handy new editions that actually were around in 2018 and I'll show you how to access those if you're working on an older version of Maya 2018 as well. I've just created these couple of spheres here to demonstrate these tools. What I want to do is just use the Boolean. We have some geometry that's not ideal, especially to any deformations. If we wanted to start to create this as a character head or something like that, that we want this mesh to deform. We don't want all these in guns that were created by the Boolean operation. I'm going to delete the history to get rid of all those empty groups we had over here. Now I'll have to do is rematch a read topologies. They're used for different things. If I rematch, it's going to create a ton of triangles, because of the second tool that's actually okay, we could use this. Let's say if we're going to start sculpting to have some more geometry to where we could actually pull things around a little bit more. Now those black areas are just artifacts of the viewport. We could shade that out and smooth those out as well. If we were going to sculpt here or something on this. It's very helpful to quickly take a simple object that has very few polygons and give it a lot more geometry. Then we can start to use the Sculpt Tool on it. You might say like, Well, what's good is this because now we have all these triangles and we can't use this for animation where you have to read topologies it, and that's going to take forever. Well, that's what the second tool is about. Let's click that and go back to the poly modeling and read topologies. Now we have quads and we can actually use this for animation. Even if we don't like exactly how it's setup now we could, this would be a much better mesh to read topologies from if we wanted to do the traditional manual method. We also have access to the settings of these. You can find them here if you wanted to adjust exactly how it is interpolating. It's not a perfect tool and that's why you need to know how to do this stuff manually just in case it doesn't do what you want it to do. You need to be able to know how to do these things manually, but it isn't nice edition. If you want to have access to these in your own Maya 2018, all you have to do is actually type in in the mail script on here, poly Remesh with a capital R. It is important to have the capital R there and it will remeshen. Now you can see that this is much different from the default settings of the other tool we had. But again, we can get to these settings here and we can increase or decrease these settings to get something more similar to what we had in the default settings. If we click the button here. The same is true for Retopol. We could just type in polyRetopol again with a capital R and the semicolon and hit enter. Again we have something Retopologies and quads that we could use an animation or uses a base. This is really good to prototype and quickly iterate and not have to worry too much about your topology at an early stage. But again, let me emphasize that it is important to know how to do this manually. The other tool I want to demonstrate is the symmetry tool. I'll also show this in a separate lesson, but just in case someone is watching this update and watch the other, I'm going to have this as a separate lesson. But because this tool create non-symmetrical geometry, a quick and easy way and there's no line down the center here. Quick and easy way to make this symmetrical is to click this symmetry button here. Now, we will need to adjust the settings. The default didn't do what we wanted to do. It was on the symmetry of the wrong axis. What we can do is just change these settings here and it will take a second update. But that's basically creates a seemed on the middle and it's somewhat symmetrical. Again, the importance of knowing how to read topologies manually is that, the given take care is that now that we've created triangle, so you're going to use these tools back and forth. This would most be helpful when, you have symmetry on, in your tools and you want it to be selecting the same vertices on either side. Now that we're starting to move things around, it'll actually mirror from one side to the other. But the disadvantage is now we've lost that nice quad to have triangles there. We could go back and forth between these tools. Use the Retopol again on this. It may not. We got rid of the symmetry again, but now we have quad, so it's a give-and-take and again, it's very important to know how to do this manually so that you're not constrained by the tool is not doing what you want them to. They're really just for convenience sake. It's very important if you want to become a modeler to know how to do all this manually. But I wanted to show this quick update and demonstrates a couple new tools and Maya 2020, thanks for watching. 10. GB Trap - Bevel, Normals: Welcome to the next lesson where we will continue adding detail to the Ghostbuster trap. In this lesson we're going to add some bevels and add this front panel here. We'll add more geometry to it and details. Let's focus on this bevel for right now. It looks like this is a [inaudible] rounded edge, but this edge maybe isn't as rounded as that one, but it is rounded there. This one is maybe a little sharper. This could be because this is a homemade thing and it's not exactly machined as it would be if it were a real thing. Depending on, if you want to divide these bevels up, you can do that and do them separately. I see we would add them all together so that it's a little quicker and you can add more detail or do the bevel separately if you want at a later time. The one thing I want to do before I do that as well is to finish out this bottom section. You can see that this goes down to a footprint that doesn't just go straight down to the floor. There is insert area that we can do with the poly extrude tool and adding some edge loops and things that we've learned. Let's go to the Insert Edge Loop tool. I'm going to go to the tool settings over here to make sure that we're back on relative distance and I'm just going to choose one area here and use that. Then I'm going to go to the face mode and select all the faces. Whoops, I'm still on the Insert Edge Loop tool and I'm going to turn off tool settings now. Let's go to the face mode, will choose q or w, whichever to select the faces and I'll hit four to make sure those are all the ones selected. Go back to five, now I will choose the poly Extrude tool. I'll just pull in a thickness a little bit. You can see we have Keep Faces Together off. Let's turn that on. As this goes in, it'll all go together. The only thing with this is it's also going up. That's the only issue there is the fact this is going up. If we go to the front view, pulling down space bar, clicking and dragging from the middle. You can see it's going up, so we can offset that later let's just bring the thickness in. It's not just the same. That looks about right, It looks, it's actually goes in and maybe there's another layer here. Let's deal with that. Let's go to the front view. I'm going to go to the vertice mode. I'm just going to select all the bottom vertices. I'll click w, and then I'm going to hit x. Now I'm going to hold down X on my keyboard. That will snap to the grid because I want this on the floor. It will snap to the grid. Now, let's add another edge loop so that we can get this bottom section out and is the same thing we just did. Let's go to face mode. Select all the faces. Whoops. Again, I'm still on the edge loop mode, so light cue to get over that. Select all of the faces, go to the extrude. Let's just extrude this out. We want to keep faces together on as we did before. Let's have that somewhere between, the front end and insert edge here. Now I'll go back to the vertices, select them, and hold on X to drag them up to the floor again. Now we've created loops. Now we've created this inset, footprint here. I want to do that before we do the bevel so that we can bevel all of these together. Let's go back to this. It looks like this is fairly rounded at the bottom. Let's select the edges we want a bevel and start beveling. We'll go to the edge mode. I'll select this edge and that edge, this edge and that edge. We're just going through and holding down shift to select more than one edge. Let's see what we're going to do down here. Let's do these corners later because it won't be as similar to the same distance of an edge loop. Let's just do these top ones. Let's go to edit mesh, bevel. I'm going to command shift click it to add it to our shelf. Now we can see it's starting to bevel the edges. Now, this one doesn't have a tool that pops up. We can go over here to the poly bevel input and it'll pop it up for us here. We can change the fraction, which is how far it is. We can change the segments, which we will need many more. If you can see I'm clicking and dragging, not a lot is happening is because the pie chart here is too slow. Let's speed that up so that I can add more sections here. Cool. We've rounded those two out. The thing I want to do actually is to move these closer together. I'm going to go to the edge. I'm going to double-click this. You can see because now this is a triangle. In Maya it only likes quads. Everything in this model so far is a quad, meaning four sides except for this, so when I double-click it, that's why it doesn't select this edge loop because it stops here on this triangle. Just be aware that Maya does not like triangles in that regard. Now that I have a slide I just want to move this a little bit closer. It's a more of an extreme angle. Select these edges again. Cool. Let's set the poly Bevel, and I'll click on the input over here. Let's hit t to bring up the menu. Let's add more segments to this, and that's looking pretty good. If we go back to this, we can see also along this edge it's not perfectly flat. We get actually add more bevel to these edges as well. Let's go to the edge tool. We'll double-click this. Let's select all the edges to outward facing edges here of the object. I'm just holding down Shift and selecting them. I'm going to do these bottom ones later. Let's deselect those. Close, I'll shift, select this edge. Deselect by holding down control to deselect things. Sorry, I didn't mention that. Double-click that and go in here. Select these, control click and drag, deselect that and let's bevel these edges as well. We'll go back to the bell tool. That looks a lot better. T to pull up the tool. We can change this fraction if we want to add maybe one more segment in there. The fractional stop based on how much room it has. You can see it's running into this edge here, so it can't go any further than that. I think that's okay for us, but just know that in your case, if you wanted to go further, it can't go further than that edge, so you'd have to move this edge before you beveled, it can go further than that. Now we have a much nicer edge here. If you look at these, because we didn't bevel this one, this one looks very CG very exact and hard. This one is just a tiny bit softer and it adds a lot to the model. The other thing that we run into here are a normal situation. Normals are how Maya knows what direction of face is facing. If we go to display and we go down to polygons, we can turn on face normals, which are going to pop this algorithm and turn them off here and again in a second. Let's click face normals. Now you can see we got these green little arrows. That tells you which direction the faces are pointing and for the most part they're all pointing in the right way. I bring all this out because it will affect how Maya views and shades the object in this almost fake shaded mode that you can see the view port. I bring this up because I'll turn that off just by clicking face normals again. Close this. You can see this is shaded in a weird way, if you click of here it's gray area here, it's wide, it's like what's happening here. This looks weird. There's a couple of different things we can do. First off, we can clean up the geometry a little bit if we wanted. You can see here we have an issue that this has a face. I'm hitting f to zoom it on and zooming out. This has a face, it's not connecting here, should connect here. There's no edge here. It's trying to drag this face over this thing without an edge. That's why this one is shaded weird. You can see it has a dark area on the top here, and then it's lighter here, but this one doesn't look the same way. We get this hard edge. If we go to the Multi-cut tool, let's go to the Mesh tools and we'll go down Multi-cut and will command shift that add it to our shelf. If I click that, I can select a vertices and select another one. It'll cut this in half if I hit enter. Now we have room for that to describe what's actually happening. If I select of here you can see it's still shaded in a weird way. We can fix that in a second, but before we do that, we need to add the geometry in here so it knows how to describe that area. We're going to multi-cut tool. Let's do that to this side as well and hit enter. Now, if I go to Mesh display and let me zoom in here so we can see this change. If we go to mesh display and average, you can see it changes the whole model. If I go to Mesh display conform or set to face, I think is what we want. Now, it looks right. That's just one way to fix that. Now that we've set the normals to be to the face, we can see that we're getting these hard edges here on the curved areas. Well, my computer thinks I'm right-clicking when I'm not. We get these hard edges here. You [inaudible] is gradient from dark to bright here on these stepped colors. To get rid of that, let's select the object and go to soften harden edges. When we do that, it will soften and harden the right edges and the right areas. Now we do not have those weird colored areas here that we were getting before. That's a way to get around that and to get these smooth areas to look smoother. We've done quite a bit in this lesson with beveling edges. I'm going to go ahead and end this one here. In the next lesson, we'll start to add this detail of this panel to the object. Thanks for watching. 11. GB Trap - Booleans: In this lesson, we'll continue to create detail on this ghost buster trap. In the previous one we did some beveling of the edges. Let's finish that up, but first I noticed that at some point my model got uncentered. You can see that it's not totally centered up here, so all I need to do, that happens, is hold down spacebar. Click in the middle here. Go to my right view and I can see that it is not lined up with the handle, so I can just hold down x, and with the move tool selected, I can just snap it to the middle. Now that I can tell that it is centered up with everything and we're ready to continue. If anything like that happens, it's no big deal, just figure it out and snap it back to the center. You can change the pivot if you need to, all that stuff. Don't feel like you're always stuck or you can't change something or whatever. It's just a matter of getting comfortable with these tools and starting to use them. One thing I want to do is add this type of a bevel here to more areas quickly. It looks like maybe that's what I did. I middle mouse dragged this while I had the manipulator tool selected. It's probably how it got off-centered. Just be careful about that and you can always fix that. Let's select the edges here, right-clicking, going up to edge, and we will go through and shift select the edges that we would like to bevel. Double-clicking, it looks like I accidentally don't have, shift held down, so hold down shift, and just double-clicking these and these corners. I want to do the bottom corner separate because I want those to have a different kind of bevel, ends to this one as well and this one. These might not be super clean because we're doing them separate from the sides. Ideally, we do these together because their intersection might be dirty. So we'll see if that works at all, if it doesn't, we can just skip that and you can undo the bevel from earlier and get back to that. Now we have that selected. We can go to bevel and you can see on these corners, if we don't do these together, then they're wonky a little bit. We can always fix that if we need to. It looks like I missed one edge here as well. Let's go back to bevel and then let's go to the poly bevel input here that we created. We can hit t to bring up the options here if we'd like and resize this to make it more clear. Let's go to a higher fraction here and add at least one segment. Let's go to object mode so we can see that and deselect it. Looks like it did a pretty good job. Only thing we need to fix down here is this intersection. If you happen to do these bevel separately and there's some wonky thing like this. This is modeling. This is creating things on the fly. Making different decisions and then fixing things when they're not working. What were going to do is just add a little multi cut tool here and we're going to add that edge in. We're going to do that to the bottom here as well and hit enter. If I go to the vertices mode here and zoom in here, just so I can hit F to have something to focus in on. We're so close to it that it's hard to see. Let's go to the edge mode and let's just delete these edges that we don't need. Actually, we need these and the center, so I'm control clicking and dragging those. Now I'm going to go shift right-click, delete edge and now we have that. Let's go to the vertex mode and just drag this up. If we want to make it precise, we can go to a camera view that's orthographic so we can see it in line with everything else and we can just drag it up so it's in line with this line here. We'd also vertex snap it, holding down V. And now we know it's in line. We can see the ones down here also need to be fixed. I'm going to leave that for now and let you fix that if you'd like. But that's how you fix intersections like that. It looks like that one needs to be fixed as well. So I'm just holding down spacebar and clicking in the center to get to the right camera and holding down V to drag that to the right spot and then going back to perspective with the holding down spacebar, dragging, clicking and dragging. That's how we fix intersections like that when something like that occurs. Again, that's just part of modeling being flexible. Because, say you had a supervisor and now they want to add more bevels and you've already done all this beveling things don't happen perfectly from one step to another. So you need to be able to adapt in other tools well enough to adjust the model as needed. Again, I'm just going to leave that one now for times' sake, it looks like we need to do that on every corner but for times' sake, let's just leave that.. Let's look at these edges here. I want to just select the corner pieces and I want it to go all the way to the edge there on the inside. Let's control click deselect areas that we don't need and double-check that we have everything selected. Let's get this side as well. Just double-clicking and then control clicking it to deselect. Whoops. Looks like I zoomed out in the wrong spot. One thing I just did, sorry, it's a habit. I'm used to using these tools, so I'll have to slow down here. I'm not entirely sure what just happened. The view just went away. The first thing I did was hit the bracket button on the keyboard. That'll just go back to your previous camera view. We can toggle between wherever the camera went. I'm not entirely sure. I might've hit A which is frame everything. Who knows why it went that way. That's just part of working in 3D sometimes. But yeah, just hit bracket and you can get back to the previous camera view if you ever missed where you went or something like that. Things go haywire sometimes and yeah, if you know the tools well enough, it's not that big a deal, you just get back to where you were. We have those done. I did those separately because I'm going to go back to poly bevel here, hit T. We could also do it from this menu, but I just like, that just looks better to me to use this one, floating one. Let's increase the fraction and I did this separately because I wanted to do these separately. It looks like we're going to be prohibited by this interior piece here. It's getting stuck right here, I can't go any wider than that. Let's undo this. We have this selection, and instead of remaking the selection, let's create a quick select set. That's just a way that we can get that selection back without having to redo that all over again. We'll go to create, go down to sets and quick select set and we'll just say bevel edges. We don't even have to name this because we'll probably just delete it here in a minute and we'll say, okay. Now we can unselect it and we can save that selection for later. Let's delete these edges here so that we can have a greater range in the bevel. Again, this may seem like tedious work but this is just modeling. This is part of modeling. If you want to get into modeling, well, what's happening here? If you want to get into modeling, this is just part of modeling, like I was saying a minute ago, to run into problems and then solve them. We have all those selected so I'll hit shift, hold down shift and right-click, get to delete edge. Now, we go to the bevel edges, I'll just go to quick select sets, bevel edges. Now, we have a selection. We learned something in that process of problem-solving. Now, we have that, we can go back to the bevel tool and we pull the fraction here, we should be able to go a lot further. Oh, no, we're stuck by those. So I think what we have to do here, is because we're still stuck by these interior pieces. We're going to have to deselect this line here. Let's just undo this and control drag that. Again, anytime I'm modeling something in my head, I have an idea of how it should work, but it's not entirely certain that's going to be the case. Let's go to poly bevel. Now here we go. Let's zoom in and let's see if we can increase the segments here. Let's go to object mode and see how that looks. It's looking pretty good. One thing you might notice is this line here, and I think that's because we don't have the geometry here, to support this area. So one thing we can do is go to the multi Cut tool and click here and go to the edge, it's missing. Do the same for the side. Now, when we go to the object mode, and click off, still there, not as bad. Now we have the corners beveled here. Let's move on to creating the panel on the right side. So let's go and create a new object. We'll go to Poly modeling shelf, create a cube, bringing it up. Most things that ever start to get modeled in Maya start with a cube or sphere, something simple, and then you add complexity to it later. I'm just using the Scale tool to change the size and get it roughly in the right spot. We can just actually, we can do the same thing that we did before. Now hold down d and v and vertex snap it to the edge, to its farthest edge, and then go back to the manipulator mode and then hold down V with just the normal Move tool and it will snap right to that face. Now also, when we scale it, it should scale from that face, won't have to worry about like going inside of the trap itself. This is important to do to have a separate piece because when we add materials later, we want to have a different object. You can see over here it's, it's called p cube three. We can start naming these things, if we want to clean this up, but basically this is a separate object, we can see it in the outliner. We know it's a separate object, so it can have a different material, because if we look at the reference, this is a aluminum metal, and this is like a painted black or something. So it's good to have those separate it out. So let's go to the edges here and let's right-click. Go to edge mode. I'll just select everything and bevel everything together. If we go back again, click it here. But I like to go back to the custom shelf, so keeps everything a little organized and go to Poly bevel. Let's just increase the segments to two. Right-click to go to object mode and clicking and dragging course to the object mode option here, and letting go. So now we have that. Let's look at creating the screws here. We have these semicircular ends that go in. Then this looks like a cylinder type of screw. Let's create this and show you one other tool called a Boolean. Let's go to the Poly modeling shelf, create a sphere, and let's just group all of this. I'm shift selecting everything and outliner and hitting ''Command G'' and that will group everything. We can call this trap or GB trap and hit ''Enter''. Now with that selected, I can hit ''Ctrl H''. That'll hide it. Now I can focus on what I'm working on here. You can see graded out here so we know it's hidden. To get that back, we can just hit ''Shift H.'' So with P sphere, let's create, it's screw and insert here. Let's scale this down, hitting ''R'' scale it down, and I want to select all the faces on the outside here. I'm going to click and drag and select all those faces. Then I'm going to go to the custom shelf and go to extrude, and with keep faces together off, I'm going to increase the thickness. When I hit the little pie chart here to make that go slower. I can actually look at this from a top-down view, holding down space, clicking and going to top view. I can see how far out I want this to actually affect the screw head here. Something like that, I think. Then I will go back to perspective, and right-click to object mode. Hit the ''R'' for scale and scale up in the Y here. Drag this down and we want this to go in as far as we think we need the screw to go. Maybe pretty far, something like that, and get a wireframe mode hitting ''Four''. We can see it doesn't go all the way to half. So because this is sticking out, at least happens more pancake shape, we could actually just go ahead and do that with the sphere. Let's go into the right view. Let's go to face mode, right-clicking on the sphere and going to face. Also if that ever happens where we actually go into UV mode and now you're in a whole new menu. You can just hover back over the one you are in, the little gray dot here, and we'll go back to that menu or you can just let go of right-click, while you don't have anything selected and I'll get you back to this. Let's go to the faces, click and drag all the faces below the half here we can see this is our ground plane are zero. We can hit just ''Delete'' on that. For faces you don't have to do anything special. You can just delete them with the delete button on the keyboard. Let's go back to object mode. Then we can scale this down, hitting ''R'', scale this down to be more pancake shaped. Now we can move this down to be something like this. We don't want go all the way through. We want to leave a little gap here at the bottom. Let's go back to perspective, holding down space-bar. Then let's hit ''5'' to go back to shaded. With the sphere selected here, and then this one selected, we can go to Mesh Boolean. Booleans are basically a way to subtract or add one object to another. Now that we have that done, we want a difference. Let's click that, and boom, we have a difference and we have our screw. That's super helpful. You don't have to model every little corner and it's like, these edges on a sphere, how do you actually even get that? It's nice to have a Boolean every once in a while. They can be wonky, and you do have to select things in the correct order. If I didn't do it in that order, if I selected, let me hit q to get back to my tool, and sometimes my has little buggy thing of, I need to shake the viewport a little bit or use the viewport and it'll let me start use tools again. We might run into similar bugs when you are using it. I'll shift select in a different way, now you see it does the reverse. You want to make sure you're selecting it in the proper order and that you're using the right Boolean. That's why it tore off the menu here because it's nice to have it in case you screw up, just go ahead and use it again and again. So we can close that out, we have this made and now let's bring our trap back. Also, now that we're looking at the outlier you can see it creates all this history when you do a Boolean. If we look at the input over here, we deleted the faces, so it says delete component, we extruded. It's combining the inputs from the two pieces and then you have this Boolean, so it gets really messy. Then it creates these empty shapes and those are quite useless and can actually be harmful in the future. When you do a Boolean and you're done using it, it's good to go ahead and clean up that piece of geometry and delete the history. Go to edit, delete by type in history. You want to make sure you do not do, delete all by type. When it says delete all, it means everything in your scene, not just what you have selected. This is a very important distinction right now. These are not the same thing. Delete by type is what you have selected. Delete all by type as everything in your scene. We just want to do what we have selected. So we're going to go to delete by type and go to history. Now you can see all those inputs are gone and all those empty groups over here are gone. It's much cleaner to do once you do a Boolean like that. Let's click this and hit Shift+H to bring it back on hide it, and click the sphere here and let's bring it over and rotate it 90 degrees by typing it in the channel box. Let's vertex snap the pivot holding down DMV to the bottom here so then we can vertex snap holding down V to the front face of the object, so now we can slide around knowing it's on the front. Because we have ambient occlusion on up here, we can see it has a shadow effect around it, so we know where it is in space a little better. I'm just going to save real quickly because it's doing crazy things. Anytime Maya is doing crazy things, it's good to save, and of course you can follow along with all these lessons in the according numbered scene. We're at number four right now, so you can pick up where we left off there and use the same model and the same scene. I'm just going to bring that up here somewhere and scale it down, and that works pretty good for me. Now we've started to add this panel, and we can add a couple more details like the cylinders, something super easy to do. Let's just create a cylinder and bring it over, rotate it down 90 degrees. I like to do it here first, so it tells me which axes I'm doing it over here, so then I know which one I need to type it into up there. The other thing I want to do is add more subdivisions to the caps. I'm going to untuggle down the input here for the cylinder and go to subdivision caps and let's just say three for fun, and the reason I'll show you here in a second, because we needed to adjust the model a little bit. I'm going to drag this out, scale it down, move it over, move it up, do all this fun stuff that you know how to do now. Let's just scale it down and then drag it out and see how they're far apart and maybe a little thicker. One really interesting thing is isolating where your scaling from. This is something I use all the time and I didn't know years late until I was using my Maya. Into using Maya I didn't know that. Saying I want to scale the radius of this thing, I could do this, and then I could do this, and I can do this, and do this, and I'm not entirely sure if it's keeping the right circle shape. If I don't want to scale in this direction but I want to scale in the other two directions, all I've have to do is hit control, and click and use that, and now it's isolating those other two ones. You can see those, the red and blue things are going up and down, but the one I'm clicking on isn't. It's a huge helpful little tip that took me a couple years to figure out, and now you know it in the first hour of learning Maya. This is the benefit of taking these classes. You can learn what took me quite some time to learn. The next thing I want to do is go into edge mode. The reason why we added these caps is, I'm just shift and double-clicking them to get the edge loops, is if you look here, you can see it has this bevel. We could actually bevel it if we wanted to, but let's just have a little more control over it in our own way, and scale these two edge loops and a little bit. It does pretty much the same thing. Now we've added that detail ourselves, and we could even go further and bevel these two edges. Now that we've done the larger move, why don't we just select these shift double-clicking, and then if we go to bevel, I don't want it to look super rounded out, so I'm going to reduce the fraction quite a bit and right-click and go to object mode so I can see it. It looks a lot better. I'm going to duplicate this by hitting Command+D on the keyboard to the manipulator tool by hitting W, and lets drag and other one down. Now we have those two red things that are, who knows what they are, on the side of this ghost buster trap. You can also see we have another screw down here on the bottom right, so let's just duplicate this command+D and we'll just drag this down and over here, and now we have that. The next thing we're going to do is create the knob here that's in the center piece. You can see it has these ribs around that is going to create a, we're going to need a special type of technique to model that in a repeating pattern over a curved surface. In the next lesson, we'll cover that and add more detail to this. Thanks for watching and hope you learned quite a bit in this lesson. See you then. 12. GB Trap - Knob Motion Path: Welcome to this lesson where we will create the knob that we see here in the reference. I want to make this its own lesson because it's going to use a very unique technique. Between the previous lesson, in this lesson, I also added a few more details using the same techniques we've already learned. I want to save some time and not handhold you through every single thing. If we've already covered that type of a topic, and I'm going to do that throughout the course so we can speed this up, and you're not having to follow an relearned the same things over and over again. The things that I added were bevels to handle and to the extension here, and I added another plate and these screws. The only thing to notice and to remember that I haven't covered about bevels when I was making this as resizing it and doing all things. Same thing with the beveled edge here, and if I was to start to scale something that I've already beveled. The bevel itself is going to scale as well. You can see the distance of those edge loops are getting further and further apart, and it's messing with the bevel. I don't want that. When I'm scaling something, I want to be able to be the same. So if you're going to scale something, you probably need to go into vertex mode and move the vertices. Instead of scaling this out, you want to move them so all the bevel is maintained. This is the same bevel distance that we had when it was this short of a piece. That's just one thing to keep in mind when you're scaling anything that's been beveled that's not uniformly scaled, I should say, because if it's uniformly scaled, then it's going to scale up and it's all going to get bigger together. If that's what you want, that's okay. But just know that bevel is going to get bigger if you scale the whole thing up together. Let's get into making this little knob here, and it's a non-uniform shape as well. It's not a cylinder all the way around as this point over here. Let's go and create a cylinder because we're going to start with the most basic things. I'm also going to group these screws also have these what are going to be black pieces. If you can look at the reference here. So I included those as well and then I group them. I'm going to just middle mouse drag. I'm shifts selecting everything and middle mouse dragging that into the main group GB trap, and we're going to do that with everything else as well. It's just shift, select everything that we're not currently modeling, and middle mouse drag that and like go over the main group. Now we can select that and hide it with Ctrl H, and now we can look at this cylinder, and what we want to do is pull out one point. So I'm going to delete some edges, and before I do that and start messing with the history of this thing, I want to add a cap here. That's important for cylinders at least because if you start messing with this thing, and then later you want to add a cap, it won't do it because you've messed with the history of the object. So get this cleaned up first because you won't be able to change it a ton later if you're messing with components like we're about to do. I'm basically going to select double-click and Shift and double-clicking all of the edges here, except for the one in the center, I just skipped because that's going to be the one we're going to pull out. I'm going to hold down shift and right-click and go to delete edge, and now we have the point that we want, and it looks like comes out far. So we can just click and drag this out. Something like that, and we can double-click these, and maybe just scale the mental level. Or what we could do is add some more edge loops here and scale them out. Let's go to the edge loop tool on our custom shelf. Click it and go to the tool settings here, make sure we're on multiple edge loops. Let's try four, clicking here, and it looks like it's the same distance. I'm looking at the distance here with a distance here, it's maybe a little bigger. Let's go five. Just type that in. Click one time. That looks a lot closer. Now we have re-made those, that uniform distance here you can see it doesn't go all the way to the center, and this is a goofy thing about cylinders while we made that cap at the very beginning because it wouldn't make these edge loops later if we didn't. That's just some quirky modeling stuff and I'm trying to help you avoid that in the future. One thing we can do here is scale this out just a little bit. We just did those two, so now it's not a flat surface all the way to the end. But again, that's no big deal. We do things and then we change it back and it's very adaptable and you have to be the same and your knowledge and application of all everything that you know for modeling. You can do whatever you need to do, and you're not constrained by the tools or the decisions you make, you can just go with the flow. Then we have the general shape of this thing. The big question is, how do we make the a ribbed looking cylinders here all the way around? We'll address that first. Let's deal with this. It looks like it's a beveled edge here. It's rounded. Let's bevel edge first. I'll double-click this and I'll double-click that, and let's look at the point that's probably beveled two here. Let's go to bevel and let's go to the input here from bevel and drag out a few more segments and then change the fraction a little bit. It looks like it's snapping around. So I'll just click the pie chart here to go to a slower fraction, and not entirely sure watts freaking out. So I just clicked here and I'll middle mouse dragging in the viewport. Again, you just have to adapt with however, if it starts acting, acting goofy, you can just route around that problem and not have to worry about it. Now we have that done The only thing I would comment on is possibly using higher subdivisions at the beginning because now you can see there it's fascinated here. It's not totally around all the way around. One trick you can try is hitting three keyboard, and that will smooth the model. In general, in hard surface modeling, you'll probably do that at the very end, but you want to make sure all your geometry is accurate and stuff, and this series of lessons about the ghost buster trap. I'm trying to model things in a way that we don't have to rely on that, and that we can be a little more sloppy with our geometry. But in this case it works pretty well. We can leave it in the three mode. I solve the problem of this not being rounded enough, and I can go between one and three to show you the difference, and if you hit two, this is an intermediate, tries to show you the one you had before, but because they run on top of each other, it's really hard to see. Mainly you're just going to use one and three to see the difference between smoothing something and not submitting something. We have that. Let's go back to one just because that's how we're going to model things. Let's add a edge loop right in the center of this thing that goes all the way around, and that's what we're going to tell these ribs to follow. We need one right in the middle here. Let's go to the edge loop tool will go back to the Tool Settings and just shrink this down to one. That way, it'll just put one right in the dead center of one right in the dead center, and you can see I accidentally clicked a few things and so I just hit undo, go back to object mode and we're golden. I'll get off the edge loop tool so don't accidentally make more edge loops again. Now we have this edge loop. Let's go to the edge mode by right clicking and dragging up, select that edge, double-click it, and let's go to modify, convert, polygon edges to curve, and we'll click the little box on the end there to get the options. I want to choose linear because I want it to follow exactly where the edge loop is. I don't want it to interpolate and get curvy, so we're going to choose linear for right now and convert. Now you can see we have a curve here that follows exactly the shape. Now with that, we have something to add the ribs to. There's a couple different ways we could have gone about doing this. This is one way. Another way is using mash, which we'll talk about later, which is used for motion graphics, and you could use mash to help you model some things as well, especially things that are patterns. But this is a tried and trued method and you don't have to rely on some new plug-in thing that Maya has come out in the last couple of years. It's can have its own problems. So it's good to just know how to do things with the bare-bones Maya tools, and also get introduced to some new things. Also we're going to hack an animation tool to use for this. I'm going to go to poly modeling and want to make the one rib musculature down. Just going to pull it over here so I can see it scales all the way down at this a little bigger and drag it over here so I can see the size and see, it doesn't. It almost goes all the way to the edge. So let's just scale it up to about there, and then it looks like these are pretty rounded at the top. Let's just go to edge mode, and I'm just going to select everything. You can see actually, if you shift select things, it will dislike things you have selected. If you want to add to a selection and you're clicking and dragging over something that is already selected, it's going to de-select it if you don't want that to happen. If you do not want that to happen, you have to control and shift, and now I'll add to that selection even if you go over an area that you've already selected. But what we want to do is control-click and de-select that, because we just want to bevel the tops here, and I'll go from a top-down view hitting space bar, clicking and dragging or at a top view, hit F to frame up and control-click the centerpiece here, so it will deselect everything goes back to Perspective mode by hitting space bar, and let's go to the Bevel tool, and let's increase it's increased that fraction and bump up the segments. Yes. So we'll just haven't I had on a slow mode here, so I changed that to nag and middle mouse drag and a viewport width that selected and it will go a lot quicker. So it's Yeah, something like that in general, you want to try not to add a ton of geometry. We don't need it and it's such a small piece and trying to keep it as light as possible. So now we have that piece and it's going to sit in like this. But the big question is, how do we get this piece to go all the way around this object? We could click and drag and try to place, duplicate one and try to place it exactly. But that's super tedious. We want to try to use the tools to our advantage. So let's go to the "Animation" window here we've been "Modeling". Now let's go to "Animation". Let's click the "polyTocurve" tool. Let's shift-click the cylinder. Lets go to "Constrain" and we'll go down to "Motion Paths". I'm just going tear this off. Attach to "Motion Path". So what we have now, if we click and drag the timeline, even though we're still in the modeling course, don't get confused. Even though we're using the timeline and we are an animation now, we're using this to help us model. So what we've created is that this follows the path. If I select these two things and isolate it here, you can see it says 120 here. That means it's going over the timeline that we had. If this was further out, it would have gone to 194 or whatever. But because it was at 120, that's the length of the timeline. So that's what it's doing. It's going to animate over the length of that. So we haven't this. Now, the thing we want to do is if you notice if you hit play over here, it starts slow, it speeds up and slows in. Slow, speed up, slow in. We don't want that, we want it to be linear because we are going to use this, were hacking this. We want it to have even intervals around this piece. We're going to duplicate this thing around. If it starts slow here and we're trying to go at even intervals, there'll be a lot more of these at the beginning, and they'll be further spaced out here. So you want this to go the same speed all the way around. Again, this is animation stuff, but when you learn 3D, you need to know a little bit of everything to create things. So you can see we have this "Motion Path" here, we have the curve selected. Now we haven't output for the motion path and we click that, we can see this red dot. That means there's a key frame. Now that we've toggled this down, we also have these red dots on the timeline that weren't there before. So there's a couple different ways we can change the handles of this. It'll the same speed through the whole length of this timeline. But we can do it here in the timeline, but I want you to see it visually since it's the first time you're introduced to this stuff. Go to "Windows" "Animation" and we'll go to the "Graph Editor". This will open up a new window and now we see a "motionPath1" U curve, and that's what we're looking at over here "motion Path", "U Value". You can see it starts slow, speeds up and then slow. I'm clicking and dragging the vertex here, the key frame and I'm selecting this one. I want to go and hit this straight line here and it's going to straighten that out. So now we can close this, will learn all about animation and graph editor more later. But for right now, that's all we need to know. so if we play this back, now it's going to go the same speed all the way around. When this loops, you won't be able to tell difference with the speed. Now it just goes all the way around and there's no speed changes. That's exactly what we want. Perfect. So if we go back to the "Animate" tab here, I want "Animation" and we go "Visualize", "Create Animation Snapshot". I'm going to open up the option box here and what we want to do is go the entire length of this thing. So we'll add 120 because that's the timeline over here. We're at 120. Go start to end. We could also say "Time Slider", which will automatically do that. So graze these out, but either one, it's the same thing if you change this number. We'll say, increment will be 1 and then let's say increment 2, well, whatever. Let's just leave that default will say reset settings and make sure we're all the default. So this selected, we actually want to select the cylinder, not the curve. Let's hit "Apply". When we unisolate this, now, we can see what we've actually made. It made way too many of these things. Let's go and unisolate this. With the cylinder selected, let's say an increment of 2 now instead. We'll hit "Apply". I'll take a second and now you can see these ribs and that looks a lot closer to what we need and what is showing up here. So the only thing that I would say is that maybe these need to be closer into the object like they're poking out too far. So one way we can do that, well instead undo will go the curve and let's isolate it and I'll right-click and say "Control Vortex". Click and drag these. So let's hold down d and x and middle mouse, snap it to the center. So now when I scale this down, everything should scale from the center. Now when we do the snapshot, we go to "Visualize" and it "Create Animation Snapshot". We have 2.21. Again, this value can be different for you. This is just based on the size of the thing that I made. So this'll probably be different for you. I'm just taking a guess at what will be the right distribution for mine. So to lock in these changes now you can see it's all the way around correctly. To lock in these changes, we need to delete the history. So let's go to "Edit", "Delete by Type", "History". Let's select all of these shifts select, hit "G", and will middle mouse drag them out. I'm just like go down here anywhere. Let's delete that snapshot group. So now we have the "Ribs" and we have the cylinder. We can delete the original one, we can also delete the curve because we don't really need all that stuff now. So now we can even just middle mouse drag and put this under the cylinder. We can also see there's maybe an extra one here so we can just delete that. So now we have our knob and we need to place it in the right spot. Let's unhide the trap hitting Shift "H". Let's select the cylinder, drag it out here, and let's rotate it down. We can see it should be 90 degrees, negative 90 degrees and x and we can also just scale the whole thing down as you can see. Because we parented the ribs under the cylinder, it's following along with whatever we're doing. This is called a parent and child relationship. We did the same thing with a group earlier that everything is a child of this group node. So if we move the group node, everything will move because everything underneath it as a child. You can do that by middle mouse dragging things in the outliner. You can also do it by selecting two things and then hitting "P" on your keyboard for a shortcut. So there's different ways to do it, but let's just get this in the right spot. Let me drag it up. It looks like It's tilted to the side a little bit and it has this black disc here. So I'm actually just going to steal one, these disks here, command "D" to duplicate it. Also talking about parenting, you can hit Shift "P" to unparent something. You can see it pop this out from that group and we can just scale this up. Let's just bring it over here to the center of this thing, and now we can click the cylinder and make sure we just have a cylinder selected and rotate it. So it's at an interesting angle instead of straight down. Now for later we have this disk that we'll be able to color something differently. Let's see if it goes almost all the way. So let's just do something like that. I just eyeballed it. It's in the center close enough. You could vertex [inaudible] at stuff if you want. But that is looking pretty good. The next lesson, we will create this top structure really quickly. You can do the same knob thing here. You just duplicate this one out and those. But the next thing we'll do is just finish up this model and complete the top and we'll move onto character in the next series of lessons about 3D modeling. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next lesson. 13. GB Trap - Front, Merge Vertices: Welcome to this lesson. In this next section, we're going to speed model this top section where the doors will open in this front element here. I'm going to model this as quickly as possible and just talk you through to what I'm doing. First off, I'm going to make a cube, bring this up and think about extruding this along the center here. Just to make that first element where the doors will open from. If we look here, there's a ridge there. For now I just want to do this flat thing, and I'll deal with the doors later. I want to get this solid piece that goes all the way down here and they can come out. That kind of a thing. I'm looking at where this meets the other spot, the proportion of how big it is relative to everything else. These vertices right-clicking and going to vertex should snap, holding down "v", to the edge here, and the same thing with these over here. I'm holding down "v", and I have the transform. I'm going to go to object mode, get back into that, and drag this down. Look at the reference, and actually goes all the way up to the edge of the handle, it looks like. We can snap these as well, hold down "v", and drag over. See if we can get it. There we go. Same thing with the spots here. We want to hit the floor and then to the top of this thing. I'm actually going to hold down "space bar" click, and go to right view, then drag this up. It doesn't have to be exact. We can actually, even just crash this all the way through if we wanted. Which is what I'll probably just do for speed at the moment. The only thing we need to worry about though, is that if we're going to extrude this piece out from here, it does need to match the top. It looks like it's going to come out at the top. Let's get that aligned, hold "space bar", go to right view, and get that there. The reason I'm not using "v", is because it's not registering which vertices to snap to. In that instance, I just come in really close, zoom in with my camera super close. I have the manipulator tool selected for "y". I know that I can zoom in, for example, let's say on these vertices, and I don't have the manipulator tool. What I can do is hold down the middle mouse button and drag, and I know it's locked to that vertical axis, so that's another way to do it. I can zoom in super close and even get the wire-frame by hitting four. There we go. Okay, there we go. Okay, hold on "space bar", click, go to perspective view, hit five, and then we can extrude this over. But first we need an edge. I need to go my custom shelf, hit an edge in here. We have the tool set, so it does multiple loops. We're just going to turn that off. Go to the relative distance and just drag this somewhere in here, and double-click it, go back to the reference. It looks like it's pretty close to the edge. I drag this all the way here. What I'm looking at is, this is going to be extruded outward. I don't know if you can see my mouse that well, but this seems to be pretty far to the edge. I Might have to move all of this as well, subtract this out. Let's just drag. Doesn't really matter. Let's drag it here and then go to face. I'm going to select both sides, and extrude this out. Tap tool window here so we get more screen really instead. I'm just going to drag this out so that it can go just on the inside. We'll go here, and we'll select these faces, and will extrude it out just past the edge here, let's extrude again, just past the edge. It looks like we'll extrude again, and then scale it down. It's hit "g", because we can just extrude again, and then I'm going to hit "r", to go to scale. Scale this down to get that edge there. It looks a little more blocky than what I have. I'll bring it out a little more, maybe scale it back. That looks closer. Then we have the flat edge, and then this one comes out. There's a little corner here. That one also goes down. We can make an edge loop here, and extrude out that face from this corner, and this corner. We need an edge loop that goes here, and we need an edge loop that goes down this area. That would cross this axis there and there. We're actually pretty close with these. Let's see. That distance I'm looking at, it might be actually this one is pretty damn close. The only problem is when we scaled in, these scaled in with it, so we can scale these back out. It looks like we might have a situation where other faces weren't kept together that's why. Let's undo this. This is an important part of extruding and keeping the faces together when you need it. Let's go back to extrude, and keep faces together is off. I just want to take a second to show you where to change the defaults. For the issue that I'm having with setting the keep faces together on. If we go down to modeling, we can say, keep faces together, and that's going be the default, now. Let's save, and that's that. When I hit extrude, and I turn on keep faces on, now. Now it will behave correctly. Because I know we're going to want to extrude this next one by hitting "g", instead of scaling in on all the faces, so that these edge loops stay straight, I'm just going to grab these two edges and scale them in. Because I want to keep those inward edges straight. Because what we're going to do now is add an edge loop here. If those were crooked, it would follow it here. We don't want that. To get an even edge loop on both sides, we go back into the tool, and turn on multiple edge loops, and crank this up. There we go. Then just double-click all these. Actually, that's the one we want to keep, so I'll just "shift double-clicking" all of these really quickly. It may seem tedious, but it's a sure fire a way to know that everything is evenly spaced. I'll leave that last one. Shift, right-click, drag, delete edge. Now we have that kind of buffer that we can extrude this other piece from. I'm going to select these. You can actually see why I made room for here, in between the last lessons. I added this plate, and we can move that later to match this width. I'm going to hit extrude again, and make sure keep faces together is on. Because they're all going in different directions, I'm going to use the slider here, and just crank up the thickness. Now, we can play. Let's look at this. This is a flat edge, it's more of a triangle, and same down there. There's a couple of different ways we can go about resolving that triangle. Let's do a little multi cut, I think this is the right amount of distance. This piece here, could be pushed back a little bit. I don't really care about this face being a weird angle now, because I'm going to delete it in a second anyways. Proceed with this gap here, making sure it's the right distance. All these little things add up. We're just approximating this, but those little details are nice to hit. I'm going to delete these faces here in a second, but what I'm going to do first is use the "multi-cut" tool and just draw a line between those two areas and create a new little triangle here. You'll see why in a second, because we're going to delete all the faces up top. I'm going to go to the face mode by right clicking and dragging to face. Go to Q or W, I'm going to turn this off, and shift click these faces and delete them. We can also take those away, delete those, and it looks like I snagged a straight face here, that's one thing I just do by habit. I spin around as soon as I delete faces, because I want to make sure I didn't do something like that. If you're using four, you could also toggle on four real quick. You'll see that red area pop up as a selection. Then we're going to use the "append polygon" tool. Click an edge in here. Now you can see the arrows working a little better, and which direction we would click the edges. Once we get that flat plane, now we can hit enter. We do have this kind of weird normal issue that we have dealt with before, we can address that later with the mesh display options that we showed in a previous lesson, but let's just keep finishing up the model here. I'm going to adjust these by going to the vertices, and clicking, and dragging those. I almost want to scale those out. I think as it's going to be such a small amount won't matter, but scaling bevels, like I mentioned earlier. There's always a little danger because the bevel is going to change. I'm scaling by such a small amount, and it's on the inside of something, you would never really see that anyway. Let's go back here, we're seeing that this is below here, and this goes in at an angle. I think this is more supposed to be up here but still below this area, and we can just select these and drag those in and down, because we're just going to crash that right into the other model, just for speed's sake. You don't necessarily have to attach these things. This needs to go way closer to the edge. Control, shift, and dragging. If I were to shift select that, it will deselect it. Again, shift drag, It won't select everything you, have to control, shift, select. Control, shift, drag, to select that stuff. Shifts like this, drag it in. I want to make sure you can see here, remaining is the fact that, because we didn't click that last [inaudible] it didn't line up with this vertices, and that's something we can fix pretty easily, and quick here in a second. We're going to get the multi-cut tool, and go based of this vertice, I'm just going click this over here. It's going through the model. Look away from it, there's nothing behind it, and enter. Then I'm going to select that, and vertex snap it by holding "V" and middle mouse dragging over to that vertice, and now we've got it. Here's a new thing that we're going to learn, is how to merge vertices. I'm just going to click and drag select. I now have both of those vertices selected. I'm gonna go to "Edit Mesh", "merge", and there's a threshold distance, so depending on the scale that you're at, it may or may not work, but you can hit "Apply", and then you can see that the normals change. They flash there for a second, so that makes me think that it worked. We can always test it by dragging an edge or something around. I think I have something clicked when I don't, it's always fun. To make sure this gets in line, we can just drag this up for now. Let's see, is there a nozzle straight line? We can eyeball this, or we could just delete this and redo the "append to polygon" thing, so that we know it's a straight line, but I'm not too worried about it. It's pretty straight based on my eye, at least it's pretty darn close. Now we have this kind of interior face setup. We can extrude that out or we could model it on its own. It really depends on whatever you want to do. Another thing I want to go ahead and do is just bevel all of these edges. I'm going to go ahead and also make this thing, before I do that, I'm going to select this face and extrude, and then I'm going to skill in slightly in this direction, and in that direction maybe. I'm going to hit G again, it doesn't matter if we keep faces together on because it's just a single face, I'm just going to smash that through. We can also make it a deeper hole if we wanted to, by doing the same thing here. Let's isolate select this piece. I'm going to go to the object mode, select that piece and go to isolate select, and we can see we have a lot of faces here that we would need to extrude down. That's something you can do as well to make that a deeper hole, but I think we are going to undo isolate select, and we can pick this up in the next lesson where we will bevel these edges, create the doors, maybe clean this up so we don't have this issue, and in a later lesson we're going to make a chord for this thing. We're moving right along. Thanks for watching. 14. GB Trap - Front, Doors: Welcome to this lesson where we will finish up this front element and the doors and I want to talk about this issue. It basically has a weird visibility issue just because there's one face round top of the other. Soon as you click one or the other, it'll show the one you've clicked. But that's why when you don't have either clicked and you look around, it's a weird view. Let's deal with that. We can isolate select this thing like I was mentioning earlier, and go to the face and select these control shifts like those corners here, which are probably going to be proved to be an issue. We can deal with those in a second. Control Shift, select anything that we don't need for to make sure we only have that top selections selected and go to, Extrude and keep faces together and let's just pull this down and see what we get so far and go back to shaded mode, so we can see. So that looks pretty good. I'm going to undo that in maybe just scale these in a little bit. So they're not right at the edge and then re-do that and make sure keep bases together is on and now drag it in. Now that we have this a little bit of a border there, let me make sure I didn't undo. Not far enough back it looks like oh, this is the issue because these aren't these aren't following along here. Let's just drag it down for time sake because we already have the top area modeled. When we on isolate select that we can see we're good there, you can just drag this one backup and actually just vertex snap it. Let's go to the front view. Actually, I lost my selection there, so I'm going to go back to select that or the front view, and we can hit W or sorry, we can hit Four to get the sideways view and just drag that backup to be even. Go back to Perspective mode, right-click to go to object mode, hit Five and now we can see we have a deeper hole here. But yeah, let's go to isolate select that. The main issue is it's extruding through itself so seeing the backside of the faces. We can just delete this face, and there we go and that solved the problem, and we can just drag this one down as far as we want and on isolate select that, we can see in this issue here with the eternal peace. We can resolve this. If we want to, it depends on how much you're going to see this stuff. You basically don't want to spend a ton of time modeling things you're never going to see as a big rule with modeling because if you work for a studio or something and you spend all your time modeling something, no one's ever going to see. Your supervisors aren't going to be too happy. It's all about what the viewers are going to see from the camera angle and if you're working on a show or movie, they are going to tell you exactly what to model. Hopefully, sometimes that changes and you have to adapt to that. Now we have this front element and let's call this Good. Maybe pull this edge back a little bit is slightly annoying. Shifts like that at four to make sure I have nothing else selected. Just drag that back a little bit, hit Five, cool. We don't see that. Go to object mode. Now I'm going to take this element and let's see what we get if we just bevel this whole thing. I think we're going to have to select edges, but just for time's sake, yeah, I mean it's pretty close. We're adding a lot of geometry to this thing unnecessarily. I'm going to go back out and get a little more specific with the exact edges I'd like to bevel. If we look at the reference, it's all of these outside angles are beveled, so just going to grab those and of course the top edges here and let's see, we could do the bottom edges as well and I'm choosing not to merge these. You could spend more time on this and merge these, so they're not separate pieces. But for time’ sake, trying to keep this tutorial shorter and not keep going on and on, I'm just choosing to do what I think fastest for us, and we're still learning a little bit. Cool. Now we're almost have all of our selections made. I'm just going to go down this edge, this edge, this edge, this edge and this one, this one. I suddenly slipped up, that one. I go up, that cool. I'm going to go ahead and grab that one. I'm going to go ahead and do those, I think should be flushed with it, but it's a much more pain in the bunt to try to bevel things after the fact. Because the number of lines, like where they meet won't line up and it just creates a lot more work. I'm just going through tumbling around this thing, making sure we have all of the angles. I'm going to maybe grab this one too. All the angles covered here. Now it's bevel this. Let's go to the PolyBevel, and we can also hit T to pull up the options here and let's just add one segment and call that good and you can see the issue when we beveled this, of course now it's not flush. We can resolve that in a couple different ways. We can just pull out this edge and because it's on both sides, probably going to scale it. That's a little bit of a sloppy way to do it, but it gets the job done for speed's sake. Instead of having to merge this stuff, what you could do is go in and add a lot of extra edge loops here. We could add one here, and then we could delete faces and then merge vertices where these points meet. That's how I would merge all of those together. But then since we beveled these now we have a lot of edge loops to do and I think for our purposes of just learning, just beginners trying to discover what modeling is all about. I don't want us to get in the weeds too much on that stuff. So we have a nicely beveled piece here, and we can just maybe extrude these two faces for this front plate element. I'll go to Extrude, keep faces on and sorry, I want the offset to try to bring it in just a little bit and then let's hit G again and keep faces on. Let's drag this out a little bit. Looks like that should be way closer to the edges. I think went too far on the offset. Let's go offset my point. We can click this thing here and now our middle mouse drag, it will be a lot smaller, so that's probably the best option for us. Then we get a G again. Now that we've created this little separation of these faces, we can go back and extrude this out and see how far out it comes. Not super far. It seems like a really beveled edge though, like super smooth, more than what we just did. Let's do that. Bevel. Hit T. So we need to go to the bevel edge first, and now we have it, and we're going to increase the segments here. Now, I need to speed this backup because it wasn't really working that well. It was going so slow. Now we have this element modeled. I think what I'd like to see though, hit T again, I think that fractions may be just too much or we need more segments so it's too faceted, you get to see the edges a little too much. That's done. We can extrude this center face and it looks like it slopes into it maybe from the top, I don't know. It depends on how you view this image or what the reference you find and use. But we just going to do the same thing we just did, extrude, keep faces on, dial this down so we can get a little more specific on the offset. A little mouse drag here in the center and you get the offset. The ballpark is pretty small and it looks like it's thinner, so I'm going to scale it in this direction. But that it's still in the center. I'm going to drag it up a little bit. I'm going to pull this out just to touch because that looks like what's happening in the reference. That makes our bevel a little wonky because it's trying to get flat at the top here. We can just delete those top edges so that it's more gradual. I'm going to do that. Go to edge, select these, double-click it. It should go all the way around. It does. Right-click, go to delete edge. So now it's more of a gradual. I feel like this profile it's going in there a little better. Now we have this plate, extrude this again. Let's go to extrude. Pull this out. Extrude at G. We need to keep faces together though. Extrude that again by hitting G, keep faces together. Increase the offset here. It looks like right? Yeah. Let me go back here. Hit G again, extrude again, keep faces together, just smash that down into this thing. I don't know how far, it's hard to see from this angle, how far that thing goes down. It just goes somewhere like that. Then we can just bevel these edges and call it a day on this stuff. The next lesson, I want to show you a very interesting way to model a cord, something that has like an organic shape to it. Even though we're doing hard surface stuff, a lot of hard surface things like MEK type things have cords associated with them. We want to make sure that we know how to do that if you're interested in the hard surfaced arena. I'm just going to increase the segments there. Go to object mode, so I see it and shade it. It looks like we just have a normals issue here. It doesn't know which way to pull. The other thing we can do is add some more geometry here with [inaudible] tool, and hopefully that will alleviate some of the normals problems. Because as I mentioned earlier, mine doesn't really like triangles and we just created a couple there. But if we put that down, we're going to make another one, so I might just leave that as it is, just do these two. I think if we go back through and do what we did in a previous lesson to resolve the normals issues with mesh display. You just do that super-quick, set to face. That actually looks pretty good just by going with the averaging the faces. If you wanted to get more specific with that, you can do that. But it's really just for our purposes in view port, when you create renders of this, those normal faces won't matter as much. But we got this done and I'm going to quickly create the doors super-quick. I'm going to drag this up and I'm going to vertex snap this to one side and then vertex snap this to the edge and I held D and V to change the pivot of course, and then I held V just to transform it to the side here so that it will all scale from this point. Again, I can use the vertex snapping here, or I can just eyeball it because anything mechanical is going to have a gap there so it cannot exactly rub up against things. One thing we want to make sure is that these in the center are in fact in the center. So let's go to the right view and hit four. Now we can see the center line. If we hold down X, we can snap to the grid. Now we know that's right in the center. We can actually just pull that back just to touch though. Again, there's a little bit of a gap there. Let's right-click object mode and hit five to go back and just shade it. Scale this down so the door is more of a door size and bring it up to the top of this edge here, so that it looks pretty good. The last thing we need to do is of course bevel this thing just to touch. I'm actually just going to leave it on object mode and go to our custom shelf, click "bevel". I'm going to go pretty small on the bevel and bring back the fraction. It's just barely bevel, just so it's not a very hard edge there. Then what I'm going to do is duplicate this by hitting command D. What I can do, there's a couple different ways you can do this. You could scale it and negative in this direction, so we go negative one. It flips it around and then we can hold down V and snap it to this other side. I think we're snapping to the wrong thing. It's snapping to the bevel. One of the bevels instead of the edge there. Let's go to the right view, hit four and just snap that to the end side. Now we can see in the center here they're equally far apart from the middle. I'm going to need to adjust that touch. Let's look at this. Yeah, let's just bring those in just a little bit, so we can click both of those and hit R, and then just scale from here. It's just a small amount that's not going to really hurt the bevels that we did. Just close that gap, just a touch. Now we have our Ghostbusters trap pretty much. We can add these little revots that we put up here. If we'd like, we can add this back element. You basically at this point have all the knowledge you need to model this back area. In the last lesson here, it's going to be very short. We're just going to make this a cord that can come off of the back of this thing. So I will show you how to do that in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 15. GB Trap - Cord: Welcome to the last lesson in the series of creating this ghost buster trap. In between the previous lesson and this one I just made this little back-end piece here, and I just basically did that with all the techniques we've already learned, extruded to the top of it to make this little rim. Then I beveled all the edges. I also added this little wing here. So I added edge loops here and then I beveled those corners there. Finally I made this little piece that sticks out the back, and this is basically a cylinder. Then I reduced the number of subdivision axes down to eight to make it more like some nut that you would have to screw in there. Then this is just another cylinder that I extruded out and then beveled all the edges to make this port for the cord we're going to make in this lesson. So that's just some updates I did that you've learned all these techniques already. Same thing for finishing up this other side. Based on the reference. You've easily already learned how to do this little panel. I'll leave that up to you to finish out this other side with all the techniques we've already learned. I also added a little thing here that I've seen some reference and it's just a cylinder beveled edges, same thing. So let's learn how to do this cord. Let's first revisit the idea of curves we did in the previous lesson. That's going to be basically the template for how we're going to extrude a cylinder over this curve. So let's go to a top-down view. We're going to see where this is going to come out. I'm going to have four to see through this thing. So now I can see where it's going to meet down there. I'm going to go to the curves and surfaces tab here. You could also go to create and go to curve tools and you can get the same tools here. You can see the similarities there. I'm going to go to the EP Curve Tool and I'm going to open up the tool settings so that I can see that we're on three cubic. So it's going to start interpolate a rounded edge there after I go three points. So I'm going to hit X to line up on the grid. Then I'm just going to make a swooping curve cord path here. This is just going to trail off in the distance. You can make it be whatever you'd like it to be. But of course, I'm going to hit Enter and then you can always edit this later. I right-click and go to Control vertex, and then drag these around if you want to change the curves that you've made, and we're going to need to do that at the insert point here because it's not matching where it's going to be inserting. I'm going to go up here and lift all of these and then bring this one in and have this secondary one, make sure that it's going in straight. You can also rebuild the curve if you didn't make enough points. You can see how it starts to get a little jagged here. It's not super smooth. You can go to the curve selected. You can go to Curves and then down at the bottom there's Rebuild. You can go to the Options and uniform, you can set the number of spans, all these different types of options, but this is the most common, just hit Apply. You can see how I curved out this thing here. I'm going to undo it and then redo it so you can see it a little better. I'll zoom in here. I'll redo it and you can see how that curves and finishes it out. But the only issue is now when we go back in control vertices, there's a lot more vertices control. So it's good to get this working before you add a ton of vertices, then you have to control. If that's the case, you have a ton of vertices, you can hit B on your keyboard, and that turns on soft selection. You can hold B and middle mouse drag in the viewport to increase or decrease that soft selection area. So that can be helpful if you have a ton of points to drag around. I'm just going to do something like that. We can adjust this later as well but you roughly want to get this in the center of the thing. You want to have a shape that respects gravity and the weight of the cord and all that good stuff. We may need to get this on the ground sooner kind of a thing. But you can mess with all that after the fact as well. But let's get to the meat of this thing where we need to extrude an actual curve over this thing. Sorry, extrude a cylinder over this thing. So I'm going to turn that off and close that down. Now we need to create a polymodel. I'm going to grab a cylinder and I'm going to, I know I haven't selected because I just created it, but also because I could see the outline and so I have to visually see it over there to know that it's selected. So I'm going to hold down C, which snaps to curves and middle mouse drag that there. Then I'm going to rotate this down and maybe scale it down a little bit and roughly get it in line with this thing. There's a couple different ways you can extrude curves. You could grab a circular curve and do this as well. But then you would have to convert the nerves circle to a polygon, which is under Modify, Convert, Nerves of polygons. But let's just do it with a polygon first. You're going to see how that is done. I'm going to select the faces of the polygon. I'm going to hit B to turn off soft selection, control-click and deselect the ones I don't need. I'm going to shift, select the curve. Then I'm going to go to extrude. I said extrude and you can see something happened, but not exactly what we wanted. It looks like there's a face now at the very beginning of this curve here at the center. I'm going to turn on keep faces on as well. So we can see it. So if I hit Five, you can see it goes inside. It's because curves also have directions. I'm going to go back into object mode so I can select the curve and we need to reverse the direction. So if I go to Curves, Reverse direction. Now you can see the end of the curve is considered down here. So when I extrude it, it's going to go in that direction. Problem is it's not really respecting the curve that we drew. We need to go into the extrusion options here, hit T, and we need to increase the divisions. As we increase the divisions and let me just turn this pi-wheel back to a normal speed. As we increase these divisions, you can see that it's actually beginning to make the cord. That's just because it needed more information. So this slider will max out at 25, but you can type in higher value. There's actually a taper value here as well that you can mess with, and a couple other things. So basically that's how you make a cord and the things to keep in mind is these subdivisions are based off the distribution of the CVs and the curve. So if we hadn't have rebuild the curve, the distribution here would have been not as accurate. You can see here, there are less points here. There's less edges here because there's less points in the curve. Let me isolate it so I can right-click on it and go control vertex. You can see that there's a big gap here between these two. It'll be reflected in the edges of the cylinder. There's less here than there are over here. Just keep that in mind. If we drag this over, it'll group them, and you can still edit this stuff after the fact, until you delete the history, you can edit this stuff. The other thing we need to do, we can see if we can go into the polyCylinder and change the original radius and we can, which is a super nice thing about keeping the history is, even though we've done a lot of things to it since we created the cylinder, this first piece of history takes precedence. So we can still have that. I'm just going to hit Five so we can see this in shaded mode. The only other thing I might do is rebuild the curve again so that we get a little more definition here in the cord. So you can go to Curves, Rebuild, and let's just crank this up and then apply and then we will probably need to increase the extrusion, the subdivisions. It totally spaces out, then it turns black. Because so this original one, sometimes this happens. So you want to keep in mind that you can't do more subdivisions than, are allowed here from the beginning. If we go middle mouse drag, so it goes back to the max default you can get by middle mouse dragging. But if we keep increasing this and this edge here goes past this one, it'll flip the edge around itself. So then it flips all the faces inside out. So if you get this black thing, you've created too many divisions. So let's just go right before that happens. Now we have this smoother looking curve. Then we can also again go to the curve and push some points around if we still want to adjust where the density of the edge loops are getting concentrated. So that's how you extrude an object, make a cord something like that, most make and hard surface models have cords of some sort. Before we sign off here, let's just make sure we get the polyCylinder radius correct. Something in this neighborhood let's look a little closer, 0.5. Then I'll shift, select the curve, isolate it, and go to the control vertex, select the end one, hit B. Let me drag this out a little bit and unisolate that and then just get that right in the center there. So there you have it. We have created the ghost buster trap, and we've done it with hard surface modeling techniques. In the next series of lessons, we're going to cover more organic modeling techniques and we're going to create a character that we will eventually use to rig and animate in later lessons. We're also going to revisit this model later on and texture it and maybe do some animating on this as well. Let's see what we have in store for that later. But great job in following these lessons. If you've gotten this far, that's quite an accomplishment and it's a lot to take in. Just take your time and re-watch these if you have any problems and you can always pick up wherever. I'm just middle mouse dragging all this stuff into the top group so it's all organized. Just know you can come back and re-watch this stuff and ask me any questions that you may run into, because this stuff's not easy and I admire you guys trying to learn this stuff, so I appreciate you watching and good luck. Thank You. See you in the next series. 16. Update: Cord [Sweep Mesh]: Hi and welcome to this updated lesson with Maya 2022 coming out just today. I wanted to go ahead and make an updated video that shows you an even better way to make chords, ropes, wires, all that good stuff. They actually came out with a new method, which I want to share with you. We're going to use the Ghostbuster example and replace the chord that we've previously made in the course. I'm just going to select that geometry, and before I do delete it, I just wanted to mention, notice the issue we had here previously using the extrusion method along a curve. You always have the problem of that extra little bit that you extruded from, and then also the possibility of flipping normals of the faces if you adjusted the curve later, and that seems to be pretty much resolved with this new method. Let's select that geometry and delete it if you're following along with the course project files. I'm going to select the curve and weirdly enough, this new feature is not in the mesh controls, it's actually under Create. So if you go to Create, you have sweep mesh. I'd be curious to see if they leave this function, this operation here because it seems a bit out of place to have on the Create menu. I feel like it's a mesh operation, but anyway, go to create sweep mesh and boom, you have the chord. No fussy extruding along a curve and creating divisions. It pretty smartly creates the geometry for us and we have all these settings now in the attribute editor for this sweep mesh creator. Let's run through a few of these. Obviously first, we can see that it's too big. We can go to the scale profile, and the default profile that we have is a poly profile, and we can just scale that profile down until we have the correct size for the chord that we want. It's not intersecting the ground anymore, roughly in here somewhere. Then we can see if we turn on the wireframe unshade it, that it's a bit rough, not just in the profile, but also along the links. Let's address both of those issues with the resolution of the curve or the mesh that the curve is making. We can get to these sweep mesh creator tab here, and then we can increase the sides of the circle, so that that is solving the profile issue, the resolution there. Then if we scroll down to the interpolation tab here, we have mode precision on and we can just increase that until we have enough subdivisions along our curve that it's no longer low poly looking. That's the main points here and to really get back to the one we had before, we can just click, add caps and we're done. That's really a much more efficient way, I think to create a curve or a rope than the extrusion method that we've learned previously. Let's take this a little bit further though, because there are some really cool options here to go even further than just a simple chord here. Let's say we wanted a braided rope or we wanted to create the interior wires of a chord. We could click the distribute button here, and now we have the option to add the number of instances. Let's imagine this is the interior of a chord and we wanted wire splaying out, this would be the way to do that. What if we wanted a braided rope, we could do that very easily as well. All we have to do to get the braided effect is go down to the transformation options here and then just increase the twist of this. Of course we can take that pass the soft limiter of two and type in a value that we want. With 90 we can see we've broken the model and it's intersecting itself. That just gave us a better range to now adjust this down to something that makes sense for the subdivisions we have and the length of the chord that we have here. This is a really easy way to create a braided rope. I can also turn off the wireframe sync, you can see that. Now the other thing we're left with is the fact that now these are separated from one another. We can click on the sweep mesh creator to get back to the menu, we can basically adjust two values. One is the scale of the instances. Now that they start to intersect each other and connect with each other. The other issue though, if you want to compensate for the fact that you've scaled everything up, you'd have to go into the scale profile and then bring that down. We can do that to maintain the overall profile of these instances at the same scale. You'd have to tweak these together to make sure that your overall, not scaling everything too much. Those are the two things you'd want to adjust. Obviously, there's these other distribution types you can experiment with, to get different types of effects. The other noteworthy adjustments here you can make is a really cool taper here that I think would be useful if you're doing who knows what. But it gives you a lot more control than previously where you'd have to, I don't even really know how you do this previously. But this is a really cool effect, something that's small to improve upon, but they really went far with it. Now, the other sweep profiles are pretty self-explanatory. They just give you different modes to adjust the profile that it's using. Something even like a rectangle could be turned into a sphere just by adjusting the corner radius for example. This is a road, if we turn off distribute and turn off twist, we get to see this could be something just to create a path or a road very easily using the line method here. Then of course we have an arc which is just like a semicircle, very quickly, easily to do. Then we have a wave which would be maybe the gutter of a sidewalk or something. But it's nice that they give you these most common scenarios here, just at the top menu and it's very user-friendly showing these icons like this. Now the final one I wanted to touch on was custom, and it was a bit finicky when I'm playing with it. Let me show you. Obviously it's going to take a custom curve that we define. If I just draw one out, let's just say something like this, and I go back to the mesh and the sweep mesh creator, I can choose this custom and it'll pop up this new window that asks me to select what curve I want to use as the profile. Once that's selected, let me turn back on the wireframe unshade it to show you what I mean. The profile that I drew was the cubic interpolation. It's smooth, but if you look at the profile that we're getting from this, it's very rough. Let me just close this down so you can see the profile of this thing. You can see it's low poly. The only way I found that that would be improved, is it appears that this option is actually controlled by the relative scale of the profile, which is surprising. It wouldn't just take an absolute interpolation of this. What I mean is because this is relatively small, I guess, for however it's determining that scale factor is, if we scale this up at the control vertex level. If I just take these and I scale these up, you can see it starts to add more subdivisions. Now it gets to be a lot smoother. It's based on the relative scale. Maybe it's relative to the length of the curve, it's being swept down. I'm not really sure. But just know if you're not getting the right result for the custom, it's probably because the scale of the control vertices, again, I'm not scaling this at the object level, I'm scaling this at the control vertex. Although you can see if I scale this up at the object level, it's not changing at all. You got to do it and go into actually edit the control vertices and scale those up. That's one finicky thing I noticed experimenting with this. Then again, obviously the way to counteract this is, it's scale up the entire thing. If we just want to scale that down, we can just scale it down through these attributes here and get back down to the size that we wanted. That's something noteworthy to look out for if you want to use a custom effect. I think this would be great. Like if you're doing corner trim in a room and you're modeling a room or something, a great way to get a custom trim, swept along a curve, instead of using the old extrude method. I'm really excited to use this in my next projects. Hopefully, this is helpful for you and you get some cool ideas to use it in your own projects. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 17. Topology - Line Flow: Welcome to the first lesson on organic modeling. In this lesson we're going to take a look at something called topology. These are some concepts you need to learn before we start modeling our own character so that you know why we're doing what we're doing. Topology essentially means the line flow or the edge flow over a surface. When we look at I'm modeling this, we see it in a gray shaded form but what makes up this model? This model is made up of, if we right-click, we can see faces, vertices, and edges. Those are the three main things and we already know this from the hard surface modeling. It's even more important to understand these concepts when we're doing organic modeling as well. Let's take a look at the edge flow here. We can do this by turning on the wire frame on shaded button here. We can see the object while it's shaded. We can't hit four like we've done in the hard modeling but then we see through the object. It gets confusing to see where the lines are. I'm going to hit "Five" to get that back. Also, a quick aside, if you want to change the background color, hit "Alt B." I'd just like to keep it on blue because the default shed is gray, so it's easier to see the model on that. When we look at this, we can see there's a lot of edges and they're all going in different directions, more simple areas. It's pretty straightforward. Like the arm. It looks like a cylinder and there just edges going across the arm as you'd expect. But what happens when that needs to be attached to a torso? We get an intersection of edges here. You can see that by this star. If we look over here, all of these edges are intersecting with one other edge. There's one edge going this way, one edge going that way. But when we look at a star, we can see there's one edge going here, one edge going there and one it is going in, there's a lot more edges intersecting at a star. What that tells you is, this is where the line flow changes and it changes because it's having to deal with other line flow, intersecting line flow that's doing something different and that gets resolved and something like a star shape. The reason why that is conceptually is because you have lines going in different directions that need to meet up and connect. You also have lines or edges that are coming from an area of high density to low density. If we look at the corner of the eye here, you can see that we have all of these edges coming from a larger area and they need to go into a smaller area like the eye. What happens is you have to reduce the number of edges as you go in so that it syncs up with however many edges are on the inside. You can see that with something like a star again. This area right here is what I'm looking at, so this really looks like a triangle. If we just pulled this vertices up this would be like a triangle. I'm going to go back to object mode, right-clicking. We have this edge just dead ends basically, but they pulled out the vertices so that it is more evenly distributed, so that the edge flow looks like it kind of goes around the eye. When we're doing organic modeling, the reason behind all this is this works for animation. Whenever we deform something, we need the edge flow to work properly otherwise, the deformation is going to look weird. I'll show you what that means in another lesson. But just conceptually, we need to begin to understand why things are modeled the way they are and to know how to look at how things are modeled. Then we can break it down in our mind and recreate it. If we keep looking at this model, we can see, Look here's another star right here. We can see that if we take a look at the mouth edge flow, this section here, all of these lines edges go around the mouth. Why is that? Because the mouth seems to open. Those edges need to be circular, then they go out, and they go out further and further. Then they meet edges that it no longer needs to go in a circle around the mouth. It needs to start connecting to the nose and eyes. Now the edges need to go up towards the eyes. It needs to change direction. That's where you get these stars. Where this edge that was now going up to the nose needs to be redirected into the eye so we get a star right here. That's usually where you see those intersections happening. We can also see this with the eyes. There's an eye mask area here and same thing with the mouth. Circle is going around, and around, and around, and eventually they need to change direction and start connecting everything else so we get a star right here. You can see how that edge flow changes and now it goes down the side of the cheek here and up the brow. You need to begin to understand about topology and why it's important and why are we going to model things the way we're going to model them, so they work in animation. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to take areas of high density to low density and how to make these areas. We are going to see another one right here. Let's simplify this in the next lesson and learn how to do that. Thanks for watching. 18. Topology - Reducing Even Numbers: In this lesson, we're going to cover something that's really like a puzzle, and that is reducing the number of edges like we saw coming into the eye. We have an area of high density of edge loops into an area of low density, and we saw that was resolved right here in this face. We're going to learn how to do this, and we're going to simplify it and we're going to use planes. Let's create a plane, go to the Poly Modeling menu and click "The Plane". I'll hit "F" to frame up on it, and then I'll hit "G" and make another one. Of course, G is the shortcut for just doing the previous operation again. I'm going to move these close together to make our job easier here in a minute, and drag these back in the center here. The two planes we have had the exact same number of edge loops. If we wanted to combine them, and be pretty straightforward, we just need to merge these edges down so that they would all line up perfectly. That's not what happens in modeling, especially in organic modeling, where you have an area of high density, like the head, that has a larger surface area, so there's more edges to describe it, and it needs to all fit into the eyeball, or the eyelid into an area of much smaller area, so not all the edge loops can fit in there. Let's take this simplified version here of these two planes. This one on the left has 10 edge loops, and let's do this one on the right has eight. Try to follow along if you can, because it'll make a lot more sense because this can be very confusing. You're probably going to want to bookmark this video specifically to revisit, because you're going to run into this issue again and again in organic modeling, and you're going to have to re-remember all the time. How do I resolve this? How do I combine an area of higher density of edge loops into lower? Fortunately, this first example is going to be the easiest type. We have both even number of edge loops. You have 10 over here and eight over here. Before we can start combining edges, we need to merge these two meshes down. We can see in outliner, there's plane 1 and plane 2, so there are two different pieces of meshes, they're not the same, so we need to combine them. I'll Shift-Select so I have both of them selected, and I'll go to Mesh, Combine. You can see that now there's one plane that we have selected and has both sides selected, so we know it's combined. But we have these empty groups over here. It looks messy, and this is part of the history that Maya creates when you do a big operation like combined. You can see it has the inputs over here, there's the unite one. To get rid of these empty groups, you could just delete them, but the cleaner way to do it is to delete the history, which we've done before. Let's go to Edit, Delete by Type, and again, let's just do this one, not the bottom one, this will delete everything in the scene, we don't want that. We want this top one, Delete by Type, History, and then that gets rid of those empty groups and it cleans up the outliner, and so now let's get to work. Let's go to the edge operation here, by clicking and dragging to it, and click and drag these two edges that are mashed up together. Let's go to the Edit Mesh. I'm going to tear this menu off, and we're going to go down to the Merge option here. There's a couple different ways you could do it. You hit "Merge", nothing happens. Why did nothing happen? Well, let's look at this tolerance value. It's set at zero right now. But as soon as we drag that up a little bit, a tolerance value is a distance, and when you increase the distance it's looking for, it's going to start to find that distance. We can see it's probably these two pieces are like 0.2 units apart, so that's when it starts to merge them. Let's click and drag and do that for all of the edges down here, we can hit "G" to bring up the Merge tool again, and merge these down. Again, you may have to increase that tolerance value each time you go. I'll hit "G" and just increase tolerance. You can do more than one at a time, but you'll see as soon as you start to get where there's two right next to each other that you don't want to be merge, you have to do them by themselves, of course. Then what do we do here? This is what the lesson's all about. We need to figure out a way to deal with this. How do we do that? Why can't we just merge, pull these vertices over, and just have that be what it is. Well, in animation, when that starts happening and deformations happen, you'll get a gap here, you'll be able to see through the model. Or this will bend in a weird way so that shadows and reflections will look very odd. That's why in organic modeling, you always want to have quads, and that means each face needs four sides. You never want to have a face with five sides, which is called an n-gon. That's N-G-O-N, and you don't want to have a face that has three sides, which is a tri, a triangle. Those are the parameters we need to work in. Everything has to be a quad. That's why we can't just pull this over and call it a day, because if we try to merge this here, then that would create a new edge for this face right here, and instead of this phase having four edges, now it would have five, and now making it an n-gon. We would have an edge at the top here, an edge right here, and then three more, so that'd make it five. We need to figure out how to keep it to four edges so that each face is a quad. With that understanding, we need to figure out how to resolve this. This is very similar to the eye example we saw above. I'm going to show you how to do that now. Let's select both of these and scale them in. Now we can merge all three of these vertices down. Let's merge these down, and you'll see where I'm going with this here in a second. We'll create some problems for ourselves and then we'll solve them. Now, we can at least combine these two edges. Let's select those and hit "G" to merge those. I'll hit "G" over here to merge that. What did I say earlier? We don't want triangles, and what do I have here? I have two triangles. They happen to be right next to each other. What does that mean? That means we can delete the edge in the middle. Let's do that. We've deleted this edge in the middle. It still looks like a triangle, but if we count the number of edges it's actually four, there's one here, one here, one here, and one here, that's four. Even though it looks like a triangle, it that has four edges, so it's a quad. We can make this look like a quad just by going to the vertices here and pulling this one out. Now we can see a little better that there are in fact four edges. That's how we get down to reducing an area of high density of edge flow into a low density of edge flow. There's one other little tool I'll show just very briefly, we will talk about this a little later as well, but if I wanted to resolve this messy look to the edge flow here with a different tool, we could go to Sculpting and choose this one right here. This is the Relax tool. If I click this, I need to select the polygon mesh. I'll select the face. You can see everything grays out, the edge flow does. It tells me I'm sculpting on this plane here. What the Relax tool does is it will not sculpt on this point, it won't raise or lower it or deform it in any way, what it will do is relax the edge flow. If your brush size is too big, you can hold down "B" and middle mouse drag and it will change the brush size, so it's way too big, just scale it down here with the middle mouse and holding "B". If I click and just hold down my mouse and drag around, you can see it just relaxing the edge flow here. It makes it flow into the next area a lot more cleanly. It did that pull out force here, where this face, instead of looking like a triangle, it looks more like a quad now. Again, and it just doesn't look like it but by its geometric components of its edges, it is in fact a quad. That's how we do a reduction of edge flow from area of high to low. In the next lesson, we're going to cover the more difficult version of odd number, and that will take a little more problem-solving and puzzle solving. Some people find this very fun because it is like solving a puzzle, and other times it can be very frustrating when trying to figure this out. I hope this makes sense and how to merge areas of high density and low density. Let's move on to a more advanced problem in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 19. Topology - Reducing Odd Numbers: In this lesson, let's take a look at the more complicated example of going from an area of EvenNumber to an area of OddNumber edge loops. I'm going to hide this EvenNumber example we've already done and create a new example by creating two planes and dragging them side-by-side, and then making one of them be nine instead of 10. We can combine these as we did, Mesh, Combine, Edit and Delete by Type, History, and I'll call this OddNumbers. Let's begin merging these edges down. I'm going to go right-click, and go to Edge and I click drag, select all of these, and go to Edit Mesh, Merge. Now we get to the issue, how do we resolve this one? This is a more complicated puzzle and it's going to take a little more problem solving. You can try this by yourself. You can pause the video and try to figure this out how to merge these lines down with no triangles and no n-gons, meaning no five-sided faces. Or you can just follow along and I'll show you the answer of doing it one way right now. We need to approach this in a different way. We need to resolve the issue back here and then there will be another solution here. We need to reduce the number of edges back here, so then we can solve the problem up here. I'm going to go to the Multi-Cut Tool. I'm going to make some new edge loops here. If I hold Shift and click, I'll get to the middle of the edge and I'll hit Enter. I've divided this and created an n-gon over here. To resolve the n-gon, I need to make this a quad again and create an edge here. When we solve this problem, now, we create another one that we have triangles here. Well, it's not that big of a deal, I can actually just delete those. I'm going to go to these edges and Shift, select them both, holding down Shift, right-click and go to Delete Edge. Now, we have a new problem. We have an OddNumber still, we have one going into two, so how do we solve this problem? Well, whenever I'm problem solving, I just try to move forward and then see where the problem arises and how I can fix it at the last possible moment. I'm going to stay in this Edge mode and I'm going to Merge these down and force the issue here. What method do we have at our disposal to resolve this? Let's try pulling this over and merging these vertices over here. I'll hold down V and middle mouse drag. You can see I'm isolated to this translation so it won't snap, so let me unisolate it by clicking in the center here and now it will snap. I need to merge those vertices, they're right on top of each other and they're not merged yet, so I need to go to Merge after I click and drag both of them, I don't have to worry about the threshold because they are on top of each other. Everything is merged now, except the problem is we have a triangle here, so how do we resolve the triangle? Well, we can try to make it a quad in some way. What's the easiest way to make something a quad? Let's try to add another edge loop. We could do this with the Multi-Cut Tool or we could go over to our custom shelf and use an edge loop. An edge loop will show you the issue. Edge loop won't be able to continue at a triangle. When we click here, it's going to stop at the triangle and then indicates A, as a triangle and B, maybe this is how we're going to solve the issue. I'll let go and now when we look, it is a quad, we have no n-gons and we have all quads. The only issue is that we had to add a new edge loop. In a model that you have, it's fairly large, this could create issues up here somewhere. Now, you have a higher density of edge loops up here. You could be just pushing the problem up higher, but it's an area that you could solve. Let's figure how to solve this and reduce this. We've done this before, we have three and we're trying to get back to one. Let's scale these vertices down and select all three and Merge them. We'll go to Edit Mesh, Merge. Now, we have two triangles again and how do we solve that? By deleting their center edge, I'm going to make sure I only have that someone's selected, holding down Shift right-clicking, go to Delete Edge. Now, we've resolved the issue. It's not super clean, it doesn't look super clean, but it is all quads and we've solved the problem. Now, this we could solve this much higher up, so all of this oddly-flowing topology won't necessarily have to be in the same area and you can maybe hide this in an armpit or somewhere that is not very visible to a model. You could move this solution somewhere in the model that's not visible to the viewer. But this is how to do the OddNumber intersection thing and and deal with that topology line flow. I hope you had fun figuring out this problem solving thing. You can find these types of examples all over models. If you ever look at wireframes of models, you'll be able to see this all over, you can see triangles right here. Well, not really triangles, but you can see where the edge flow changes. It looks like a triangle, but it's really a quad, right? It has four edges, so that's a quad. But you can see where the edge is, it goes up and around. We can see how this starts to flow. This goes up and around like this, instead of going straight through because we can see a star right here, we know there's an edge loop change indirection here. See how this changes directions and it's near that star. Start to look at this stuff when you're looking at wireframes of models, you can see the thought process and the reason behind they did it. They did this because abs are in the center here, maybe they need the topology to be right for the bellybutton or this Adam's apple area is upside down version of this, all of this flows upward so that this person can have an Adam's apple and the topology will support that shape here. Start thinking about models in this way. In the next lesson, we'll begin creating our own model from reference that I'll provide so we can create our own character and keep moving along and learning how to model in Maya and all the other aspects of Maya. Thanks for watching. 20. Bones - Image Plane Setup: Welcome to this lesson where we will discuss how we're going to use an image plane to create this character. In this series we're going to model this character that will later use for rigging and animation. Before we get started, like we did on hard surface modeling with the Ghostbusters trap, we need reference. In this case it's concept art that I drew based of looking at some other art. You always want to start with a piece of reference. You don't just want to look at it like we were doing in the hard surface modeling example. That's one way to do it. But the more advanced way to do it is to actually have this image in your scene and use it as a direct correlation with where you're placing edges and vertices and faces. In this lesson, we're going to bring this image into Maya. Let's go over to Maya and let's create a plane. Anytime you create a plane, the default is to have 10 subdivisions. When you start modeling, you'll quickly realize that the more subdivisions and the more faces you have in the scene, the slower it's going to be. There's no reason for this image plane to have this many subdivisions. Because we're not deforming it anyway. We can reduce this down to one. It is just a single face. Then we need to map this image onto this face. It's currently not the same dimension. You can see this is a square. You'll often run to that when you're using reference. It's not going to always fit up perfectly. So we'll deal with that as well. Let's rotate this image up in the Z direction. We can see what the Z direction is over here on the bottom left, we can see it's pointing this way. It's rotated up. It's facing front. If we go to our front camera, will be able to see this face. Let's add this image to this. Let's assign this a new shader. This is something new. We're going to right-click on this and scroll down to assign new material. Now, we get a new window. There's a lot of different options, but for our purposes we're just going to use the Lambert. Because the default shaders Lambert1, it always is in your scene. When you create a new Lambert, it's going to say Lambert2. Let's just call this reference. I'll put SHD for shader. We have all these different attributes. We can change the color and we can do all sorts of things. If I hit Six on my keyboard, it's going to update a little better. That I can show that color change and we can change the transparency. There's all these things. But we want to map the image into this color attribute. Let's hit this little checkerboard over here. We get another new window. I'm going to choose file. When choose File, it creates a file node, of course. Let's just type in reference here as well with an underscore to the file. We know it's a file and this might help us later for you to locate this or something like that. Hit Enter, make sure you hit Enter because anytime you rename something and you try to map something into without hitting enter here, it'll say, "Can't find this node." Because you didn't finalize this change. Anytime you name something like this, you want to hit Enter, so that's when you actually map in file which we're about to do it'll know where it actually put it. Which is Reference _file1 instead of file1. Let's go to image name will hit the Folder. Let's go to find the reference image, CharacterDesign.jpg. Hit Open, and if I right-click on this sample, it'll update the little test swatch here. Sometimes if you're having trouble by just hit Spacebar to get the four view up here. Then I hit Spacebar again to get back to perspective, that was just an accident. There is one bug that I found in this version of Maya. Every version of Maya is going to have its own fun bugs in it. You'll have to troubleshoot. But the textures should just pop-up when you do what we just did. We'd assign the new shader. When we look at the color now instead of a checker box, it has this arrow box thing. If we click that, it'll take us to that file node. It's not showing up, even though we see it's registering here. It's not showing up on our viewport. Let's hit Six, make sure we're in texture mode. You can also hit this button up here, which is the texture option. But it's not updating here. This may not have happen for you. But the bug I found in my version of Maya is you have to open up the Hypershade, which is this little ball icon up here, which we'll get into in later lessons. You can see when I open up the Hypershade, it finally made the texture reload. This again is a goofy thing in Maya. If that has happened and you've assigned the shader to this and you've loaded in the file, try opening up the Hypershade, and so it'll refresh the textures. You might have to do that more than once. You have to close and reopen it. Yes, so let's deal with the scaling issue now. Because this image is squashed, it's square right now. Go into wherever the file is. On a Mac, I just right-click and go down to Get Info. On a PC, I think its Properties. Somewhere, it should show the dimensions of the image. On a Mac, it's right here. So 1023 by 1539. We can use that to scale this up. Let's go back over to the channel box by clicking this button up here. Currently this is at an odd scale. I'm just going to do one for that and 1023. I'm going to go 1023. It's going to freak out because that's a massive distance as you can tell. But all we're trying to do is get that ratio for right now. So 1023,1539. We want to go in the Z direction, we can see here. Let's type in 1539 there and so this thing is massive now. That's fine, but we now have the correct dimensions of this image at least. Let's scale this back down to something more manageable. Now we have a reference image and is properly scaled to the right dimensions. If we want to lock this in, we can just freeze the transformations. What I mean is, all of these numbers are a little weird right here. If we want to have it be a little more clean, we can just freeze the transformations. So that it'll be one and all of the scale dimensions. Let's go to Edit. Let's go to Modify, Freeze Transformations. I can see everything that went to 1 and everything else is 0. Let's duplicate this and rotate it in 90 degrees. Now let's go to the Front View. Let's just line up the drawing to be right in the center of our grid here. We can see where 0 and 0 for X and Y are. We need to just center this thing up so it's roughly in the center of the scene. So that everything that we model can be symmetrical and mirrored over to the other side. That's pretty good. Lets go to the other side, the one that we duplicate it and rotate it. Let me back up because it looks like we didn't do anything. We move this one to the center. But this one is still rotated 90 degrees and we haven't moved in any direction yet. The reason we rotated it 90 degrees is because this is going to be the side view. We want to align up this image to the right to be in the middle. Sometimes these might very well be two different images. You might have to create a new shader and apply new shader with the new texture on it just like we did already with this one. You might have to do that again if you have a different image. Let's go to the right view. Now we can see this one. We can see our 0-axis here. This is up to you where you can eyeball it. You might just split the difference and maybe look at the neck or the spine or something like that. But this roughly needs to be in the center as well. If you wanted to minimize the distraction of having this other image here, we can get our Custom menu, go to the Edge loop. We could create an anti loop here. We can just drag it over to wherever we wanted it basically, and hit V. In the selection tool select it with X. Let's go to Face and we can just delete that. All we have is the side view. We could do the same for this side as well. It doesn't really bother me and it might be nice to have this in the same view when we're modeling the front. [inaudible] that for now. One last thing I'd say about reference images is that. When you're modeling, it's a little distracting if these are selectable. Say you are modeling a cube and here something like that to make the skull. You keep accidently selecting the reference image. One way to get around that is to click and drag, select everything. Let's first put these in their own group and call them Reference. It's a little more tidy and the outliner. Then let's go over to the display tab over here and hit this far right button. We do that. It adds these images to a new display layer. All that means is, it gives us a little bit more functionality that we can turn these on and off. But it also means that we can template these really easily or reference them. With template it'll only make these outlines. But if we click this third button one more time, we get an R, and that means reference. When we click, we can't actually click these anymore. We can always turn that off again by hitting that. But let's keep that on R. When we start modeling won't be accidently selecting the reference images. I'm just going to rename this Display layer Reference. It says,"I had already exists." You might need to add a little suffix like DISP or something like that. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will get started in modeling. Thanks for watching. 21. Bones - Box vs Edge Modeling: In this lesson, we're going to cover two of the main techniques for modeling used and we're going to get started on the skull head. Two of the different ways to begin modeling something like this would be to go into one of your views, the front view or the right view. I'll choose the front view, holding down space, and right-clicking, and going to the front view. We can create a box and this is called the box modeling method. I'll drag this box up that I just made by clicking in the poly modeling menu and basically start to pull points around and try to match the image that we have. We could go in here to our custom menu, this certain adding edge loops, and pull those out at different distances. We can also extrude faces to try to get to the right shape. But basically, you want to use as few amount of lines to describe an area as possible so you don't want to start just detailing the lips or something like that. When you start modeling, you want to get the basic forms correct first before you start adding any detail. This is how you begin, and this is called box modeling. You start with a box and you just start pushing points around. You can see what I'm doing is double-clicking so I know I get the whole edge loop that goes all the way around and I'm just scaling it to try to match the outline of this character. That's box modeling. What happens when we need to create the eyes or start making this more rounded or something like that? I'm going to hide this box real quick. I'm going to go to object mode and hit Control H and then I'm going to go back to the front view and discuss the edge modeling method or point modeling. There's a couple different ways you can describe it, but it's the same idea. I'm going to create a plane and drag it up here. I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees and I'm going to turn the subdivisions to one so we just have one face. I'm actually going to go out to my perspective view holding down space bar right-clicking and, sorry, not right-clicking just left mouse clicking and then we'll go back to the front view. So sure I want to pull out so I could see that off of the image there. One thing we can also do if we can't see through this object, we could go to the shading materials here from the attribute editor and turn down the transparency of the shader that this is assigned to. Anytime that we have an object selected and we go to the attribute editor, it's going to pull up it's different attributes and there's all these different tabs up here. The last one furthest to the right is always the shader. Well, we have the display layer here so if we turn off the display layer for the reference, and I select that and I go to the attribute editor, we'll go to the far right tab. This is the shader for that so we can change the transparency and all that. Let's turn that back to reference and let's click the Plane, and let's turn the transparency down so we can see through the object to make sure we're lining things up. We could do the same thing. Scale this, move it up and instead, we can use the edges to extrude. I'm going to get this to a place where I want to extrude an edge. I'm going to go to right-click and go to the edge mode and scale this out. Just like we can extrude faces like we did in the hard surface modeling, we can extrude edges so we going to hit the Extrude button up here. We can also get to from our customer newer where we saved it out and you get the same attributes. You can just start pulling edges around and when you hit "G" which is a very good shortcut that we've used a lot. You can begin to move really quickly in how you're modeling something. One thing to keep in mind too is that oftentimes when people begin modeling they only model one side and they cut their model in half. So to do that we could go to the edge loop tool and we can go to the tool settings and turn on a multiple edge loops and turn that down to one. That way when we click here for the edge loop, we can see it's going to set it right in the middle. I'm going to turn off the tool settings here and I'm going to go to the face mode and hit "Q" to pull up the selected tool, click and drag, select those faces and delete them. All we should worry about now is modeling out this right side. I could go to this edge and extrude it and pull it out and just continue modeling. When we get to curves, surfaces and things like that, we can go to the Perspective mode and we can start pulling this around. We go to Object mode, pull this out to the front where the forehead should be and we can start pulling these things around. Let's go to Edge mode, pull this back in. This is the edge or point modeling technique. We can see we're going to need some more edge loops here so we're going to add those and we can start wrapping these edges around and extruding them as we need. This is two different ways of modeling, the box method which we've already shown, and then this method. You're going to need to know both of them to be a successful modeler. Different circumstances call for different techniques and you'll need to know both of them. What I like to do when I'm starting is use the box method and then later I'll come back to this method. If there's an area where it's hard to use the box method, I'll delete faces on the box and then I will just use a new plane. I'll show you how we do that here in a little bit. I'm going to go back to the front view and do what we did on the face. The other thing to keep in mind is we can also use symmetry. We can go to the tool settings here and when we go and we hit "W" to make sure that we have the Move tool on. We can go down to symmetry settings here and the tool settings, and we can turn it on. We can click this little button and we can tell it which direction to be symmetrical and because it's not always that you want to go in. I guess object X or world X is the same thing because we're modeling this rate at zero so it won't really matter if we choose object or world at this point. Let me show you what happens when you do that. If we go to vertex and we just select one over here. You can already see that as I hover over one and selects the other on the other side. Let me just turn off the tool settings here so we can get a closer look and turn that one down. When I hover over it, you can see this blue selection here. When I start pulling points, it's going to be symmetrical. That's also one way instead of having to cut a model down the middle and then just model one side, and then copy it and flip it over, and then merge all the vertices down the center. You can just turn on symmetry and work this way. In a lot of times I'll end up doing both where I'll start out this way and then I can only get so far, and then I'll have to resort back to splitting it in half and then go back to this method. There's a lot of back and forth, but basically anytime you start you want to just get the basic shapes down. I'm going to drag this down. I can see I didn't get all of the edge loops so I'm going to click and drag, and then control click and drag everything above that bottom edge loop, which can drag this down to the bottom. Then we'll scale this down and then I'm going to start adding an edge loops where I see the furthest point on the silhouette here. If we look, we can tell we're going to probably need one in here, up here, up here, here and also with drawings. We probably need to be going to the n side of the drawing. This is a very thick line so we can adjust for that as well. Yeah, I uses the edge loop tool them and forgot to turn off the equal distance here. Let's go to relative distance, turn back off the tool settings so we get a better view. I'll hit "G" to pull up the last tool which is incidental tool we've been using. I'll just click and drag in here and make a bunch of edge loops so that we have some geometry to pull around. Otherwise, we don't have anything to work with and it'll make modeling a lot more difficult if we don't have these edges. With that done, I'm going to click "Drag, Select" and bring this up to the bottom of the skeleton head. I'm just going to start double-clicking and scaling these out to match the silhouette of the skull. In the next lesson, we'll continue working on the model head, and I'll see you there. Thanks for watching. 22. Bones - Make Live Tool: Welcome to this lesson where we will continue working on the skull head. In the previous lessons, since you've last watched, I have finished following the outline of the silhouette of the concept art. Now we can move over to the right view, holding down Space bar, left clicking, and going to right view. We can see this is still a box shape. We have a lot of work to do to pull this around correctly. One thing you'll also keep in mind is the fact that there aren't any subdivisions on the face yet. We're going to still work in a boxy fashion for as long as we need to. Then I'm going to show you interesting technique we can use to try to sculpt a more rounded shape here. I'm going to go into my vertices mode here, and just start pulling vertices around. I'm going to hit B to pull on self-select, just because I know the vertices around it are going to need to be over there somewhere. Also I'm going to remember that I need to turn off self-select, and we're going to the inside edge of this concept art because the drawing lines are very thick. We can also see where there's some discrepancy, and where the actual top of the head was finishing. But of course, these drawings are not perfect. This is where the skill of modeling comes into play. Where you need to be able to interpret art, and understand shapes in three dimensions, going from a 2D drawing. This is really the skill that's going to take quite some time to become proficient at. But again, you have to start somewhere. I'm going to speed this up for right now, and then I will see you in one second. Now that we have this side profile done, I'm going to go over here to the attribute editor, and just turn down the transparency so we can actually see the object. You can see it has a lot of ugly shapes to it right now. It's not circular in any way. We need to resolve this somehow. Because we can see that it doesn't respect the three dimensions of this object in any way. Like the nose goes all the way across. We need to start dealing with that. We can do that with adding more geometry here on the front because we can see there is none. For us to resolve this, we need to add a lot of geometry here. But the problem is, if we start adding edge loops, I'm going to click the edge loop tool, go to the tool settings, go to multiple edge loops, and let's add a bunch of geometry here. It's all concentrates up here through the top. That's not really what we want. We want to have the type of edge flow and topology we talked about earlier where things can redirect and whatnot. That's where the edge technique works sometimes. I'm just going to undo that. We could start with a just a new plane, and start working that way. We could also just rough in the shape here with that topology that we don't like. Then retopologize it. I'll explain how that works as well. Let's go ahead and go with the method that we tried here, and add all this topology. Let's go in both directions here. We have all this topology now. I'm going to right-click, and go to object mode. But it's very boxy Like I said. One thing that we can do is, go to Polly modeling, and bring up a sphere. Because I know the general shape of the skull should be circular. I'm going to turn down the transparency again on the one we're currently working on. Assign a new shade to the sphere so we can see that. I'm going to right-click on it, and go to assign the material, which is a Lambert. Now we can see that through. I'll turn this one on back a little bit because I still I want to see where it is relative to that. Basically what I'm doing is I'm trying to create the form of the top of the head roughly. It looks like the back is the only thing that's messed up maybe. I'm just getting this in a general shape. I'm going to go to the vertex mode. I'm going to make sure symmetry is on, which it is. If you don't remember how to do that, go to the tool settings, get on the symmetry settings, and remember we left that on from when I showed you how to do that. I'm going to hit B, and I'm going to hold down B, and middle mouse drag. Now I have a self-selection. Now what I can do is drag this in. It looks like I need to go in quite a bit. I'm going to actually do a really big self-selection back here, and select more of those vertices. I know it's going to do it evenly because we have self-selection on. Something like that. Just going to drag this, maybe reduced the self-selection a little bit. Drag this back. But the idea is just to roughly get a more circular shape for these top areas. I'm going to right-click, and go to object mode to get off of that. I'm going to select this object. Then I'm going to actually select the sphere, and go to this little magnet up here. When we click this, you can see right here, it changed from no life surface to P sphere one. Which is the name of this object here, which it's hard to click there. But you can see that the outlines turn green. What that indicates to us is the fact that if we go to a component mode like vertex, and I click one of these, and I start to drag this around. It's going to snap to that sphere. I can move this all around, and it's going to snap to the sphere. You can see if we hit four, there's a lot of crazy stuff happening though, because we have self-select on. It's best not use self-select with this method, and just two individual points. But as soon as I touch this, it's going to snap down. I can go through these, and get them in the general area of this sphere. Let me choose several of them without self-select, and see if we can do more than one at once. You can see it doesn't really like that. You will have to go through one by one. If you click dragging, selecting, you're going to probably select things behind this. You want to to be careful about that as well. I'm going to take a minute to snap all of these points to the sphere. Just really quickly I'm going to turn off symmetry. There's also a shortcut for it up here, I'll just turn that off. I'm going to select everything from the top portion here, except for maybe this bottom row. Let's turn on six again just so we can see the texture. Yeah, I'm going to turn it off. I'm not going to select the bottom row here. I'm just going to move everything, let's say down. But as I try to move it down, it's going to snap it. It's spasming out and that's okay. We can clean this up later. The other method we can use is to use the Relax tool. I'm going to go to object mode, select this, and go to the sculpting tools, go to relax. With larger brush, I'm just going to click and drag on these. We've at this point abandoned the symmetry of the model, and that's okay because we're going to essentially retopologize this thing. I'll show you what that means a little bit later. But we basically just want to get the forms down. We could also later on do the symmetry thing where we delete one-half, and then mirror it over. There's a lot of different ways to work, and there's no one right way. There's just, you should know as many ways as you need so that when the time comes, you can dip into that tool set, and take advantage of all that knowledge, which is why it's helpful to learn techniques that you may not use immediately so that later on when you run across problems, you can deal with that. If we go back to texture mode with six, I'm going to hide the sphere, control H. I'm going to look at this model. It's obviously a lot more rounded. There's still some issues here, and back here on the corners. But for the most part, it's a quick way to get a more rounded shape instead of having to pull vertices by vertices over. Of course, the bad thing is, there is a lot of geometry here that we probably don't need. In the previous step, we could have just probably gotten away with a lot less geometry. You can also just reduce this stuff, doing like selecting every other one, and reducing the amount of topology here. I'm going to Shift, right-click, and go to delete edge. I'm going to do the same thing in the front. I'm just going to take out every other edge, and Shift left-click, go to delete edge. We don't have to pull as many points around when we're editing things. That's one important thing to keep in mind. Early stages of modeling is to keep it as light as possible. That when you're editing, you're not having to pull a ton of points around. I'm going to continue to clean this up with the Relax Sculpt Tool. I will see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 23. Bones - Sculpting: Now, we have the top of the head looking remotely like a skull shape. Let's move down the head and see how we can continue to refine this. We still have the piece fewer marked as a make alive surface. We need to turn that off if we're going to continue to work. Let's look more at the sculpting tools that we have here. Actually, one thing I also like to do is to duplicate out the stage I made, someone hit Command D. I'm just going to hide this so that I can work on this without fear of having to undo 100 brushstrokes, or something crazy. I can just pull this one backup and continue modeling. That's one technique I like to do is to duplicated out to save where I'm at. Let's look at these sculpting tools. It's arranged by how likely you are to use it basically. We have the classic sculpt tool where if we click and drag on it, it's going to pull out points, and if we control hold down and it's going to push points in, if we hit Shift, it's going to smooth points out. With one tool, we can do a lot of what we need to do on this model. Again, I don't have symmetry turned on, which is not a huge deal because later on we're going to delete this half. This for right now it's just for ease of use to be an artist and work more free form. You don't always have to be super strict. I'm holding down Shift and smoothing these corners out with the sculpt tool, so that we can bring in those corners and round, everything off a little better on this dimension that we don't have a drawing for, which is this three-quarter dimension here. I'm just holding down shifting, dragging. I'm going to bring all of this stuff in and going to just smooth this stuff down on the corners, mostly as when I'm looking at, just to generally get the stuff going in the right direction, and undo that a little bit. I think because that's the nose. We definitely want this part in. Because the nose, the only part of the nose it's should be poking out is obviously in the middle of the model. I'm actually going to hold down control and push this geometry in. It's a little more aggressive of a brush. That's going to push it in from different angles, and then I'm going to hold down Shift and smooth that stuff out to try to get it back to a better shape. I'm just holding down shift and it's looking a lot better from when we started. Pretty quickly you can get to a decent spot without having to do too many crazy things. Let's look at this and knows issue here. I'm going to grab an edge and I'm going to actually going to hit b to self-select. I'm going to hold down b and just make it a small area. It grabs the ones around it. Then I go to this view, so I'm going to grab these, and control-click, Deselect the neighbors, and want bring this one in as well. We're going to use this. I'm going to hit Add to bring up scale and scale this flat. If you want this not to go pass negative, would like this can go. Let me do that, so it's a little easier to see. See I can go pass negative over here. I can go through the manipulator. If we hold on r, and click, we can go to Prevent Negative Scale. Let's turn that on and see what happens. We get a straight line. That's a really nice way to get a straight line on a model. We're going to do that again here, keep dragging that. Then now we know that something like this over here. I selected through it. I'm going to control, click that, should definitely be way back. Something in here. Because the nose should be a pretty pronounced shape by itself and it shouldn't be competing with the cheekbones, of course. I'm just scaling stuff and bringing it in so that we can start to shape out this cheekbone area as well. It looks like we're starting to lose some of the form here. I'm just going to pull some of this stuff back out with the soft select still on to make sure we're trying to maintain the overall shape of this thing. I'm going to go to the Sculpt tools again and just smooth out this area again. Do want to be careful when you start smoothing, and there's not a tone geometry here to support this? For smooth, this is start snapping the stuff back out and get rid of the work already did. I want to undo that and just maybe relax the model to bring in more geometry. I'm going to click the one we were familiar with already and try to bring in some of this geometry from the right. It's looking a little bit better. We can look at it from all different angles. It's hard to see the shape of something if you aren't seeing it from a glancing angle. Meaning, I'm looking on the surface, I want to see the profile, the silhouette of the surface to see what's actually happening there. Here, we can see there's a divot. It's hard to see that divot when you're looking at it straight ahead. But when you go at this glancing angle, you can see that we've gotten rid of that shape, which is just a matter of pulling that stuff back out. We can turn the piece fear back into a make live surface, and then just pull that stuff out, vertex by vertex. Even though it's hidden, it will respect that make live surface. We can get that shape back. After all the work we are doing, pushing and pulling stuff around, it got rid of that shape. Looks like that was a little too much. I'm going to turn that make live back-off. We've solved that problem. I'm constantly seeing what the state of affairs is and what the next thing we need to be doing. We've made some progress and we learned about Sculpting tools. I'll see you the next lesson where we will start to model the eyes. Thanks for watching. 24. Bones - Eye Socket Edge Loops: In this lesson, we're going to start to model the eyes. We're also going to clean up the model a little bit. When we start modeling, it's like a sculptor with clay. It gets pretty messy. That's okay. We're trying to find the form from the reference and whittle away and build up and whittle away again and smooth out. Things can get pretty messy with the topology that we learned about should be pretty follow the right line flow, all that stuff. But at the early stages, you shouldn't be worrying about that too much and just finding the form of it. To clean up the model, I'm actually going to delete the left side. I'm going to go the front view, and before I delete the left side, I'm going to go to the edge mode and I'm going to double click this middle edge here. I'm going to go to scale, and because we have the negative scale attributes set, if I let the hold on and left-click prevent negative scale is turned on. When I scale this, it's going to flatten out that edge. Whenever you hit W and hold on X, it's going to snap this edge to the center line of the world here. So now I know if I go to my face mode, and I select all the faces on this left side, or If can just hit Delete. There might be some stray pieces that you need to grab, but make sure you're not grabbing anything on the other side. Now we're working with just one side and that's okay. What we need to do is start to look at the line flow a little bit more so we can start to define areas that we need to work on, like the eye. I'm going to scale this one end similarly as I had done before. Actually, I'm going to deselect this top because I liked the sphere that we had going up here. I'm going to deselect those and then scale in this, just the front area here and push it over because we know we want the nose to have lines here. If we look at the reference image, we know we're going to, at the bare minimum, we're going to need a line here to hold the inner part of the eye. I'm doing this now because we need to look at modeling the eye socket itself and deleting part of the geometry we already have and using the edge modeling technique instead for right now. I'm going to go back to the perspective mode and take stock of this where the edges are and see what I need to pull over possibly. I think we could maybe pull some of this over and deselect to the top. I'm going to go back to the front view. Now that I've made that decision, hit 4 to see that I have deselected the backside of this thing the way that I want. I'm going to drag this over and deselect some of this stuff and drag it over. I'm going to deselect the bottom area, and just trying to get this edge flow to start going a little more down the model as you would predict it. We can smooth that stuff out later. But what I'm trying to get at here is. Hit 6 on keyboard is we're going to delete these faces. I'm going to go back to the front view with this texture turned on so we can see the reference image. I'm going to select the faces that encompass this eye socket and delete them. We could extrude them if we wanted to. Another method could be going to custom and extruding this and go to the perspective view, and we could keep bases on and scale this and try to make the eye socket this way. But to me it's too messy, and I'd rather just start from scratch and focus on making one component of the skull really well and then trying to just figure out later how to connect it up. I just hit Delete on that to delete it. I'm going to bring in, actually I'm just going to work with the edges that we already have. Let me go to the front view and I'm going to grab this edge here. I'm going to start to really think about the edges and pull this in and rotate it and get it to a point that is somewhat representative of the outline of the eye. I'm doing like every other edge because I know the edge above it is going to follow. Again, when you think about edge flow, we're going to start to see areas get pulled in ways that we can't really resolve right now. What I'm going to do is actually just delete this face, and I'm going to bring this edge over. Actually, I'm going to make another edge loop because I want to leave that inner edge, so I'm going to undo that super quick and just hit the edge loop tool. I do not want 10 edge loops right there, so I'm going to click the tool settings and go to one. Doing it in the center is fine. What I'm going to do is delete this face here and turn off all the stuff so we get a better view. Now I have this free edge when you get in here. Now I have this free edge to start a different direction. I'm going to go to the right view to make sure we're in line with where we need to be there. We can see that this is way too far back, so I'm going to push this way back and I'm going to do the same here. I know we can do that now because we have that extra edge loop to hold the nose bridge. Now I know I can pull this stuff around and be roughly in the right spot and still keep the bridge. I want to make sure that I'm not selecting that one, the bridge edge loop as I'm going through here. I'm just going to bring this stuff in and makes sure we're getting in the ballpark. A lot of modeling is a lot of back and forth, especially if you don't have a ton of experience. This is time-consuming stuff like most aspects of 3D that you are bound to learn if you haven't already. This is just part of modeling, and learning 3D is taking your time and trying to imagine this stuff in 3D and making that a reality here in the computer by pulling points around. This really starts to stress how you interpret things in 3D space because we don't have, like I said, it's not like we have a drawing from every single angle that we're looking at. We have to interpret based on the art and what we think the outline of this should be. So we started getting it in the right space, the right depth, and you can also see why we're trying to work with these few edges as possible because it makes the work go so much quicker. Here's another example of me wanting to split off from the current edge flow. I'm going to click the creative edge loop. I'm going to go to the tool settings and turn on relative distance, so I can put this wherever I want it, which is right here at the top. I want an edge loop here so that now I can take this edge and extrude it and just pull this out. I'm not worrying about everything above it, right now. I just want to make sure that we're doing the eye correctly at this time. I'll worry about connecting everything up later. That's why, I taught the topology part first. So you'd understand the fact that, and I can actually just pull this. There's a roughly straight line, we hit G to extrude again. There's roughly a straight line. You can just go to perspective mode to make sure I'm rotating this edge in the right direction. If there's roughly a straight line like this and the design, you could just pull this edge out super far and then make edge loops later on it. Where there should be. So just to move and work a lot quicker, that's one way to do it. So wherever there's a turning points in the shape, I'm going to hit G again. Hit G, it looks like we missed the shortcut there, so I'm going to hit extrude from the menu. But that's just to work a lot quicker. To pull edges passed. You don't have to stop every little centimeter to create an edge loop. You can pull things really far and then make new edge loops later. So when things start to turn a corner, you will have to obviously have more edge loops like this. But take advantage of those straight areas so that you can not have to worry about that too much. I'm also going to hold down left-click and go to component, and now we can scale up and down. Because before we are scaling up, object space which was up and down in world. So in component mode, it's taking into account where the line is. So we're going up and down the line itself now, which is very, very helpful, scaling things appropriately for what our needs are at the moment. So just going to continue to drag this stuff out and make one last edge loop here. Extrusion that is, and cool. Now I'm just going to select this edge, and I'm going to go to edit mesh, merge, and it's going to increase tolerance till those snapped together. We have the outer rim of the iron now. So that's looking pretty good considering how messy it was before this still probably looks pretty messy to your eye, but let's look at it from the right view and get things lined up now. So I'm going to go to the face mode because it's harder to click the edge that we would be going for there. So this is going to make things go a lot quicker. Now I can actually select this middle edge here to get this going in the right direction. Cool. So it's all about switching between views, and again, here you can see where the two drawings don't really line up. They don't sync up with what the drawing has. So you have to start to interpret for yourself in three-dimensional space. What should be happening. So I'm hitting B holding down B to change the size of it here, and just trying to get things roughly in the right area in Z space as well. What we need to start thinking about too. So I'm just trying to get the stuff out of the way. So we can actually model the eye socket. So you can see how modeling is very time consuming and it is a difficult job. I have a lot of respect for people who this is all they do at studios is create models like this. It's not an easy job. Artistically and technically. It's quite challenging. So as I make changes to it from different views, it's like pushing and pulling it. I want to make sure that it's still roughly in the same area and may have to just split the difference on how the two drawings are not lining up. But what I want to make sure is that the general idea of this teardrop shape is starting to take form on the eye socket. So let's just pull that there, once we have this done and go the edge mode here and a double-click, and you can see now we have this inner ring. I'm going to extrude them all at the same time. I'm going to go to the perspective mode, and I'm going to see how well this stuff wants to extrude in. I might just grab this from the center. We need to keep faces on together and drag this stuff in. I'm going to hit R and scale this from the center now, and we can start to see us getting the edges of this thing, this socket working. I'm going to hit G again. Extrusion did not work, so I'm just going to choose it there at W to just pull the move tool and just drag this stuff back. So now we have the general idea of the socket for the front view. I want to make sure that, we didn't have keep basis the other on there. That's why when I was double-clicking. It was not going around the edge loop. So now when I double-click it, it will go all the way around. So I'm just going to scale this stuff out and double-click this. Scale this out, so we can start to see this go in the depth. Go inside the skull and pull that one back a little further. So we start to make the eye socket, and now we need to resolve how this starts to fit with the rest of the model. We'll do that in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 25. Bones - Eye Attach: In this lesson, we're going to continue to work on the eye socket, and figure out how to connect it to the rest of the head. I'm going to turn on the wire-frame on shaded here with this little button, so we can see where the wire-frame is. When you're doing anything like this, we'd just made the size socket, and how we need to make it to follow the reference. Now, we need to resolve how it fits in with the rest of the model. The first thing I'd do is just try to line up where edges should meet. We have one edge here, and two edges here. We know we need to add an edge loop here. I'm going to go through the whole model and look at that thing, and add edge loops where I see that they're needed. With that in mind, I'm going to run through the model really quick, and add edge loops. I'll go up to the edge loop tool and add it. As soon as I add an edge loop, I also want to try to maintain the shape that I've started to create. I need to pull it up, I can't just add an edge loop and expect it to maintain the type of shape I want it to, because that'll just be a straight line. It's going to go through here and line up these edges. This one will go to that one, it looks like we need one in here, so I'll hit "G" and add one there, and then pull this out just to touch. Then we got these two and then you need two here, and it looks like, and then that one will go with that one, that one to that one. One thing I also want to note is you want to try to maintain the edge flow. When we're talking about topology earlier. See how far away this edge. There was this edge, it's going in this direction, and then it takes 60 degree turn and then it starts going straight again. You don't want edges like this, you want them to line up with the edge flow, so they're all in a straight line for the most part until they're needed to be moved, but there's no reason for these to be out of whack like they are. You need to rain the topology as you continue to tweak things and correct your model. I'm just going to pull this one over as well. Eventually we'll have to resolve this issue over here on the nose, but I'm going to save that for another video when we're working on the nose. Right now let's just focus on the eye socket and try to get this stuff and the line. Now let's start at the top. What we can use is the append to polygon tool. Because this is too far of a gap to try to merge these edges together, we need to create new geometry here. Let's do that with the append to polygon tool right here, and I can just click here and click there, and I'm going to hit "Enter". I'm not going to continue to go down the model with the same tool, because every time I hit "Enter" it makes those edge loops. I want to make sure that it's making those, so I'm doing it face-by-face. Now what do we do? We were faced with a triangle here. What I would suggest doing is we haven't flipped the model over yet, there's nothing over here. What I would suggest doing is just running this edge loop with the Multi Cut tool. Clicking on vertex here, and just running it all the way through to the other side of the model. Now we have two triangles, one empty, and one filled. Let's just take this face, make sure we're on the face mode. Click it and hit "Delete". Now we have a quad, now we can use the append to polygon tool, and make sure that we do not have a triangle in that area. We're also now working with any handguns which is good. I'm going to hit "G", and just keep going. I will speed up the video and I'll see you one second. One thing I do want to note is you can't just take everything for granted, you have to be very precise with every vertex. I got to make room for this new edge flow so I got to move the vertices. Don't just allow the model to be whatever it is, you have to touch every single vertices and make sure it's precisely where you want it to be at all times, so keep that in mind. Now we have the eye socket attached to the rest of that. I'm going to increase the transparency here, or I guess decrease it really. I'm going to slide over to the very end. You can see we have all this history now, and it takes a long time to get to the shader. One thing I can do to help clean with the model. I'm clicking and holding this, and we're seeing the tab just scroll by. I'm going to go ahead and delete the history on this so that you'll watch the tabs over here. Now it's much cleaner, and now we get straight to the shader so that we can adjust this transparency and see it in a more shaded mode. I'm going to turn off the wire-frame on shaded option here, and these edges are very hard for the mesh display just because we created them by themselves. The normal's are a little wonky, but we can start to get a sense of the shape of the thing. As we've continued to refine the model, we need to try to keep it on model where we want it to be. I'm just going to take a second to hold down shift and smooth this area out. I'm also going to use the pull, I don't think we've used this one yet, but the pull one as very useful, or they call it the grabbed tool. You can just click and drag stuff around, and this one is was very useful to just get stuff in the right spot. As I do that, let me undo that super quick, it looks like the model got moved at some point. I'm just going to drag this back down. Let me look at the outliner, or undo that. That's weird, I don't know how that happened while it's recorded, so I'm sure we could do some detective work. It looks like it got a little out of whack. Maybe when I was moving around at some point. Sometimes that happens when you're navigating and accidentally move something if you have the Move Tool selected. It's usually better to navigate around with the Select tool. You're not actually moving things while you're navigating in the view-port. I'm going to go back to the grabbed tool, grab this stuff to try to match the silhouette of the drawing again, and smooth stuff as well, even though we're only grab tool, you can still smooth things. That modifier key works with multiple tools, so I'm just smoothing things and grabbing them back out. Smooth this hard edge there, and refine the shape of this eye socket to make sure it's a teardrop shape. Because there's some straight edges here that I think could be slightly curved, and brought in. To do that, I'm trying to get the enters along with it. You just have to move around. We might need another edge loop in here. I'm going to go ahead and do that because this is. If you look at the distance between these edges, that's quite a long way and this is actually a good moment to talk about this slide tool. If I like the shape of this thing, but I just want to drag this edge down, and you see how it's changing the shape of everything. I can actually use the slide tool, and there's a couple different ways you can get to it, I like to just use the modeling tool setup here by clicking this little button. We can go to the transform constrain and look at our options, we have the edge slide. We click that, you can see it says slide now and also when we move it. It's maintaining that shape. We can just slide edges around if we need to make room for other edges. I'm going to slide this one down just a touch, and turn this off so that we're not having to deal with that later, and bring in a new edge loop here with the Insert Edge Loop tool. That way when I use the sculpting grabbed tool, I'll actually have something to move. Just wanted to move that end slightly. I think my brush is too big, so I'm going to hold down B and middle mouse drag of the view port. Just push that around. We had smooth just to touch here holding down Shift. That's looking at a little bit better. We can continue to refine this later on, smooth out hard edges here, so it has a nice shape to it. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will approach how to deal with the nose area here. If we look at the reference, there's inset there. We need to deal with the nose in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 26. Update: Quad Draw Tool: Hey, I want to make a little update video to this course and introduce you to a tool that I've been using on a couple of projects recently, and that's the Quad Draw tool. It's related to the work we're doing right now on the course, and so it can be an alternative method to the things I've already taught or I'm teaching after this as well. Basically, we're creating the topology as we model. Whereas this method, you could actually retopologize on top of an existing model, which is typically the workflow if you're coming from another modeling package like ZBrush which has a ton of geometry. You need to bring it back down to something manageable for animation, because you don't want a million polygons on a character that's going to be animated. It's going to be a nightmare to animate. What you can do is retopologize after effect or make good topology as you're modeling, which is what I traditionally have shown in this course to do with this character. This is actually an alternative method to use and just to have in your back pocket as another tool to use. It's related to the stuff we've been doing because you're already familiar with Make Live, and you need to make live on the thing that you already retopologizing and in this case, it's the skull. We've already made decent geometry, topology rather on this, and so it's not super necessary to go about this. But if you just want to start clean with new topology, this would be a way to generate it. What I'm going to do is hit "Make Live", which we're familiar with by hitting this magnet button up here. Another thing to turn on is the Wireframe on Shaded which is this button right here. I'm going to click that and it gives us a nice view of, this is the Make Live object because it's green. We can remember that from an earlier lesson that was the case. I want to turn on anti-aliasing just so the edges of that are a little cleaner, and then I'm going to go to the Modeling toolkit here. I'm going to go down to Quad Draw. This is the tool that we're going to be using. There's a few settings down here, but I just usually leave it on default. What I use it for, is for retopologizing like I said, where you can actually just come in here. Normally how I start, is I start very broad, very big strokes. Let's say I'm going to start with the skull, the top of the head first. I'm going to make some pretty big quads here. I'm just hitting Left mouse button in four different places and then I hold Shift and that makes one whole face. You might think to yourself, if I look at it from this angle, it's not following the head very well. That's okay. We're going to deal with that in a second because what we don't want to do is start in here and start at this scale of the faces. We don't want to be in here, making faces that big or that small because that's going to be very time consuming and I'll show you why here in a second. I've hit Control Shift and I left mouse button click and actually delete that face. The way to extrude out, which is what we've been doing. You can actually hold down Shift and move an edge. Here you can hold down Tab and Left mouse button move an edge. That's just while you're in the Quad Draw tool. If we jumped back into modeling traditionally, and I went to the edge mode here, I'm just going to hit F4 so I can get to this edge and see it a little cleaner. I can actually hit Shift and then extrude like this. That's another alternative but because we're staying in this tool, I'm going to go back to that method. I just want to show you the comparison there. You can see Quad draw also turns on this x-ray mode here. We can see through the model and see the faces that we're making. Again, by holding Tab, I can extrude out and now I have to go back to the move tool that we had before. I'm going to hit Tab and then do it again. You can see that it's starting to be diagonal. One thing that we can do is hold down Shift and just relax this out. We're brushing this area out and it's relaxing the geometry down. We can also just left mouse button on whole faces or vertices or edges and move them individually so that we can rearrange it the way that we want it to. Now, the other cool thing about holding tab is that instead of what we've been doing, Tab Left mouse clicking, if we Tab Middle mouse click, we can actually take this whole edge loop up. Now you may start to see gets wonky because we're going in one direction, but the faces are all facing different directions as they go around the sphere. You'll want to make sure that you're clean that up as you go along and they're following where you want them to go. We can just move this up so it's more in line. Then we can hold down Shift, you brush this area to relax that back out so that it evenly distributes the faces that we've created. I'm just going to pull this one down individually. Now to the cool stuff that I referred to earlier about why are we starting so big? That's because we can use the edge loop tool here and create edge loops after we've made these big chunks. Because we're still on the make live features turned on that will follow the shape of the make live geometry underneath it, which is the skull. If we look right here, we can see that the blue edge here just go straight down and where it should be following the contours of the skull. If I hold Control on my keyboard and then I Left mouse click, we can see it will jump out to that point. Now, it's also because we don't have an edge on the profile here. I'm going to hit Control and click there. We can see that it's starting to contour to the skull as well. We can see there's a spot here that still sticking out. So I get add an edge there, add an edge here and that's a ton easier than if we were to go in and make each individual square by themselves. That's why we started big and then we can add edge loops in after effect. Now it's worth noting that we may want to hit Shift and relax this area to relax it back out again. Alternatively, you could jump back into a more traditional method like using the multi cut tool and when we hold Control here, we can also make an edge loop and we still have make live on. It's going to act very similarly but the advantage of maybe using the multi cut tool here is that we can hold down Shift and actually get to the middle of that quad. We already have a pretty even topology there. When we jump back in a Quad draw it maybe won't have to relax it as much. But that's just to give you an example of comparing those tools. But what I like to do is just stay in this tool and not jump back and forth between the others as much. That's a really good way to use the Quad draw tool. Now, just as a general note about topology in general, I want to re-emphasize basically what we're doing here is we are making sure that we're having good topology for animation and to do that, we want to make sure that we have the right of edge loops. That's why in this course, we were inserting this edge loop here for the eye sockets so that we could animate a blink later on in the course with a blend shape. One thing that I would also do is I would just in the workflow wise, I would maybe stop what I'm doing here on the skull and think I had the skull cap and a good spot, but I know I want this edge loop here around the eye socket. Now, another bit wonky of a way to use this tool is if we just hold down Tab on the face without actually being near an edge, it'll give us this face. Now, you want to be careful about using this because it can actually have the first face flipped. If we were to start drawing to the right, see how it keeps flipping around. It's going based off the direction that we're pulling it. If I meant to go that direction, see how it overlaps itself. I want to make sure that the first face I do is actually behind the cursor. I can drag it here and whip it around. The other thing is if I want it to be bigger faces, all I have to do is just middle mouse drag and scale the face up. Then I can just click and drag around the eye socket and we can just paint these even quads. We can loop it back up here, hold down Shift, and then click. That was the original method. Then we can just relax this area out. Now we have that edge loop. Then we could continue our traditional modeling techniques. Now, back to the earlier topology when we did the odd and even connections. That's where something like this comes in when we need to connect these two spots, we could divide them up and say, set an edge basically at each point where I know I'm going to need to connect between here and here, and here and here. Maybe it'll go there and there and so I need an edge for here and here. Then this vertex, and I need one here. That means when I hold down Shift, now I have this nice bridge between those areas. You can just go through and make as much topology as you need. Again, just jumping back and forth between the tools, I can hold down Tab and middle mouse drag two edges out. Then the vertexes I will also snap down there. We can very quickly topologize something like this without too much effort and then hit ''Shift'' and then relax this area back out so we're not getting too much stuff bunched up there, too much quads bunched up in that section. It's a really nice tool that I've been using lately and I just want to update this course. If there's any other updates, if you had questions, hit me up and ask me about them. Or if you want me to update the course with a topic, I'm considering doing a follow-up course that's maybe a bit shorter than this one. Stay tuned for that and check out Digital Creators Skull YouTube channel where I am posting a bunch of videos about just the animation industry in general and some other Maya tips. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 27. Bones - Nose: In this lesson we're going to tackle the nose. I will turn off that so I get a little more screen space here. I have my wire frame on shaded, turned on here and I turned down the transparency so we can see through a little bit. Basically what we're trying to do is create a triangle here, where we have a lot of quads. We are probably also going to need to build this out a little further as well. First, let's try to get the line flow in here, that will help support this type of a nose shape because it looks like the indication here is the fact that this is going in and it's a hole here. Let's grab the multi cut tool and go to the front view just so we can get a better view of what we're doing. Let's create a new edge loop here and go down this way. If we went straight across, we'd create a triangle, so let's put a point out here and then continue down. Let's just keep going and do the same thing over here. We don't want to create a triangle by connecting this ones, so we'll put a point there. Then just go straight across and hit "Enter." We need to solve this problem. We basically just need to connect these two things, so that creates two quads here. We'll do the same thing here. We may need to add another edge loop. You can see that this edge flow is a reverse c shape. If we try to create a new edge loop, it will reflect that. It's going around like that. Let's put another one here and go back to perspective mode. Because we're going to need to pull this stuff out to help support the nose. I'm going to go to the vertex. Let's just pull this stuff out. I'm just going to scale this and hold down R to get back to object mode. Scale this stuff forward, pull it forward. I think we'll probably also need some more geometry overall here because it's stretching so much to try to reach. We may also just pull these back. Instead of having those be the front ones, we can just use these as the in-betweens and pull this one back as well. You constantly just re-evaluating what's the best way to do this. Nothing is set in stone when you're working like this. You just keep going forward and finding out where the problems are and trying to fix those problems. We've got something like this so far. I think we may need an extra edge loop here because it's stretching so much. We could also put an edge loop here and pull this over. We're squeezing this stuff down. Just get this in the ballpark right now and try to work as quickly as we can. We go back to the front view. Looks like this stuff is down pretty low. I'm going to turn back on the slide function here from the multi menu and transform constrain. Let's do surface slides since we're using vertices. Let's see if we just line the stuff around. Let's go back to perspective to make sure that's working. Yes, it's going to stay on the surface, which is what we want. We don't want to change the shape just yet, we're trying to get these edges where we want them to be. Select all this and go back to perspective because invariably will select things behind it and just move all this stuff up. Same thing with these. I think all of these need to go up. These are probably going to go out. We're just switching back and forth between views to make sure we're going in the right direction. In general, when you're doing modeling like this, anywhere that you put lines closer together are going to help define an edge. That'll become more clear in a minute. That's the reason why these are closer together than the other one or something further away. I'm just trying to move this stuff over to match the outline of the black area. It looks like we probably could use an extra edge loop here. When I try to hold off, I try to delay adding geometry as much as I can because it does add to so much more complexity. As we're pulling points like this, it's just that much more stuff that you have to deal with. Try to avoid it as much as possible until the last possible second and say all right, I need an extra edge loop here. Just getting this stuff around, I'll probably speed this up and I'll see you in a second. Okay, so now that I have that kind of matching the silhouette, now we need to deal with this kind of a thing. It looks like this stuff needs to be a straight line, right? If we're looking at in the front view, we can see from this vertices up to this vertices should be a straight line. This is the furthest point out and this is back on the face. When we go into perspective mode, we can see that's not really the case. Again, that's part of the difference of these two drawings. This point should really be over here somewhere I think, but the drawings don't really reflect that. We have to interpret for ourselves, where do we really want this nose? How big of a nose should this actually be? I think the front one is a little too large. If we were to do this one here. It would just be a massive nose, right? Look at this in profile or three-quarters. The nose cavity would just be massive. I think the side view is more accurate. What I may do is cut this off sooner with the edge flow that we made. Instead of it going down so far. Let's just cut it off here instead. I'm going to go back with the multi cut tool here and make those adjustments. Let's see. What we did was we added this line and we can see where we had created this corner. We would just want to move that up. Let's see, for this line to be here. Let's imagine this is the right corner here, this needs to be pulled over here to this corner. Let me make that first. Let's say this is the corner thing that's going to hold it. This is a problem solving you have to do when you're modeling. Basically, rerouting this one down to this corner, this one would go, well, but we want that. We just need to get rid of these or no. We want to keep those, it's gets confusing for me too. Let's just delete this and see where we get. Sometimes when I right-click, it doesn't really enjoy that. Let's delete this. We just need to add an edge loop here basically and call it a day. Let's bring it. Let's do it here, so we're just do what we did earlier or just bringing it up a level, so that now we can bring these vertices more in line with this edge here. All these, if we go into our right view, should be lining up. This should be the silhouette, right? or in theory. We might do this in see like design wise, that doesn't work, but I always like to start with falling the references as close as possible. Then working back from there, that's not looking right, deviating from the reference after you give it a shot. We're in the neighborhood right? Like we're in the ballpark. What we can do if I go to face, right-clicking and dragging I think multi-face or something, and I'm going to be selecting only faces here. We basically hit now have these faces that will create the nose cavity. If I extrude this, go click on the "Extrusion tool." Keep faces together and I'll just set w-report the manipulator tool and just drag this back. Something like this, maybe I'll rotate it and scale it down. Because we want this, this should continue and shouldn't just cut off here so I'm trying to rotate it. It's like this. That should be the opposite for their is internal triangle here. This should continue back like that. That looks right to me. From extruding, we still have this face we can just get rid of because this is going to go straight through to the other side and this is going to be a hole there. I'm going to delete those and we're definitely going to need more edge loops on the in-side here to support this. Let's get the edge tool and see what the edge flow where that puts these edge loops. Let me just talk about this super quick. If we hit three on our keyboard with this object selected, it's going to go into this like fake smoothing. We can see it rounds off all these edges. The issue is, if there's not enough geometry in an area, it's going to collapse down. If we add geometry here, grab the edge tool again. Let's put one on the inside and we're going close to the front here, close to the edge because we wanted to test support this front edge, so that when we hit, "Three" again, we get out tool, so it'll show, it's much thicker here than before, right. If we keep refining this and adding edge loops here to support that, you can see it starts to build out that front edge a lot more. Now, you can see it's way thicker. than what we originally started with. Hitting three on the keyboard and smoothing might help show where you're headed in that sense, I don't like how thin it is, like the nose bone, so we need to address that. I'm going to undo, I just wanted to show you that the heading three and what that means and why I'm putting edge loops where I am and go back to one. I want to make all these changes before I add those edge loops in all that support. I want to make this thicker, these faces basically, I'm just going to scale them. You can change what you have selected by holding down Command and right-clicking and say two vertices. Let's go two vertices, and if I hit "W" and hit "Control" and middle mouse drag, it will scale these vertices away from each other. That's one very handy modeling tooltip. It'll save you a ton of time. If I was trying to use the scale tool and do that, it would be a nightmare, because they're all occur. They're all going in different directions and the scale tool is not going to follow each one of those directions independently. It's going to do it all together. Again, that's middle mouse dragging with the move tool while holding down control. That is a huge. It took me, I didn't know that for many years and has been incredibly helpful once I figured that one out. We wanted this to be a lot thicker and we just need to work on the shape of this thing. This is the idea, right. We now have this nose cavity mapped out and we can start refining this. I'm going to clean this up a little bit and move these points around and probably try to have a bit more of this, follow this type of a silhouette, bringing these points out, but for the most part, this is the technique we just made the nose. I think what we'll find too, is this might be a little too much exaggerated it's too far out. When you look at this from any other angle and the side looks like a duck bill, but this is all part of modeling and I'll see in the next lesson where we will continue to refine this model a little bit. Thanks for watching. 28. Bones - Cleaning Topology: In this lesson, we're going to clean up this area of the nose in between the nose and the eye here. That's stretched out and doesn't have enough geometry here. I don't know that I'm going to show you any new tools or techniques, so if you're not super into modeling, you might just skip this because I'm going to just figure this out as I go along and clean this area up. If you're into this thing and you just want to see me work, let's just continue on here. So the general idea is that most geometry needs to be evenly spaced, and if you look around the model, things are within the same ballpark until you get right here and there's this massive gap. It goes back to what I was saying when we hit three on the keyboard, and things start to get stretched here quite a bit and pull more when they're further apart. So we just for tidy stake, need to figure out how to clean this area. So what I'm going to do is just delete this. Delete these faces. We shouldn't delete anything behind the head, and rework this area. Because we need to have enough geometry here, we're always going to be fighting this. If we don't deal with this now, so we might as well address this here before we get too much further, and before we start to mirror things, mirror the face over because we don't want to have this on both sides. There's a couple different ways to approach this. I think the star was way too close, like you can see we have a lot more edges here than we do back here. So let's really move the star further back here, and we might need to create a few more edge loops in here or create another circle type of a deal. Let's take these edges and go to the edge mode and we'll extrude those, who want to keep faces together. Keep in mind that we're probably going to connect those too, hit G to extrude again. Keep faces together. We'll go there. These two are going to connect and then looks like we have one more. This one will go here. Yes, let's do that. We'll just extrude another time bases on. This is the issue. We're going from three to one here. This is bunched down so you can't see it super well, but we need to figure this out. Because it looks like this should flow here, but we have an extra couple of edge loops here. So we can try to resolve this further up the nose or down the nose, it depends on really what we want to do. I think I might go further up just because we don't have a ton geometry in here. I think this could stand to get moved over like over here. Let's first make another edge loop that we're probably going to reduce at the top of the head somewhere, later I want to go ahead and set that up here so we can continue. Let's make one edge loop. At least we know what we're going to need. We can see that it goes all the way around, let's deselect the part we want to keep. I'm going to hold down control, and drag, and click. Let's just say we're going to resolve this and reduce this line up here somewhere. I'm going to shift, click and go to "Delete edge", because this edge went all the way around up into the nose and we don't want that. We just want it on the bridge here. I'll just have to remember up here, we need to resolve this later. I think we could probably do this again, and let's move this edge over. If I select this one and then double-click up here, it'll just select that distance. I'm going to go to the modeling tool and choose the transform constrain, or we could transform this train, do edge slide, use the manipulator and just move that over here. The same thing for this one really; double-click and move this over to make room for another edge, I think. Do we need another edge? This is such a big area here. We go back to component mode, pulling down R and go to component so I can scale this. That's weird. Oh, it's trying to cut along the edge or something weird. So I'm just going to turn that off now I can do it. I'm just trying to get everything organized to see what do we really need to do here. I may need to add some geometry here. I'm just pulling this stuff around, seeing what we can get away with, and what we don't need to address. It looks like we have one extra edge and I think it's too close to make another one, so we're just going to pull this one over. What I think I'm going to do, I might just delete them altogether. Let's see where that one leads. If we double-click this, that one so that's weird. Then starting on the inside and going around, but I guess those are getting reduced here you can see. Inside the nose; that's another place we could hide things and geometry terminating and stuff that we're never going to see. That's actually a pretty good possibility. I don't think we need this one. I think I'm actually going to do a big no and just delete this edge here. We're going to have an in-gone back in here. I'm going to make it be this one. We could fix this. Let's just be clean about it, and just do this, same thing we've done everywhere else. Now it's not an in-gone, but if you pressed for time or something, no one's ever going to look that far up their nose, hopefully. Let's start to merge these down and see where we're at there. I'm going to go to the "Edit Mesh", "Merge" tool, and increase tolerance at G. We might need to add geometry here because remember, we're going to have a star somewhere, we had one down here, it was right next to the nose, which was no good. Because in general you want to try to put the star where there's not a turn of deformation, or things happening. I think that's pretty good. The one thing we could do is put some supporting geometry around around the nasal part here, and maybe one down here. I think that's it. Let's extrude this edge out. You don't have to worry about keeping faces together because it's a single face. Let's just put this over here, and at G again, extrude that one out over here, rotate that curve down and the ballpark. Cool. Now let's just go back to "Merge". I'm just going to tear this off so we can keep this up. That's merged, this is merged, and this. Whenever I've set G, the tolerance is not far enough, maybe not, "Merge", "Tolerance". I guess these two aren't made to go first, maybe. "Merge". Now let's merge these. Yeah. That was it. Now the issue is, we have two pieces of geometry going into one area, you can see we have three edges here and two over here. We could maybe add an edge loop. Let's see what this looks like over here. We can even add an edge loop here. I don't really know how much that's really helping us. I think we can probably just get rid of this one. Delete the edge. Slide this one down. Yeah. I think that's good. Let's just bring these over so that we can merge them down. I think that we will need to add some geometry. I'm just track-selecting those to make sure they're merged. This distance is far apart. What the heck? Let's just add some geometry here. Let's see where it goes all the way around. Is that useful? Yeah. Look how big of a space that is, we can't move those over, but maybe that was the issue. Let's leave it for now. We can delete it here later or reduce it down, but I think we need it for this cheek area. The last thing I'm going to do is pull this stuff around. I think it's set as what's giving this the duckbill look from this view. Let's evaluate this. It looks like a duckbill, I think it's the fact that it swoops up like this, and it should be the opposite, it should be curving down. Let's ignore the reference, and remodel this to not be a duckbill. Let's move this down. Let me undo this and just go to vertices. So I'll select this stuff with b, hold down b and middle mouse drag. Pull this out. I think in general, just as a skeleton, even though this is a cartoon, like the nose was way too big in profile. The bone and actual skull is much further up and there's cartilage that finishes out the rest of the thing. I think that's what was throwing me off. Let's just, yeah, clean this up and then I think we'll be good. I'm just going to round this off. I might even do a quick pass with the Relax brush. Yeah. I want to see how this is like a div-id in. I want all this stuff to be the opposite. I want it to be bulging out down into more than nose terminates to give all the stuff volume here. You'll hear the word volume a lot in modeling once you get into it. That's a big concept and a big deal, trying to maintain volume and describe a volume accurately is a big deal. I think I lied. There's one more thing I'm going to do as well, I don't want to go that far with it. We're going to mess with this more later. Yeah. This stuff is too far apart maybe. I want this here. We can just do something like that. I'll smooth this out to get rid of that div-id here. Yeah. See how it's a grounded out, it doesn't look like a duck bill now, its looks more like a skull, I think. That's just my interpretation. Yeah. The one thing I lied about is, I think I'm going to put more edge loops here to help support this edge. I think we have room for it, and do the same on the inside here. What I'm looking at basically is, we have no edge loops from here to all the way back. We really want to support this front edge. If we selected this, these need to be pulled up. Slide this up. Cool. Yeah. I think that's working a lot better. Anyway, that's a general idea. Cool. I think we've done a pretty good job modeling the eye, modeling the nose, and we're not going to do a jaw and mouth, and all that stuff in this, but the concept is the same. You could delete this bottom half and then make a jaw here, or you could do what we did for the eye, and just do it horizontally, and do edge loops here, go around and around. It'll be a circular thing. Then end them like we ended this corner here, make a circle here and then pull them to this corner or whatever corner, however far you want the mouth to go out and make a mouth. Yeah. I'm going to hit this with the Relax brush and even this stuff out, especially this stuff back here needs to get relaxed a little bit. It's too close together and not even. I'm going to hit that and then I will see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 29. Update: Modeling Mistakes: I've opened up a new Maya scene and I want to recreate some of these problems that I find. I know the process that people are getting there, so I want to recreate that and show you the mentality of what's happening, so you understand where the mistake has been made and how to correct for it. In the class that I teach, the first thing we do is to model a ghostbuster trap, so it's a rectangular shape. One of the fundamental things you do in modeling is you extrude faces out. I want to take this face and I extend it out. Not just by moving it, but I want to leave an edges loop behind here. How I do that is with the Extrusion tool. It's this little button right here, and I think this is what confuses the students is that the icon looks like a face is already extruded, it extrudes it for you is what the mentality I think is. When people click it, like I just did, and nothing happens, they think, "Oh, the tool didn't work, let me click it again." and they end up clicking the polyExtrude tool, and I've seen upwards of 20 times in people's history. Let me just click it a few times. Sorry, I double-clicked it, opens up the options for it. Sometimes I'll even see it where people will select multiple faces and do this as well, and then maybe they start messing with the options here, like, "Okay, this isn't working, let me turn Faces Together off. Let me hit that. That didn't work. I'll just hit this a few more times. Sorry, I keep double-clicking it. I'm seeing upwards of 20 times. How I know that is because all this history is kept in the channel box here in the inputs. If you scroll down, you can actually see all the poly extrudes we've done. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Then eventually the student will figure out, "Oh, I need a pull this thing to get them to extrude." They get frustrated because this is the next level of mistake that they're not sure how to diagnose what went wrong. In their mind, they think, "I have this tool, it says Keep Faces Together is on, and I finally got it to work. Now, why are the faces separate?" That's because at some point, like I did, they actually turned Keep Faces Together off, and you can actually go back in the history and see where that happened on polyExtrudeFace6. When I did that on the sixth time, I tried turning the faces off. It actually separated this four steps ago for me, and I was adding faces on top of that. The faces were already separated four steps ago. When I finally figured it out, they're already separate. You can see these multiple Edge Loops here as I extend it out, and you can start to move edges around. Look, there's more edges here, there's more edges there. It's all this hidden geometry that's stacked on top of itself because we kept extruding, but we never moved anything. That is the main point here. If you hit a face and you select it and go polyExtrude, but you don't move it, that Edge Loop that is still stacked on top of itself right there, so let me hit it one more time. If I grab an edge, I don't know if I'm selecting the first, second, or third one that stack on top of itself. If I pull this out, now look what happens. It's all wonky. I don't know why that is. Well, it's because you hit polyExtrude and you didn't pull the face out. That's where that stems from. Let me just show you real quick how to fix that if that happens, in a simple way. Just delete all that noise. I don't want to actually grab this lower face, let me undo this a few times and just get this face back down. What I can do is pull this up and then start selecting edges and pull those up. If it starts to look like this, I know that it's a face stacked on top of itself. Having grabbed the correct edge rather. If you see this flashy black thing, that's because faces are stacked right on top of each other. This is actually the edge that should be above this one, so let me grab that, pull it up. Now, I know this is the order in which they should be. This one shouldn't be below this one because we get that feedback where we see it's all wonky. Now that I know that's fixed, I can actually just get back to square one by deleting all of this stuff. You can use two different methods, you can use the Append to Polygon tool, which I like most, or you can just fill the hole if it's something as simple as this. You can go to the Mesh tools. It's kind of confusing because it says Make Holes here, but the actual Fill Hole is in a different place. It's not super well organized. Fill Holes under mesh. It'll actually just make another face for us. Now, we can go back to extruding this and pulling this up. Now, we have one face by itself. If we pull this edge, it should just be that one single edge. That's how we fix that. The next step I want to show that people mess up is with Edge Loops. Another super basic thing, I'm just going to make a new cube here to mess with is the Insert Edge Loop tool. Let's grab that under Mesh tools, Insert Edge Loop. We can just start clicking and making Edge Loops. We're making a bunch, whatever. Then we're like, "You know what, I don't want one of these." Let's go to the Edge mode, double click to select the Edge Loop, and I'm just going to hit Delete on my keyboard, which is the key point here. The mistake is made right now when I hit Delete on the keyboard. But it's hard to see because it looks fine. If we go into Vertex mode, we can see all those vertices are left behind. That's a big no-no. If you go in a Vertex mode and you see a bunch of vertices with no edges through them, that's a major mistake. We can select those and delete them. But what ends up happening is, let me just leave those there. How people end up discovering this later way down the road. They made that mistake here and then they keep modeling and doing stuff. Maybe they tried to insert another Edge Loop, so let's do that. They click something and they're like, "Hey, this Edge Loop tool is broken." and they blame it on the Edge Loop tool. They're like, "Hey, it doesn't go all the way around. This Edge Loop tool is broken." It was going around earlier. If we go down here, look, it goes around because that Edge Loop is not going into a face that has more than four sides, which is the point. When you leave these vertices behind it, actually even by selecting the edge, you can see the red selection only goes to where that vertices is. We got a vertex and we grab it, pull it out. You can actually see those edges. We actually created a face that has more than four sides. The Edge Loop tool doesn't know how to go through those faces, because that's called an end gone. An Edge Loop tool wants and needs four-sided faces. That's why it's working down here because all of these are four-sided faces. I can click this as many times and it'll go all the way around. As soon as I do it where there's vertices up here or it runs into where there's more than four sides. It's hard to tell because this mode is not super visual, but that's what's happening. You have to go to Vertex mode or try to select edges. Even in that little dot there, that's actually cutting that edge in half. It's making that be more than four sides, even though it looks like its four sides. I can understand why this can be confusing because it's just a straight line and think, "Oh, it's a straight line. That still looks like four sides to me." Well, it's not. The Vertex actually cuts that edge in half, so that makes it more than four sides for this face. That's why an Edge Loop tool will not work. The tricky thing though is, you can delete vertexes with the Delete on your keyboard, but to properly delete an edge from anything, you can hit "CTRL" and hit "Delete" on the keyboard. Hold down "CTRL", and then hit "Delete" or you can select an edge, hit "Shift" and right-click and go to Delete Edge. Those are the two ways to successfully delete edges and not leave behind vertices. That leaves me to the final point. We've gone through extrusion mistakes and what those lead to keeping faces together on and off, and how to find that in the history over here on the right in the channel box, you can see where you make mistakes. We just learned about edges and Edge Loops, and End Gone's and how to delete the vertex that are left behind, and how to properly delete edges. The final one that I want to mention is a mentality. The mentality is antithetical to learning. Some of the questions I received, this isn't everyone, but I'll receive a question and the first sentence makes it hard to answer. What I mean is, the first sentence is, "I did everything right and this doesn't work." In the very first sentence, they're already not accepting blame. They don't think they did anything wrong. The learning process is stopped immediately for them in their mind. This is what is tragic for me to see. When you're learning this stuff, you have to be your own teacher. In my classes, I have hours of courses, but you physically have to be the one to follow along and do it for yourself. As you progress and evolve in your career and learning all this stuff, you need to learn how to become your own teacher and to problem-solve. If you get a job in the industry, that's one of the main points is problem-solving. How you start is, "I did nothing wrong and this doesn't work.' You start pointing the finger at other things, it makes it very, very hard for you to troubleshoot and problem-solve for yourself because there's not always going to be me there to answer questions, there's always going to be a co-worker who's willing to answer a question. You need to figure out how to troubleshoot for yourself. The way to do that is to change that mentality, if you have that mentality. The first step is think, "I made a mistake." then you can go back through the actions that you made and to diagnose what you did wrong. I make mistakes, everyone makes mistakes. It's okay to admit you make mistakes. As someone learning, they get super defensive and think that they have to prove their intelligence or something else. Square one for them is, "I didn't do anything wrong, I'm smart, I'm not dumb." There's all this underlying immaturity going on there that you need to get over and mature as a student and an artist, and accept that you can make mistakes. When you ask a question, don't start with "I did everything right That's the final mistake I'll leave you with for the total beginner starting out. If you're in my online classes and you want to ask a question, don't start the question with, "I did everything right." Start it with what the problem is and then we can go from there and diagnose it and figure it out. But hopefully if you've watched this video all the way through, you will not make these mistakes and you won't ask these kinds of questions. You'll have other problems, I can help you with that in the classes I teach. Thanks for watching, bye. 30. Bones - Mirroring Head: In this lesson, we're going to mirror the face over and connect it back up and make some finishing adjustments on it. I'm going to hide the reference for now, and I'm going to go into the front view. I want it to line up this middle edge because through the modeling it's gotten off of the middle, so I'm just going to go to the Edge Mode, double-click the center one and get off of component scale. Holding down R I go to the [inaudible] world and scale this down. It looks like it snapped pretty well, but I'm going to hold down X and just pull it over a little bit to make sure it's right on zero here in the center. Then I'm going to close this. I'm going to delete the history real quick just to make sure it's clean. I'm going to duplicate this. I'm going to freeze the transformations and scale this negative one in X. Now we have a copy and a proper skull head. The only problem is it's not connected to each other, so we need to first combine the meshes. Mesh combine. Now we can delete the history here to get rid of those empty groups over here in that liner. Let's go to Vertex Mode, and we're just going to select the vertices down the center. I hit "4" on the keyboard to make sure I'm not selecting anything on either side. It looks like I grabbed one here and one there. For the most part everything is together. Now we just need to go to Edit Mesh, Merge. The distance threshold shouldn't really matter because they should be around on top of each other. If we increase, that'll start to merge neighboring vertices that we don't want to be merged together. When I hit "5" on the keyboard, pull up the shading, and I'm just going to run through another Relax sculpting tool. When you use the Relax tool and it's on edge like this terminating that it won't relax. I don't know what I'm saying relax that way. Now we can get the centerpieces to relax. I don't know why I'm saying that, that's weird. I think I turned on the steady stroke. What did I just turned on. Sometimes when I'm right-clicking, you can accidentally go into those menus. Well, let me back up. I need to turn on symmetry here. As soon as we mirror something, we definitely want to make sure that we're mirroring stuff, all the tools that we're using so under the Tool settings, we should go to a Symmetry and turn on World X. We can see that this is the x axis and and we hover over this thing. We should get the dot on either side here so we can see where it's doing the symmetry. Just knowing that these centerpieces and everything we do on the mesh now should be in symmetry mode. Otherwise we'll have to mirror one side over again with the other. I'm just going through and hitting mainly these center points that we couldn't get to earlier when it was not mirrored and I'm just going to cache. I'm going to produce a brush size here when I'm going in the center. Cool. It's looking a lot better. This is such an easy way. I don't know what we did before. You had to just individually pull points around an eyeball trying to even stuff out like this. There's generic brush that is pulling the points out, and that works just as well as the grabbed brush. When I'm rotating it, I'm looking at the silhouette, see how there's this little divot here so I'm going to find that and brush that out. Maybe pass where it should be so that then I can smooth it. Like that. It looks like it's smoothing a little too strong. All in all the model's pretty close to what I had in mind. There's some goofy little things going on with the shape in general, but for the most part. I'm going just relax this area, it seems there's too much density here. Trying to bring all that dense mesh from the top of skull down around to the side. You can see here where we connected when were adding those nose bridge loops, and I think I'm going to adjust the eye shape a little bit. Let me turn B, for self-selection. Once you get to this stage, it really is very small tweaks at this stage. I'm not making huge adjustments. But I wanted to get more of an asymmetrical eye, I don't want it to be super symmetrical on the eye shapes. I'm holding down Shift to smooth some of this so it rounds it out again, and hold Control and just push that in. For the most part, this is what I had I mind. Some of this stuff isn't working, I think. Let's go into vertices and really get specific with what we're doing. This looks like a pretty hard edge here and I think if we were to use the smooth Sculpt Tool, it's going to collapse it too much because there's not a lot of geometry there, so I'm going to turn off B and really just pull individual points around, and this is modeling in 3D for you. If you've never done it, this is what it's about. Getting very specific with individual points. There's not a roundness here like this. The front is too flat. I feel like the same is true here. It's the smallest thing, but there needs to be just the suggestion of a curve without looking like a point. But I'm going to continue to tweak some of those things and maybe experiment. I'm just going to go ahead and save. Once you get to this stage it's fun to try different things, what if we wanted to put horns on him like it's a little devil skull or something, or I exaggerate that cheekbones, a lot more? This is a time to experiment and see how far you can push things. That actually looks cool. We were following the reference pretty close and now feel free to get creative and see what you come up with. That's the end of modeling the skull. For the most part, I'm going to continue to refine this on my own as I encourage you to do as well. But in the next lessons we will continue with the rest of the body and we will learn maybe a couple of new tricks and also how to mirror the body. The ribs are going to be interesting. I'm going to go over some deformers which we haven't talked about yet. Look out for that and I hope you enjoyed this lesson getting cool skull out of this that looks pretty cool. I'll see you guys next lessons. Thanks. One more thing real quick I want to touch on before we close out this lesson is, so saying in this example of me pulling out the cheekbones, if we hit "3" on the keyboard to do the auto smoothing thing, we can see that we lose a lot of that shape and the sharpness that make the cheekbones look cool, I think. I think the contrast is cool, everything else is smooth and the cheekbones are more jagged. To maintain this shape, we need to add more geometry in here and there's a couple different ways we could do that. One of the ways would be to select faces here and make sure we have symmetry on. We can select faces here and choose the ones that are facing out like that. Let me just save real quick before I do a bunch of crazy stuff. We can extrude here and turn on key faces together. Let's do a small adjustment here. I'll just bring in the offset just a little bit. Now when we hit "3", these are much stronger edges, it's not collapsing and rounding off as much as it was. Now you can see this harder edge. Just keep that in mind. The closer edges are together when they're rounded out. Even though these are just inline, these are supports basically. When it starts to smooth, there's more geometry here it has to deal with, so it creates a harder edge when we do the auto smooth thing. You can go through this and do that on different faces like here. We could try to do that again and keep faces together on, offset, bring it in, and hit "3", and it just makes everything a little sharper around here, which I think makes sense for the cheekbones, but I just wanted to touch on that real quick before we close this lesson out. 31. Update: Mirror Tool: In the previous lesson, you learned how to do this manually, but I want to show you how to mirror the geometry with a quick tool in Maya. It's right here, it's called the mirror geometry across an axis. If we click it, it will just do it for us in one click but I want to impress upon you to not get lulled into a false sense of accomplishment with this. Because sometimes this might not work or you're working on a very old version of Maya or who knows what? You need to understand how to do these operations manually and these tools up here are merely for convenience and to be a good modeler, you need to know how to do this manually first. That's why I wanted to show you how to do it manually first, to see what's happening behind the scenes, and to appreciate a one-click tool like this. It has some options here that will pop up. If it doesn't pop up for you, you can get to the tools of this by selecting on polyMirror and hitting T, which should bring up the menu settings here. You can also get to them, if you just scroll down after selecting the input, you can get to the settings here as well. After the fact that we could change the axis that is being mirrored on and you can see it's doing its best to merge the geometry across an axis where there used to be geometry to the back of the head was there but now it is merging it as best it can. This also works for geometry across an axis. Later on we're going to make the bone arms. Let's say we had an arm over here. This will also work for separate geometry. The catches will make it one mesh. If I'm near to that, you can see if I select one or the other, they are now the same mesh. The way to get around that, of course, is to go to Mesh, Separate and now we have two separate pieces if we wanted to rig these arms separate. You can tell even now and it gives it a bit of odd history. I'm trying to rotate it and it's not affecting the object as you'd expect. It's changing the topology on it. Of course, what we would need to do to solve that is to go to edit, delete by type, history. Now, when we do it, it should rotate just fine. No, it does not. What we need to do is unparented from this group here and delete that group. Now it should rotate just fine. Again, this is a perfect example of why you need to know how to do this stuff manually in case there's quirks like this, because these tools really are just for convenience sake and you need to understand how to do everything manually in a worst-case scenario. If something's not working the way you expect it to, you could always revert to doing it manually. Thanks for watching this quick little update. I'm using Maya 2020 right now as an update video, but the symmetry tool has been at least as far back as 2018, so you can use that throughout the course as well. Thanks for watching. Bye. 32. Bones - Lattice Deformer: In this lesson, we are already done with the skull, but before we move on to the rest of the body, I wanted to show you a deformer. I'm going to hide that reference again, and we've completed this head. I'm going to clean this stuff up just a little bit. Command clicking this stuff, grouping it. What I want to show you is the deformers. You can get to the deformers from animation menu and also the modeling menu. It's exact same menu that you'll find in each. I'm just going to tear this off, and with head clicked, I'm going to go to lattice. Lattice like the classic deformer that you're going to see a lot, use a lot, probably. There's a ton of deformers here, but I really honestly only use maybe for these like very often. Everything in the bottom half here is just editing so really all the deformers here on the top half and then editing existing deformers that you create is all down here. Let's create a lattice, and it is what you would think a lattice to be, it's this grid shape here. We can go and change the subdivisions, just middle mouse dragging and cranking those up. But, in general, I use lattices for very large changes. In this case, when I looked at this head, I thought that a proportions weren't super great like the foreheads a little too big. Instead of going in here and having to, you know, turn on symmetry and get the, maybe the soft selection tool and like go really big, and move stuff around that way, I prefer to use a lattice. We can edit the lattice by right-clicking on it and going to a lattice point. If you try to do that and from the geometry, it's really hard while I just did it, but sometimes that can be a little wonky because it'll keep thinking you want the geometry behind it. But that's why I click on the edge where there's no geometry. I'm just going to get that back and object mode 2. Now you can still use the soft selection on a lattice of course, so hit B and all that stuff still works. This is one way to just squash down the proportions and get things in a better spot than maybe what the reference had. Or if you want to make like skull that has different proportions as opposed to an adult, this would be the way to go. That's one way to do it, and those are lattices. One quick thing I also want to mention is the fact that, I've made these adjustments and if I move the head, they're gone. You have to make these adjustments inside the lattice and the geometry has to stay inside the lattice. A way to kind of keep these edits would be to one, delete the history like we've done before at it. Delete by type "History" in and we'll get rid of the last and keep the changes. The other thing that I want to do, because it's so early in the modeling phase here, we might not want to keep these changes later after we see the proportions of the body, maybe those proportions work better. What I would do is shift select both of these and middle mouse, drag them under the head. Again, that's called parenting, we've done it before many times, but now when we move the head, the lattice will go with it and so will the changes. If we don't want to see the lattice, we can just go to show and turn off deformers here. Now we can keep going and have that history kind of still there, and we can delete the lattice later and get back to whatever we want it that is the lattice. I'll see in the next lesson where we will discuss some other interesting techniques to create the spine and ribs. Thanks for watching. 33. Bones - Spine Wire Deformer: In this lesson and the following lessons, we're going to speed things up a little bit now that we have the head done. We're going to focus on the spine. I'm going to unhide the reference and I'm going to grab the reference in the head and command, click them in outliner and pull them both up so that the feet are on zero here. This is the world space where we have the grid turned on, we can turn that on and off here. What I'm going to look at now is the spine. I want to make one spine joint and then populate it all the way down the spine. We're going to do it in a similar way that we did on the hard surface modeling with one little extra trick. I'm going to make the one spine bone now with the cylinder, and so I click the cylinder from the shelf and I'm just going to drag this up just so it's in the neighborhood, then I go to a front view holding down spacebar and left clicking there, and I'm going to add some subdivisions here, maybe 10 and maybe an extra cap on the end that we can't see which is the top and bottom, and I'm going to scale this down. I need to do some typing over here instead of registering as a shortcut. I just need to click here to get that off. Let's scale this down and go to the edges, double-click the center edge here right in the middle, turn on soft selection, hold down b and middle mouse drag, I'll take control and the top one so that if we were to do this in the middle, it's going to scale this up and down vertically. I just want to go from X and Z the horizontal axes. I'm going to hold down control, click the y-axis and pull this in, something like this, then I'm going to go to the object mode and actually go to the edge mode, double-click the top and the bottom edge here, turn off soft selection and double this, and may be increase the fraction, may be give it one segment, zoom out and see how that looks. That looks like a spine bone to me. I might delete this edge here because if you look at this it makes a hard edge here, which I guess is okay. If you don't like that you could just delete this edge. It's the fact that these two are close together or what we could do is go to modeling, turn on Transform Constraint to be a surface slide or an edge slide, and then just scale these together so it moves them down away from the edge there. We have one spine joint. Let's go to the right view and hit F2 to frame up everything. Now we need to create a curve, so I'm going to go to curves and surfaces, click on the EP Curve Tool. I'm going to start down here or somewhere just to give us some room to go, because we don't want to start this motion path thing that we're going to do right exactly at the starting point because the ends of it can get wonky on how it interprets the rotation and direction of where it's aiming that thing. The hip bone is going to be its own thing. This is going to be its own piece here. I'm just doing this to give ourselves a little advantage. I'm going to click in the middle of where the spine has been drawn, and just keep clicking all the way up and here how to just guess where it is. The middle is probably here, and then it reverses back and starts coming back this way in the base of the skull, I'm going to hit Enter and now we have our curve. I'm going to attach this like a motion path like we've done before in the hard surface, so I need to go to Animation, Constrain, go on to Motion Path, so I'm going to turn this off because we're going to need this again in a little bit. I'm going to say attach to motion path. You can see that it's not pointing the right way, so we need to go to the Attribute Editor and go over to Motion Path and start messing with this basically, and try to figure out which way it needs to point to be up. So there we go, for an axis Y, up axis X, and now it is traveling down the spine bone. We want to start in here probably, to the one little trick that we're going to add to this before we do the visualizing step that we did previously down here, Create Animation Snapshot, we're going to set it as their flow path object. When I click this, you can see it already. Let me undo it in case you missed that. When I click the flow path object, it's going to add on a lattice. We're not going to see because we have short of formers from the last tutorial. So I'm going to turn deformers back on and click Flow Path Object. Now you can see it conformed to the curve a little more. This will just automatically give us unique shape to each spine Joint. Even though they're exact same cylinder, their position all along the curve is going to change their shape. It's a really nice way to very quickly get some variation in each of these joints. So I'm going to click this and go back to Visualize and create animation snapshot. I'm going to open up the menu here. We basically need to set their increment based on the distance that we need to intersect each one of this. Actually before we do that, we need to change the motion path. If I select the node here, we get these key frames at either end. I'll show this very quickly and again, we're going to get back to this in animation but if we go to Windows Animation, Graph Editor, we can see that it starts slow and it ends slow and we want it to be a consistent speed. When we set the interval and where to create a new cylinder that it's consistent, we don't want a bunch down here and a bunch at the top, they need to be consistent, so we're going to set that to linear by clicking the linear tangent handle there, and that's all we need to do. We'll learn more about graph editor and tangents and all that stuff later. Now with that said, we just need to set this interval at an appropriate interval with our cylinder selected and hit Apply. We can see already that we have an issue in that at some point along the curve it's starts to twist. I'm going to hit undo. If we scroll this, we'll be able to see whether that happens. This is a goofy thing that Maya does, where it doesn't know what the up axis is. If you're going vertically with the flow path tool that we used, the quick way around this I found and go back to perspective, is simply to rotate this thing down 90 degrees so that it is no longer vertical. Now when we scrub, we'll see that it's not twisting anymore, so it's doing what we expect it to do, it's still deforming but it's just not freaking out and twisting. So now we can hit apply across the cylinder selected and we will see that they're too far apart, so we can just start downloading this down seven, and they're still too far apart, so when I hit undo it actually undo and it depends on where your cursor is, so if I hit undo here, it actually made it back to eight, so I need to hit undo and then view part for that work to go to something a lot less like five. That's getting pretty done close actually. It looks like we're going to need like five and change on this. Let's do like 5.5 Apply. That's pretty done good actually. It looks like a spine to me. Now we can rotate this thing back up, scroll the curve in the outliner and turn this to zero. That'll bring all this stuff backup if we go into our right view and it freaked out. Now when we rotate it back up it's still freaks out, let's twist some of these pieces, we're going to need to break that down before we rotate that back up. Let's go to the Snapshot, and it looks like we made two at some point. Let's select all of these spine joints, we'll group them and then I'm going to hit Shift P to unparent. We could also just middle mouse drag it out of this snapshot group. The group selected, I'm going to go to Edit, Delete by Type, History, and now I can just rotate this group back up. We can go 90 here and rotate the curve back up just for fun, and we'll set F. Now we have all the twists out and we have a spine. Now the one interesting thing we can do is, in case we want to adjust all of these together, is do a wire deformer. Let's learn another derformer. I'm going to hit six here just to see our reference, and I'm going to hide the cylinder and these lattice Control H. The wired deformer is unique. We need to select the curve, then go to Deform and go to Wire, and it'll say down here in the bottom left, select shapes to Deform then press Enter. We need to select all of these shapes, I'm going to Shift select all of them, then hit Enter, select wire curves and press Enter to finalize all operation. Now you just select the curve and hit Enter. When I say select this, so I can right-click on it a little easier and you go to Control Vertex, when we select a CV in here, we should be able to move the spine. This will just give us the ability to adjust the spine later in modeling if we need to, so that each one of these pieces aren't independent from each other. That's one really quick way to be able to adjust the spine which is going to be nice, because I can't really tell if this is actually a good path that was actually drawn here and meant to adjust things a little bit. This will give us that freedom. Awesome. So we learnt about the wire deformer and how to model things quickly along a path. Thanks for watching. 34. Bones - Ribs Bend Deformer: In this lesson, we're going to learn a few new deformers and create the ribs of Mr. Bones here. So we have our reference, we have our spine, we have a head. We can turn off deformers if we want, but we're actually going to need those in a second. So I'm just going to leave the deformers visible so we can see the Lattice and everything else. So there's a couple different ways we can make the ribs. We could do box modeling where we create a box and we start extruding one of the faces here, right-click and going to face, and then going to extrude, start pulling this out and at G, start pulling that out. You can do this kind of a thing, right? Make a rib, go this way, actually. That's one way. But I'm going to show you a deformer that can do this. First we just need to make a long kind of tube that would be like a rib I guess, or a box really. So let's grab a new box. I'm just clicking up here in the poly modeling shelf, and a drag this up. I'm going to stay in perspective mode just because this is going to take a couple of different views. So I'm going to increase the subdivisions by going to poly cube, and let's see which direction we want it in, the depth. So let's just crank that up and then we cannot, I don't know why it's stuck to that one direction there, that was weird. So just grab this and scale it in z and maybe we'll increase the subdivisions and the other axis as well. You'll notice when you start scaling something and you try to do the stuff, that goes crazy. So the proper way to do it, which is annoying, there has to be a proper way, is to use the depth values here. Once we do that and then we make changes, it should work just fine. So that's one little goofy thing about working with Maya. Okay. So let's maybe increase these subdivisions here. I'm just trying to give us enough geometry so that when we apply the deformer, I hit three real quick to look, change that to two, it's a little too boxy. What I'm trying to say is when we apply the deformer, it will have enough geometry there and topology so it can curve properly. Okay, so that looks good. Now when we go to the "Deform" menu, go over to "Nonlinear", I'm going to turn this off. These deformers are super useful and probably the bend deformer is the one I use the most out of all the deformers combined. So even lattices or whatever else, and we'll learn about these others later on, probably in rigging. But yeah, so nonlinear, these are super, super useful and very simple. You can go through and experiment with these. Basically, when you click one, it'll create this deformer. Let me isolate, select these so we can see it by itself. It'll create this little deformer handle thing and you can see it over here on the outliner. It's just going to usually go up and down like this. So even though our piece of geometry is horizontal, it won't really care when you created it initially. If I was to start to crank this one up, it's not going to be working the way it should, you can just simply rotate the deformer down to line up with what objects you have. Then once you start adjusting it, it should work as expected. It's super cool and it's pretty simple, but there's a handy controls like this. If you wanted to save this and not have the deformer of course, click the geometry here and go to edit, delete by type history, and it'll save that out and delete the deformer. But we don't want to form and I encourage you to just play around with the other ones. They're all useful in their own way but the bend derformer it's a classic. It's hard not to use it on every project. So I'm going to go back to "Isolate", "Select" and if we go over to the bend input here, and I'm going to middle mouse drag here on the view port like I was doing earlier, you can see it's bending in the x-axis direction, which is not what we want. So we need to rotate this thing. Check this out. You can just experiment and play and you could animate this, rotation. You could do crazy stuff. But anyway, for our purposes, we're using it for modeling to help us dial in a rib. So I'm going to zero up these crazy values and get back to being more serious about this. I'm going to flip this around 180 and the y, and then I just need to rotate it down 90, the x. So we have a rib. The Bend Deformer, you can translate it around as well, so that'll adjust where the point it's scaling from. It also has these inbound things which I don't think it will affect us as far as the maximum they should be at because they look like they're already to the maximum, right? Like you can see the little green dot here, hopefully. So if this was a super long thing, you might need to extend the bounds. But what we're going to use the balance for is to help maybe adjust. Let's see, let's scale this thing up because this is too aggressive of a curve, right? We could reduce this here, which is partly what we'll do, but we also need to maybe scale the deformer up because we want this to cover a greater area. Let's turn back on, let's turn off isolate select so that we can see the reference. In general, everything is really too big. Let's go to the front view, holding down space bar, left clicking in the center and choosing front view. So if you tried to start to move this stuff, it's going to get all crazy and this may be the kind of effect you're going for, but what I like to do is parent the handle of any deformer under the geometry you are applying it to. That way when you move the geometry, it should move with it. You can see the handle ends here are all moving around with it and the pieces is maintaining its deformation and shape. So the reason I'm doing that is because the ribs come down at an angle like this, right? So we basically just need to figure out where this deformer needs to line up with the ribs, and we can move this around and do all this crazy stuff. But in general, it looks like it's all way too big. So I'm going to scale all the way down and let's see, let's look at this first one. It looks like this first one is like that-ish and this can get us in the ballpark and then we can continue modeling our own. That looks pretty close, at three. I think maybe just the size of everything is too thick. Let's see. Yeah, it's not round enough. It depends on the idea of the shape of the rib that you want to create but for me, this is too uniform, right? It's a square. So we need to break that up. I'm going to select a face here, and let's select face over there. So when I double-click, it'll go between the phases I selected. I'm going to do the same thing here for the bottom part. So now I have these faces and I'm going to control middle mouse drag them. So they'll move relative to their normals, which is the direction the face is facing. So I'm going to hit b and hold down control again and just push that. I think b might be the wrong thing to do because I think those faces are going in the wrong direction. So I'm go back to one. Yeah, just looks like this stuff needs to be fixed because that's all crashing into itself and so I'm going to turn on the edge slide transform constraint here. So I can just slide this stuff, okay, that's freaking out, and it looks like I can't undo that now, which is always fun. You get to see like real-time what modeling is all about. Let's scale this down. Actually, what I might do is just delete this until the edge and use the multi-cut tool. Yes, so this is modeling. Sometimes Maya is not kind. So I'm holding down "Shift" to get to 50 percent and just remaking all these. I wish I could remember what this went into. Let me let me back up and see what that, one, two, that star, okay. Just holding on "Shift". I want to go 50 percent, I want to end on that one, hit "Enter" and we need to fix all this stuff as well. Let's go to this is part of modeling is when Maya freaks out, doesn't let you undo. Let me just roll with the punches here. It's this edge, as we push back, sure for the bottom as well. You don't have to do exactly what I'm doing: this is just my best guess as to what would make the best shape here. Rounding off the corners of the box. Actually, I want to do the control, I'm going to mouse drag here because they're all going in different directions. Because it's a semicircle now. You could make these adjustments before you apply the bend deformer which might make all these easier. But if you didn't have that decision made before you started, it's no big deal. I'm showing you, you can just keep going with stuff. I slide it to that one. Use "Control" I'm going to mouse dragging. I'm going to hit "F3". That looks like real bone. I think that the middle here is probably too thick still. But I like the difference we get. Get back to one. I think all of this stuff is too narrow maybe. I'm going to select that, hit "B", hold "R", let's get out in this direction. You move a little bit in that direction. Just making these little tweaks to get it back in the ballpark of a proper rib shape. Something like that. But you get the idea. The bend deformer is still applied so we can adjust that later. I think we need some variation here vertically as well. I'm just going to grab these vertices and scale them down on y. Maybe it's going to increase the self-selection. I do that first one. I want to go further out here. Like that. Let's do the object space. What I did just there is holding "R" and left clicking, same deal have been doing. You can change the axis of the manipulator. In general, this is a bone shape. Let's go to the front view. Looks like a rib to me. But yeah, you can keep messing with this, but this is the general idea. You could even extrude these faces, make the ends more bony looking. But I think for a rib, it's a pretty simple shape. One thing you can do now is to actually, once you finalize this, you could just duplicate this out and then just slide it down. Let's go back to the front view. Slide this stuff down, and then keep making tweaks to each one. Instead of it being the copy that you're dragging down, leave the copy where it's at because it doesn't have the former with it. We've made that copy and it says bend deformer, but it's not going to do anything because it's not connected to it. I just copy that just for copy sake and it didn't actually make the connection. Instead of dragging the copy down, why don't we drag this one down? Then we can continue adjusting each one with the bend deformer. We can go back to bend deformer, change the curvature of this one a little bit. But for our purposes, let's go to the side view and see what this is looking like. Of course, we're a way off and I'm sure the drawing is not accurate whatsoever. It's even hard to tell which one's a rib, the bottom? That one? This one? So I think it was in here, somewhere. It looks like they're all too big and that direction because they need to connect to the spine. But you get the general idea here. We just want to have like an interesting shape. Yeah. Another thing we could do is add another to bend deformer so we have this copy. We could even do it to this one as well, but let me click this one and go bend deformer. Anytime I have a new bend deformer, I just crank up the curvature so I can see which direction it's facing, so then I know which direction to adjust the handles here. So I'm going to go back to perspective. Looks like it's collapsing the volume of the thing. Hopefully, it's just because of how much I'm curving it. Let's do something like this. Maybe we'll move this away, Let me go to the right view, something like that. Then sometimes I'll just delete it and see what the differences and undo the deletion. Sorry, my arm is hitting my scroll wheel on my tablet. Yeah, I think it looks better with a deformer. I'm just going to mouse drag that onto itself and get back to perspective and then just keep refining this stuff. You can see where, because there had bend deformer, we collapse the geometry here. So I'm going to go back to one, choose faces, pull this stuff out, keep modeling, doing what we've been doing. Just making sure we're getting the shape that we want with everything. In the next lesson we'll continue modeling this stuff. But for now you can just do this for this right side and will mirror everything over here in a later lesson. So don't worry about doing it for both sides. Just focus on one side. Right now I'm doing the right side and I'll probably model on the right side, and then we can mirror everything over to the left in a later episode or video. Cool. I will see you guys then. Thanks a lot. Bye. 35. Bones - Sternum: In this lesson, we will model the sternum very quickly because I think we may need another rib. Before we make another rib and figure that out, I want to make the sternum because it should connect. There seems to be a gap here in the art reference, how all this stuff works here in profile. It just seems like a large gap, so let's go ahead and model the sternum and we'll figure this out on the fly. I'm going to do some box modeling. I'm going to go to the right view and I'm going to go to the poly modeling shelf, click the cube, and drag that up. I'm just middle mouse drag now that I've isolated that vertical axes. I'm just going to get it in line here so that we can do some box modeling and scale it down. I think it'll probably end up connecting with the collarbone somewhere. Again, I don't know if this is all medically accurate but for our purposes, I don't think it really matters all that much, it's a cartoon type of character. When I get to a point where I can grab this face and then go back to the right view so that now I can extrude the face here, I'm going to try to go an even distance, this section to this section, almost like a descending thing. We want to make sure too that each rib is getting its own little section here. I want to make sure I'm doing that. I'm just going to scale this up a little bit. Anytime I rotate a face, I can start to lose its volume a little bit. So always make sure whenever I'm rotating a face or edges that it's maintaining its volume. I'm only trying to go in these two axis. I'm not trying to grab the middle one here because I could get it off of the center where it's aligned. Let's do one more after this one. G, more time. Got to get this in line, I think that's kind of in the ballpark. Go to the edge mode. Just going to make this more rounded as it goes down. Probably going to need an edge loop in here somewhere. Just going to drag this up and maybe divide this one because it's such a large distance. Trying to find my custom Tab in the edge loop tool or something like that. I'm not going to the component mode and double-click on the edge. Now it should be a little more in line with where I'm trying to scale up from. Although, it's hard to tell how the axes are oriented. That's close enough. This doesn't look like much right now but we can use this now that we know where it's positioned and profile, we can adjust this now for our front view. I think the general idea with this is that the places where the ribs connect are going to be the widest parts. I get back to object space because we're growing straight across. So something like this. We need to add a lot more edge loops in here to help connect this stuff. Actually, I want to undo that one and wait until we get the bottom done. I think we may need one more little small rib up here. It's hard to tell that this collarbone, we can model that really quickly as well. Maybe this is going too high it's just reconciling the artwork with 3D. This is the hardest part modeling always. So don't get discouraged, this is as hard as it should be and is for everybody else. I'm just going in here and adding edge loops. I'm clicking dragging on the ends on squares. It tends not to let you connect the loops, so I'm just control clicking areas where I don't need it and scaling these down. I think I'm in the wrong axis there. Scale on these down a little bit. I'm just going through and it looks like to me that we're going to need one more. The other thing of course we have at our disposal is extrude. Shift double-clicking should get you the edge loop of face. I'm going to extrude this inward. No, that's freaking out. I'm just going to scale it and maybe push these down closer to the rib that it's inserting into and get this one a little more in line. Same thing with this one down here. Hopefully, you can get the idea of what I'm going for visually at this stage. Go back to component and hope, we'll just move the edges. You can see how I'm moving between the different spaces pretty quickly. One tool is not always going to work and going to be your catchall. You got to adapt pretty quickly and not get too discouraged about something not working when you expect it to. It's always just problem-solving. I grabbed the wrong edge. Yeah, not just in the front view, we want to make these little in-between parts that we want to do it in the side view as well. I want to make sure we're adjusting those in every way. You can tell right now, i'm not really paying attention to the reference at all. I can actually just turn that off. Because I got the idea of what the references is trying to do and that was enough for me to try to make it work now in 3-dimensions. If I hit "3" on the keyboard, this will give me an idea of how much further I need to go with adding geometry to support this volume, which is, you can see it's shrink quite a lot when you hit "3" because there's no geometry here supporting this. We'll need to add an edge loops here. I wait to do that because it's a lot easier to select edges when it's just this whole thing instead of this being divided into two or three edges. Always when you're modeling, try to get the the big stuff done. Worry about this smaller stuff after the fact. Only add geometry when you need it. Otherwise, you're going to create a lot more work for yourself. It will make you a lot slower and you'll be more frustrated. Don't do that. I'm just trying to make sure everything is lined up as well. The thing with this is like when you model something, it's not done, especially with this stuff. In general, the idea with this stuff is that we're going to have all the bones floating just to give ourselves a cheat almost so that we don't have to worry about all these things intersecting perfectly. It's a cartoon and it's a skeleton on top of that. It's not something. It's believable that we see walking around every day. That's why I think it's fine to just have this stuff just floating in space next to the joints that it would it would be connected to. I'm not getting too caught up in that. I don't think you should either. This is just a good exercise with a good goal in mind to help facilitate learning this stuff because I know for me, if I don't have a goal in mind, it's a lot harder to motivate myself to get going and learn something new. That's the idea here. Don't be too hard on yourself when you're modeling this stuff. Being super specific, that stuff will come later the more you model. I hope that you continue modeling or doing something in 3D. You find the stuff that you started doing. You might not show anyone anyway. The longer you do it, you'll do better and better. You only want to ever show your best stuff. Don't get too caught up and making everything perfect just yet because you're still learning. It's okay to not be a 100 percent perfect on this stuff. That's just the practice of going through the motions and getting comfortable with the software. Then later on, getting more serious about it and taking it a little more time. But at this stage of the game, you don't want to frustrate yourself to the point where you're not going to pursue it anymore. Try to keep it fun for yourself here and go easy on yourself. I'm just going through the model and do a last little tweaks before I add any geometry. Let's also look at how this works. Let's just take it because i'm just thinking about the scapula, not the scapula, the collarbone. Just to block something and super quick to see visually the weight of this stuff. I think we might be good. The collarbone might take up enough room. What i'm thinking is it's going to point from the sternum to the shoulder and holding down "Control" there to scale and that isolated axis that we've done before. I think three is actually fine. Let's continue with this and finish up the sternum. It's going to hit "1". The first thing i'm going to try is just throwing down edge loops in the exact center. We're going to go to the tool settings over here after selecting it and go to multiple edge loops and then just choose one. That will put it right in the center of whatever edge loop that we click. If we hit "3" now, it should be a little thicker and have more volume. Have to hit "Q" to get off that wireframe thing. Yeah, so this is good. I think the proportions of this thing or I can use a lot of work, which I'll do in between the next video. But the other thing that we can do real quick, and when I say proportions, I mean this one is way bigger than this one. It'd be nice to have it in an even fashion in descending order. I'll probably move this gap down closer to here. This one is a smaller chunk. This indentation is maybe too big or this one needs to be more. That's what I mean when I say proportion stuff, having this stuff all work together as one piece. I'll continue to refine that stuff. But the last thing I want to mention is also consider doing a bevel on just these edges to help support this. Also maybe even give you the option of not using the auto smooth feature in Maya. It's going to go to the poly bevel. I'm going to hit "T". Crank up the fraction, probably we're limited by something [inaudible] is hitting some edge loop somewhere. Because this is so close together, so the fraction can only be that big. We could space that out, like hit "Undo" here and space style. But I think this is pretty close to what I had in mind anyways. Let's go hit "3" now. Yeah, and that made this edge a lot sharper and stiffer. If we actually use this in three mode, we can see how much sharper this edge can be. Might spaces out here. We'll get to zero. You can make this as super sharp edge depending on how close those edges are together. That's just all up to you. Something changed on the fly here I like it closer to the maximum to a keep bony idea here. Smooth edges a little bit, but yeah, thanks for watching. In the next lesson we will continue doing the rest of the body. I'm going to spend the time in between these lessons finishing out the sternum and making it look a little bit nicer. That's just pulling stuff around and yes, is coming along really well, pretty much from here on now, the most complicated thing is probably going to be the hips and maybe the hands and the feet. But the arm bones, i'm imagining us duplicating most of this stuff. We're going to speed this up as we go here. Thanks for watching. Bye. 36. Bones - Right Side Body: Welcome to this video where we will model the right side of the body. I'm going to speed this video up. It's going to be mostly just watching me work because I'm not going to talk, I'm not going to show any new tools. I've taught you everything you need to know to be able to model the rest of this skeleton. I don't want to bore you with me rambling on, trying to fill the time. But I did want to record me doing it just so you can only see it if you're interested in that. If you're not and you think you have a good handle on everything, skip this video and watch the next one where I will show you how to mirror the right side, the left side, and you can just model this in your own time. But pretty much, it's just going to be box modeling. I'm going to do extrusions, and I might use the sculpting tools a little bit to make the end of the joints here and bevel some edges of the box to round out to make it more bone shaped. Then I'm going to use a cylinder here for the hips and same idea for the hands and the feet. I'm going to generalize the palm here so we don't have to draw or model 20 bones in the foot and the hand palm. These are going to be pretty general shapes since this is a cartoon and not atomically correct anyway. If you feel like you have a good handle on this, skip this video. If not, I'm going to speed this up now. If you're watching in a player, currently at two times or one-half times, you might want to slow it down to real time because I'm going to speed this up for you. You can at least follow along if you're interested. If not, no biggie. I'll see you in the next video. Thanks for watching. 37. Bones - Mirror: Welcome to this final lesson where we will mirror the right side over to the left. We have finished using the reference and the two things I didn't model were the little ribbon, bow tie thing here and the hat. We have all the tools basically to model those things yourselves if you'd like to do that. So what I want to talk about before we mirror this over is a little bit about rigging. Anytime something is rigged, a character that is, typically it's put in an A-pose or T-pose, A meaning the arm is rotated out here to the side, so the hands over here, or T-pose the arm is straight out in this direction. That's what I'm going to suggest we go ahead and do before I mirror it so that when we mirror it, it will be on the other side. So I'm going to select all of this geometry, "Control shift" Selecting it and I'm going to hit "Command G" and hit "W" to pray with the manipulator. It's down at 00, so we need to hold down "D". Instead of holding down "V " there's actually a centroid snapped to reject its center, which is a newer snap tool in Maya. So I'm going to hold down "D" and middle mouse drag. It's going to be in the center of that bone. That's what it means by the Projected Center where we drag that it's going to be in the middle of it. So we want it to rotate from there. We can hit "FY" cursors over the outliner and that will frame up where that group is that we have already selected. We can call that arm R for right and you can see I named everything here with an R at the end of it, just so we can keep it straight on what is on the left and what is on the right. So, now that we have that group, it's hard to select it. The group is just kind of invisible. Let me turn off the snap. When we select the arm, we can't really select the group because it's not visible here. The group is invisible. We can only find it in the outline or when we hit "F." We can see it that everything's parented underneath it. There's one way that we can get to it though. If we select one of the children of that group, anything in here, then we hit "upward" on the keyboard, it will go up one level, which means that we'll get to the group. If we were to do that again, we would get to the main group. You can see how this changes in the outliner here. So again, if we select something in here we can see this is gray, meaning we're selecting something inside that group. But if we want to get the group that it's a part of, we can just hit "up on the arrow" and now we have it. So lets rotate this out 90 degrees. Let's also rotate it 90 degrees this way. That'll make it for a lot easier to rig in later down the course. So that looks pretty good. Now, what we have to do is mirror everything over. But before I do that, actually I'm going to go ahead and delete the history on these objects that have the former still on them. So I'm going to go "edit," "delete by type" "history." Cool. So that's a lot cleaner, and we can mirror everything over. Next thing I'm going to do is actually group the leg. So I'm going to hit "Command G." Before I do that, actually the foot is in its own group. I can see that over here. So when I select everything, I can see it's these four things and this group. So I'm going to command click everything here and put all that into a group and have that be leg R. So that is on the World Center. I'm going to get this right arm. I can group it again, which could be the easiest thing to do and call that arm world. World meaning just that's 00 in the world. So we have this, we have the forearm. Looks like it's an empty group. Let me look at this. We might need to delete some history. Not there, that was just an empty group. I think it's because we just grouped everything under this arm. So it got rid of the forearm group, which was never named here. We can call this, I don't know which one is which, but the two bones on the forearm are the radius and the ulna. I can ever keep track of which one is which though. So I'm just going to take a guess there. So, now we have the world group, we have the leg, and we have the ribs. The ribs are also in the world space. I think you can see where I'm going with this and that we can group everything and rotate it or scale it in negative one. So I'm going to group these two as well. Just call this collarbone R. I'm going to select all of this. I can also group it one more time and say "right side." I can duplicate this now and call it left side and I can scale it in the negative. I'm going to be very exact with it. So I'm going to type it over here. I'm going to say "negative one." Now we have it on both sides. So we have a complete model now of the character. The only thing that we can go in and change now is it says R on all this left side group. So a quick way that we can rename everything here is going to "modify," "search, and replace names." So now with this dialog box open, we can simply just say "underscore R" and "underscore L". So we're going to search for underscore R, I'll replace it with underscore L and let's just do everything and "apply." You can see it changed the left side to have the L here. So we can see that even everything in the group, everything below it also has L on it now. So that saved us a ton of time and that's a very useful whenever you are mirroring things over to have the right names before you mirror it so that you can do that easy search and replace. So that wraps up this section on 3D modeling for the complete beginners guide to Maya here. I just want to end this with the last couple of things that probably change or update with this. I might adjust the hips a little bit they're a little thin and not wide enough, and a little too basic. There's not a ton of interest here, like it has one line all the way through here. So I might change that. The feet are little big. I might change that. Other than that, I mean, it's a pretty basic model. I think it looks pretty good for our purposes moving forward and I think we're going to have some fun with it. Basically, I also want to give you an idea of what we're going to do with this model later is we're going to texture it. We're going to give it some DS and De la smart dose. I'm going to butcher that. The coloring here on the face with flowers and those designs. We're also going to procedurally texture the Ghostbusters trap and we're going to rig this thing, so we can animate in a scene later on. So those are all the things we're going to do now that we have a good understanding of modeling. In the next section, we're going to cover UVs and shading and texturing and how those things all interact. If you're watching this with complete series, don't feel like you have to follow this in order if you want to jump to animation, jump to animation, and you can look for the correct file name up here for the scene that you want to start in and just go ahead and start animating or doing any of the other sections. You don't have to necessarily follow one after the other. If that's how you'd like to watch it, but yeah, I look forward to seeing you in the next sections where we will continue to chip away at our knowledge on Maya. Yeah, congratulations on finishing the section. All right, thanks a lot. Bye.