IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hi! I'm Ryan Kittleson, and I'd
like to welcome you to Maya 2011:
| | 00:08 | Modeling a Character.
| | 00:10 | In this course, I'll show you how to
take advantage of Maya's powerful modeling
| | 00:13 | tools to create a cartoony character
that can be animated, adapted into other
| | 00:18 | types of characters, and above
all, one that really looks great.
| | 00:22 | First, I'm going to demonstrate
some of the most commonly used tools in
| | 00:26 | character modeling, like Extrude and
Smooth Preview, and how they can be used
| | 00:30 | to build a character.
| | 00:32 | Then I'll show you how to break down
your character design into bite-sized
| | 00:35 | pieces for easy modeling, like
separating the head from the body.
| | 00:38 | I'll teach you how to avoid common
pitfalls and how to detail and refine your
| | 00:43 | model to professional standards.
| | 00:45 | I'll model the character one part at a
time and show you how these tools and
| | 00:49 | skills apply in practice for the final
body, hair, and clothes of our figure.
| | 00:55 | Character modeling for animation involves
some concepts that go a little beyond the basics.
| | 01:00 | So you should already have an
understanding of Maya's interface and fundamental
| | 01:03 | 3D concepts before taking this course.
| | 01:06 | In my years of building characters,
and experience in teaching character
| | 01:10 | modeling, I've come up with this
approach to modeling that's straightforward
| | 01:13 | and easy to follow.
| | 01:14 | It'll work in versions of Maya
back to 2009 and for years to come.
| | 01:19 | Well, I hope you're as
excited to start modeling as I am.
| | 01:22 | So, let's get to it with Maya 2011:
Modeling a Character.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you are a premium member of the
lynda.com Online Training Library, or if you
| | 00:05 | are watching this tutorial on a DVD-ROM,
you have access to the Exercise Files
| | 00:09 | used throughout this title.
| | 00:11 | Each chapter of this course has its own folder.
| | 00:13 | For example, the chapter on the body, Chapter 4.
| | 00:16 | Inside each chapter are folders for each video.
| | 00:19 | Let's look inside the folder for fingers.
| | 00:22 | Inside each video folder, there is
going to be a Maya scene file and a
| | 00:26 | reference image that the
scene file will load inside.
| | 00:29 | All of the different video
chapters work the same way.
| | 00:32 | If you don't have access to the
Exercise Files, you can follow along from
| | 00:35 | scratch or with your own assets.
| | 00:37 | Let's get started!
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|
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1. The Interface and Tools Used Most in Character ModelingNavigation and views| 00:00 | Before we get into the character
modeling in this course, I want to talk about
| | 00:03 | some of the navigation and
interface controls in Maya.
| | 00:07 | If you're a beginner with Maya, or
just need a refresher, these are the most
| | 00:11 | commonly used interface functions
that I'll be using in this course.
| | 00:14 | There are a few different ways to
move around in your viewport in Maya.
| | 00:18 | If you want to rotate around your scene
and get a different view on your model,
| | 00:21 | hold down the Alt key and left-click the mouse.
| | 00:25 | Then just move the mouse
around to get a different view.
| | 00:27 | If you want to zoom in, use the scroll wheel.
| | 00:31 | Scroll forward to zoom in
and backwards to zoom out.
| | 00:35 | To pan around your scene, hold
down the Alt key and middle-click.
| | 00:40 | This lets you move around.
| | 00:42 | You can change your viewport from a single
view to multiple views by hitting the Spacebar.
| | 00:46 | Now, in any one of these multiple
viewports, if you hit the Spacebar again,
| | 00:50 | you'll go and make that viewport full-screen.
| | 00:53 | Hitting Spacebar again
goes back to the four views.
| | 00:55 | Move the mouse to a different viewport,
hit Spacebar again, and you can go into
| | 00:59 | any other view you want.
| | 01:03 | Let me show you how to enter
the different component modes.
| | 01:06 | Components are vertices, edges, and faces.
| | 01:08 | Let me zoom in to get a better look.
| | 01:12 | If you click a model and you hold down
the right mouse button, this little menu
| | 01:15 | is going to pop up and you can choose
from Vertex, Edge, Face, or Object mode.
| | 01:20 | There are a few others, but we're
not going to use them in our course.
| | 01:24 | If you release the mouse button over
one of these, you'll go into that mode.
| | 01:27 | Vertex mode, for example.
| | 01:28 | You can also go into Edge mode, or Face mode.
| | 01:33 | Let's go back to Object mode.
| | 01:34 | We can create new primitive objects
if we go into the Polygons shelf.
| | 01:39 | For the most part, we'll be using the
Polygons shelf in this course, but we
| | 01:42 | might occasionally use Surfaces or Curves.
| | 01:44 | In the Polygons shelf,
click on this Polygon Sphere.
| | 01:49 | You can create a sphere by
simply dragging on the grid.
| | 01:52 | If you want to select multiple
objects at once, hold down the Shift key
| | 01:55 | while you click them.
| | 01:56 | If you want to deselect objects,
hold down Ctrl while you click.
| | 02:02 | Moving, rotating, and scaling
objects is easy with the W, E, and R keys.
| | 02:08 | Hit W to go into Move mode.
| | 02:10 | Now you can move on any axis you
want, or relative to the viewport.
| | 02:15 | E goes into Rotate mode.
| | 02:18 | You can rotate freely, or you
can rotate along a single axis.
| | 02:23 | Same with Scale. You can scale
uniformly or in a single axis.
| | 02:30 | Pressing 1 on the keyboard will
put the object into Smooth mode.
| | 02:34 | Pressing 1 will put it back in regular mode.
| | 02:38 | Pressing 4 on the keyboard goes into
Wireframe mode - it lets you see through
| | 02:42 | objects - and 5 goes back into Shaded mode.
| | 02:44 | If you want to undo something, press Z.
You can press it multiple times to
| | 02:49 | undo multiple changes.
| | 02:51 | If you want to redo, hold down Shift
while you press Z and you'll redo through
| | 02:56 | all the changes you've made.
| | 02:57 | There are lots more to learn
about Maya navigation and interface.
| | 03:01 | But if you learn these basics, you'll
be able to hit the ground running in this
| | 03:04 | character modeling course.
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| Using Smooth Preview| 00:00 | In Maya, models are made up of polygons.
| | 00:03 | Polygons are, by definition,
flat, and rigid, and blocky.
| | 00:08 | However, when this character goes to
a movie or a TV show, it's going to
| | 00:11 | be smooth and soft.
| | 00:13 | We can turn a blocky polygonal model
into a very smooth mesh by using Smooth.
| | 00:17 | Let's select hank and go up to the
Polygons shelf and hit Smooth up here.
| | 00:23 | Now what we can see that happened is that it
subdivided the mesh into a lot more polygons.
| | 00:30 | The end result is that the mesh is more smooth.
| | 00:33 | But the downside to this is that
it's created a lot more polygons.
| | 00:37 | So if I want to make any modifications
to this object, it's going to be more
| | 00:40 | difficult because there are a
lot more polygons to move around.
| | 00:44 | That's why Maya has
something called Smooth Preview.
| | 00:46 | If I undo this Smooth and hit 3 on the
keyboard, you can see that the mesh is
| | 00:51 | now smooth again, but without
subdividing all those extra polygons.
| | 00:55 | If I go back to unsmooth mode by hitting 1 on
the keyboard, you can see it's the same mesh.
| | 01:01 | It's just been rounded out.
| | 01:02 | Now, let me zoom in on part of this.
| | 01:06 | You can still edit this low poly mesh
and see the smooth result in real time.
| | 01:11 | If I go to Vertex mode and move this
one vertex right here, you can see how the
| | 01:16 | mesh is instantly updating and
creating a smooth mesh, even though I'm only
| | 01:20 | controlling a very low poly mesh.
| | 01:24 | You can turn Smooth Preview on and
off as many times as you want, to get a
| | 01:28 | sense of how your model is going to
look when it's eventually smoothed for render time.
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| Using the Extrude tool| 00:01 | The Extrude tool in Maya is a quick
and powerful way to create new shapes,
| | 00:05 | structures, and edge flow
patterns in your models.
| | 00:08 | The cool thing about Extrude is that
it automatically creates the right edge
| | 00:12 | flow for all kinds of body parts.
| | 00:14 | There are several ways to use it
and a few things to be careful of, that
| | 00:17 | I'll go over with you.
| | 00:18 | So let's make a very quick, very basic
character with Extrude in just a few minutes.
| | 00:23 | I'm going to go up and grab a
polygon cube off the shelf.
| | 00:27 | I'm just going to drag just a rough
rectangular shape out here on the grid.
| | 00:32 | If I hit 5, it'll go into Shaded mode.
| | 00:34 | Extrude can work on faces,
edges, and even whole objects.
| | 00:39 | Let's select a face to extrude from.
| | 00:40 | So I'm going to right-click on
this object and go down to Face.
| | 00:43 | Now I want this character
to have two sides to him.
| | 00:47 | So I'm going to zoom in and select this
one face right here and go up to Extrude.
| | 00:52 | Now, what we see here is
this gizmo is popped up.
| | 00:54 | There are lots of different things to it.
| | 00:56 | It's more complicated than it has to be really.
| | 00:59 | What I usually do is I just pull new
faces directly straight out with the
| | 01:03 | blue arrow right here.
| | 01:05 | Now you could pull it in other
directions, but to tell you the truth, I don't
| | 01:08 | really use these other functions so much.
| | 01:11 | I usually just want to pull a
new face directly straight out.
| | 01:14 | You can also click on this circle here
to go into Rotate mode, or you can click
| | 01:18 | on these cubes to go into Scale mode
and scale the new face you've created.
| | 01:21 | But really, for the most part, I just
want to pull a new face straight out.
| | 01:24 | If I hit W, it goes out of Extrude mode,
and it's back into normal Move mode.
| | 01:30 | So let's say that this is
the chest of our new character.
| | 01:33 | We want to create a neck and a head.
| | 01:35 | So what I want to do is select these
two faces right here and hit Extrude.
| | 01:39 | I can use the blue arrow to pull it directly up.
| | 01:43 | Now what I want to do is make the neck
a little bit narrower than the chest.
| | 01:46 | So I'm going to go into one of these
Scale tools and just scale the size of the
| | 01:51 | neck in a little bit.
We just want it to be narrower.
| | 01:53 | I'm going to look at it
from the top to see it better.
| | 01:56 | Okay, that's pretty good.
| | 01:57 | Now, I can hit Extrude again to
extrude up and continue up the head.
| | 02:03 | I want the head to be a
little wider than the neck.
| | 02:04 | So I'm just going to pull this out a little bit.
| | 02:09 | Let's extrude again to continue up the head.
| | 02:11 | I want to show you how to extrude some
very quick eyes out of this character.
| | 02:16 | What we can do is extrude from these two
faces in the front and make some eyes.
| | 02:21 | So let's select one and Shift+Select the other.
| | 02:24 | Now if I do extrude right now and
let's say I go into Scale mode and I shrink
| | 02:29 | these up, these two faces are going
to shrink together. I don't want that.
| | 02:32 | I want these two to shrink
separately as two different eyes.
| | 02:36 | So let's undo this extrude and try again.
| | 02:40 | The way we change it so that these two faces
extrude separately is in the Edit Mesh menu.
| | 02:44 | If we open this up, we see up
here there is Keep Faces Together.
| | 02:48 | What this tells Maya when this is on,
is that any new faces that are extruded
| | 02:52 | should be stuck together.
| | 02:53 | If we turn this off, the faces
are going to grow out separately.
| | 02:57 | So, our faces are selected.
| | 02:58 | Let's hit Extrude again and see what happens.
| | 03:01 | If I go into the Scale mode and
scale these in, now you can see that
| | 03:05 | they're scaling separately.
| | 03:06 | Now I can just hit Delete on the
keyboard and that deletes those faces and
| | 03:12 | makes the hole for the eyes.
| | 03:14 | You can use Extrude on edges as well as faces.
| | 03:16 | Let me zoom in and show you how that works.
| | 03:18 | If I hold down the right mouse button
and go into Edge mode, I can double-click
| | 03:25 | on any edge and it's going
to select the entire edge loop.
| | 03:28 | In this case, it's going to select
the open edges that are right here
| | 03:30 | where there is no face.
| | 03:32 | With these selected, I can go to
Extrude and also extrude in these edges.
| | 03:37 | This will create a little
bit of an inside of an eye.
| | 03:40 | So let's continue with the rest of
the body of this very simple character.
| | 03:44 | I want to extrude out some arms.
| | 03:45 | So let's zoom out a little
bit and go into Face mode.
| | 03:48 | I'm going to select the polygons on either
side of the body here and let's go to Extrude.
| | 03:54 | Now we've got two faces on
different sides of the body selected.
| | 03:57 | While I'm still in the Extrude tool
and I pull on the blue handle, each one is
| | 04:01 | going to pull out in its own
direction away from the body.
| | 04:04 | I just want to make the arms a
little bit smaller than the chest.
| | 04:08 | So I'm going to scale these in.
| | 04:09 | Let's just extrude it out
one more time for good measure.
| | 04:11 | You're just going to have
stumpy little hands here.
| | 04:15 | So we're not going to bother
to do fingers for this one.
| | 04:17 | Okay, let's extrude out the rest of the body.
| | 04:20 | Looking at the underside,
we can grab these two faces here.
| | 04:23 | Now, up in the Edit Mesh menu,
we turned off Keep Faces Together.
| | 04:27 | But we want his abdomen to be stuck together.
| | 04:29 | We don't want two separate parts to his abdomen.
| | 04:32 | So let's go up to Edit Mesh and make sure
we've got Keep Faces Together turned on.
| | 04:36 | Let's hit Extrude and pull it down.
| | 04:40 | Let's just shrink this up a little bit
right here, getting a little bit narrower waist.
| | 04:44 | Okay, so I want to extrude
two legs out of this as well.
| | 04:47 | If I extrude these two polygons
right now, remember we've got Keep
| | 04:50 | Faces Together turned on.
| | 04:52 | That's going to have his legs stuck together.
| | 04:54 | We want his legs to be separate.
| | 04:55 | So we go up to Edit Mesh menu and
turn Keep Faces Together off again.
| | 05:00 | Now when I go back into Extrude and
pull this down, we can see the legs are
| | 05:04 | coming out separately.
| | 05:05 | But sometimes you might not necessarily
see the legs being separate, you might
| | 05:09 | have to go in and manually move
them to see that they're separate.
| | 05:12 | So I'm just going to
extrude this down one more time.
| | 05:15 | We'll make some space for the feet.
| | 05:19 | Let's extrude the feet
forward from these faces right here.
| | 05:22 | I'm going to look at it from the
side to get a better angle on this.
| | 05:29 | Okay, so you can see in a matter of minutes,
you can create a very simple character.
| | 05:32 | I'm going to go back into Object mode and
zoom out, so we can see the whole thing.
| | 05:37 | Hitting 3 on the keyboard, you can also get
a Smooth Preview of what this guy looks like.
| | 05:40 | So you get a very simple gingerbread
mankind of character, in just a few minutes
| | 05:44 | with the power of the Extrude tool.
| | 05:46 | You can see it's a very easy way to create
new geometry in an intuitive and fast way.
| | 05:51 | You'll find yourself using it all the
time to create limbs, cavities, bulges,
| | 05:55 | horns, anything you can think of.
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| Using the power of Soft Select | 00:00 | So, in this video I am
going to talk about Soft Select.
| | 00:03 | Soft Select is a way of making edits
to your model that change gradually in a
| | 00:07 | smooth falloff over a certain
distance. Rather than tweaking vertices
| | 00:12 | one-by-one in a very tedious way,
you can use SoftSelect to very quickly
| | 00:15 | make edits that you want.
| | 00:16 | So, let me go into Vertex mode of
this character and show you how we can
| | 00:21 | make some edits to him.
| | 00:22 | I am going to select some vertices on
the hand and hit F to zoom in on them.
| | 00:25 | Okay, so if we want to make some
adjustments to the shape of this finger,
| | 00:30 | you could go into vertex mode and you
could move some verts around and it's very
| | 00:34 | tedious and very time-consuming.
| | 00:36 | But instead of doing this way we can
use Soft Select to really speed things up.
| | 00:42 | So, let's go up into our tool settings.
| | 00:46 | You can see in the tool settings, we've
got the Move tool right now and there is all
| | 00:50 | these different settings and
Soft Select is one of these up here.
| | 00:53 | So, let's make sure we've got Soft
Select here and we can just turn it on.
| | 00:56 | Now the big change we see here is
there is this gradual falloff of selection.
| | 01:02 | So, anything that we select is
going to be a falloff in Soft Select.
| | 01:09 | So, when we move this we can see that
everything is moved along with it but the
| | 01:16 | falloff depends on how
close it is to the selection.
| | 01:19 | The farther away it is,
the less it gets affected.
| | 01:22 | Now, we can go up into the Falloff
radius and change the actual size of the area
| | 01:28 | of influence, and this is kind of tedious.
| | 01:30 | There is a quicker and cooler way to do this.
| | 01:33 | If you hold down the B key and you
click and drag the mouse, you can scale
| | 01:37 | the area of influence.
| | 01:38 | It's a lot more interactive
than doing it in the menu.
| | 01:40 | So, let's say we want to move this
finger and we want to have the falloff go
| | 01:45 | from the tip of the finger to the knuckle.
| | 01:48 | But we want to move this finger so
it doesn't affect the other fingers.
| | 01:51 | We'll there is a setting for that.
Up here in the Move tool, you can go to
| | 01:54 | Falloff mode and I am
going to change it to Surface.
| | 01:57 | So, you can see the big difference here
is now when you move this finger it only
| | 02:02 | affects this one finger because the
falloff isn't cutting across gaps from one
| | 02:06 | finger to the other.
| | 02:07 | If we go back to Volume mode you
can see it's cutting across gaps.
| | 02:10 | When we move now to a different part of
the model to show you how to use a few
| | 02:16 | different options of Soft Select.
| | 02:18 | Let's go up into the shoulder. I am going to
click on vertex and hit F to zoom in on it.
| | 02:23 | So, let's say we want to make this guy
have a little bit bigger trapezius muscles.
| | 02:27 | If we use Soft Select and we pull up on this
muscle here, you can see that's all good
| | 02:32 | and fine for his first body but
it goes right through his shirt.
| | 02:34 | If we go up into the Falloff mode
and change that from Volume to Global,
| | 02:39 | the difference is that now the Soft
Select will grab any object in this scene
| | 02:44 | that's within the falloff radius, not
just vertices that are on the selected
| | 02:48 | object but vertices on any object.
| | 02:51 | So, now if you move this up, you
can see that the shirt goes with it.
| | 03:01 | Another way to use Soft
Select is with the Object mode.
| | 03:05 | Now, let me move up to the
hair and I'll show how that works.
| | 03:10 | So, if we want to move around any of these
clumps of hair we can go into Object mode.
| | 03:16 | What this is going to do is it's going
to move entire objects as a whole, rather
| | 03:22 | than moving their vertices, Soft Select wise.
| | 03:24 | So, you can see that the falloff is
affecting the objects as a whole rather than
| | 03:31 | in Global mode, where it's affecting
the vertices independently and individual
| | 03:36 | hair clumps in the hair will stretch out.
| | 03:37 | But if you go into Objects mode, the
objects are going to maintain their shape
| | 03:44 | but they are going to move as a whole.
| | 03:46 | So, when you want to move a lot of
vertices in a natural and smooth way,
| | 03:50 | Soft Select is a fast and
precise way to do it easily.
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| Adding new detail to an existing model| 00:00 | Okay, so we've got our Hank
character. As you can see in this version he's
| | 00:04 | not all that detailed.
| | 00:05 | He is actually pretty blocky, there's
not a lot of detail going on in him, and
| | 00:09 | we want to give him more detail, more
character and make him more interesting.
| | 00:14 | We can do that by adding detail,
adding geometry to this character.
| | 00:17 | There is two main ways to do that.
| | 00:19 | There is the Insert Edge Loop tool
and there's the Split Polygon tool.
| | 00:23 | So, let me show you how the
Split Polygon tool works first.
| | 00:26 | We want to have our character selected
and we can go up into the Edit Mesh menu
| | 00:31 | and select Split Polygon tool.
| | 00:33 | I just want to zoom in a little bit.
| | 00:35 | Let's say we want to give this guy
a little bit more collarbone detail.
| | 00:40 | So we can select one of these edges
and if we hold down the mouse button and drag,
| | 00:45 | you could see it's got this little
dot and this is showing us where the cut
| | 00:48 | is going to start from.
| | 00:49 | So if I release the mouse button here,
now we can go and follow the directions
| | 00:54 | on screen and click on these different edges.
| | 00:58 | And it's going to cut across these
edges and let's say I want this cut to go
| | 01:03 | right up into this vertex.
| | 01:04 | So, if you click and drag the mouse and
pull it into a vertex, it's going to snap
| | 01:09 | and sort of lock in there. Now that's good.
| | 01:11 | That's what we want because we want
to carry this detail back around to the
| | 01:14 | underside of the collarbone.
| | 01:16 | So we'll lift up the mouse here and
continue our cut across the chest.
| | 01:20 | When we are done we can either hit
Enter or right-click and that's going to lock in
| | 01:27 | those changes that we made.
| | 01:28 | So, now we've got some extra detail that we
can use to modify and control the collarbone.
| | 01:34 | If you wanted to, you could select
these vertices and pull out the collarbone.
| | 01:37 | All right, so that's all fine and good.
| | 01:40 | There is this other tool that I use all
the time, the Insert Edge Loop tool, and
| | 01:45 | really this is the workhorse of
adding detail to your characters.
| | 01:48 | So, let's make sure our character is
selected and we'll go into the Edit Mesh
| | 01:52 | menu and select Insert Edge Loop tool.
| | 01:55 | So, let's see how this works really quick.
| | 01:56 | I am going to look here at the chest and
when I click on an edge, what it does is
| | 02:02 | it automatically throws this new edge
loop all the way around the edge loop.
| | 02:08 | What it's doing is it's looking at the
edge that you select and it's seeing what
| | 02:12 | edges are opposite from that edge and
continuing the cut all the way through them.
| | 02:17 | So if you click and hold down the mouse
you can see this little preview of what
| | 02:20 | the cut is going to look like.
| | 02:23 | Now, this only works when there is an edge
that's opposite the edge that you click on.
| | 02:28 | So, let me look around the backside of
this model and you can see that there is
| | 02:30 | a triangle right here.
| | 02:32 | So, if you click this edge
it doesn't know where to go past that triangle,
| | 02:37 | because there's no edge on the opposite
side of this edge right here so it just stops.
| | 02:42 | It doesn't know what to do.
| | 02:43 | So you can use that to your advantage or
you know, it can be to your disadvantage
| | 02:46 | if you don't know that it's going to do that.
| | 02:48 | But it's just something to keep an eye open for.
| | 02:50 | Now, let's see how we can really use
this tool to insert an edge loop to
| | 02:55 | create more geometry and then edit that geometry
to really flesh out the shape of this character.
| | 03:00 | So, let's say we want this character
to have more definition in the wrist.
| | 03:05 | So, I am going to move here to the
wrist and you can select a vertex and hit F
| | 03:09 | and that will focus in on the
wrist, so we can see it more clearly.
| | 03:14 | So, there is not a lot of definition in
this wrist. Itt just kind of go straight
| | 03:17 | from arm right into the hand and
we want to make a little division there.
| | 03:21 | So, we can just use the Insert
Edge Loop tool and click on this edge.
| | 03:24 | Now, the cool thing about this is when
you insert an edge loop or cut new faces,
| | 03:29 | those edges that you just created
are going to be selected by default.
| | 03:34 | So, if we hit R and go into the Scale
tool, we can just immediately go right in
| | 03:38 | and scale that wrist up and now
we've got more definition in the wrist.
| | 03:42 | So, adding new detail and form in specific
areas is quick and easy with these two tools.
| | 03:48 | You'll find yourself using it
all the time to refine your models.
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| Using the Sculpt Geometry tool | 00:00 | The Sculpt Geometry tool is a powerful
character modeling tool that can make
| | 00:04 | modifications to your
models quickly and smoothly.
| | 00:07 | You want to use this to make artistic
organic changes to your models, because it
| | 00:11 | behaves in a very intuitive artist-friendly way.
| | 00:14 | It differs from standalone sculpting
packages like Zbrush or Mudbox in one major
| | 00:18 | way in that it doesn't subdivide your
mesh in order to create finer details.
| | 00:23 | It only works with the mesh that you give it.
| | 00:25 | If the mesh isn't dense enough to
create fine details, Sculpt Geometry will
| | 00:29 | not be able to do it.
| | 00:30 | So, we've got our Hank mesh here.
It's a very blocky simple version of him.
| | 00:34 | One of the thing that Sculpt
Geometry tool is really good at is
| | 00:39 | smoothing out blocky detail.
| | 00:42 | Right now, if we turn on the Smooth Preview
you can see that he's pretty smooth all over.
| | 00:47 | There are actually not a
lot of rough things going on.
| | 00:49 | But if we want to increase the level
of detail, so it's kind of like a real
| | 00:55 | world situation, we want
to Insert Edge Loop tool.
| | 00:57 | We want to give him some
more geometry more detail to work
| | 01:01 | with, like we might see in the real world.
| | 01:04 | We've given him some more detail now.
| | 01:06 | So, if we go into the Smooth Preview
now you can see that there's these kind of
| | 01:10 | blocky flat spots. There is some weird
lines and edges going on in the body and
| | 01:16 | that's not very appealing
we want to get rid of that.
| | 01:18 | Sculpt Geometry is really good at
dealing with those kinds of things.
| | 01:21 | So, let's go into the Sculpt Geometry
tool up here on the shelf and make sure
| | 01:27 | we've got the tool settings turned on.
| | 01:30 | So what we see is a whole lot of
settings and it can be a kind of intimidating
| | 01:34 | at first because there's really a lot of
a things to look at. But really there's
| | 01:38 | only a few of them that you're
going to need on a regular basis.
| | 01:41 | To tell you the truth, 99% of the time I
only use very few of these settings and
| | 01:45 | I'll just show you what those settings are.
| | 01:48 | The big one is Opacity.
| | 01:50 | This changes the amount of affect that you
are going to get from any of the brushing.
| | 01:54 | By default it's at 1 and I
think that's just way too much.
| | 01:58 | I like to build up any
strokes that I make gradually.
| | 02:01 | So I'll bring the Opacity way down.
I am just scrolling way down here.
| | 02:05 | You can see there is another setting that I'll
like to use all the time. It's Show wireframe.
| | 02:10 | So, if you can turn off Show wireframe,
now you can see just what the mesh looks
| | 02:14 | like without any of the
wireframe to get in the way.
| | 02:16 | Sometimes seeing the wireframe is
helpful and sometimes it gets in the way.
| | 02:19 | So, it's up to you to decide when
to use it and when not to use it.
| | 02:23 | Another setting I use all the time is
under the Stroke menu there is Reflection.
| | 02:28 | So, you can see when Reflection
is turned on I get two brushes.
| | 02:34 | When Reflection is turned off,
there is just one brush, so you can
| | 02:37 | sculpt asymmetrically.
| | 02:39 | For the most part I want to
have Reflection turned on.
| | 02:44 | The last section of the Sculpt Geometry tool
that I use all the time is here under Operation.
| | 02:49 | So, there is different ways
that you can use the tool.
| | 02:52 | There is Push, which is pretty self-
explanatory. If we just zoom in here on the
| | 02:57 | model you can see, if we want to push-in
on the model, it sort of shrinks things
| | 03:02 | or pushes them away from the brush.
| | 03:04 | I am going to undo that
and let's see what Pull does.
| | 03:07 | It's pretty much the same
thing. It just pulls outwards.
| | 03:10 | There is this Smooth tool
and you can see what this does.
| | 03:19 | It just kind of pushes down any rough
spots and spreads out the geometries to
| | 03:23 | keep things from being too rough.
| | 03:26 | Then there's the Relax, which is very
similar to Smooth. It's actually kind of
| | 03:30 | hard to describe what the difference is.
| | 03:32 | There are very subtle
different way in which it behaves.
| | 03:35 | So, you probably better off just
experimenting with the two different brushes to
| | 03:39 | see which one gives you the better result.
| | 03:41 | Then there is Pinch, which
kind of pulls things together.
| | 03:46 | I should probably increase the
Opacity for this one so the effect is more
| | 03:50 | pronounced. It just kind of
sucks things towards the brush.
| | 04:00 | Then there's the Erase tool and this
has the effect of just simply removing any
| | 04:07 | sculpting that you have done.
| | 04:10 | So, the Sculpt Geometry tool is a
powerful way to directly affect the surface of
| | 04:14 | your model in a more naturalistic way.
| | 04:17 | With knowledge of just these few
important settings, a wide array of sculpting
| | 04:21 | possibilities are at your fingertips.
| | 04:24 | Even though it doesn't always
replace the need to tweak vertices by hand,
| | 04:27 | you'll find that in many situations it's
much faster and much more convenient to
| | 04:31 | use the Sculpt Geometry tool.
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| Working symmetrically| 00:00 | Most characters that you model will
probably be symmetrical. By modeling just
| | 00:04 | one side of the character and then
duplicating it over to the other side rather
| | 00:08 | than modeling the whole at
once, you save time and effort.
| | 00:12 | So we've got a Hank model here and only
half of it is existing in the scene right now.
| | 00:16 | What we need to do is
mirror it over to the other side.
| | 00:19 | There is a little bit of
prep work we have to do first.
| | 00:23 | One of the things we've to do is make
sure that the centerline of the character
| | 00:27 | is flush with the center of the world
and the way we do that is we go into the
| | 00:32 | tool settings, and in the Move tool
settings we want to make sure that we turn off
| | 00:38 | Retain component spacing.
| | 00:41 | What this would do is make sure that
when we move the centerline vertices they
| | 00:44 | all snap to the center of the world.
| | 00:47 | So I'm going to just zoom in really
close, make sure I can select this border
| | 00:52 | edge, and I'm just going to double
click it, so that's going to select all of
| | 00:55 | these edges around the
centerline of the character.
| | 00:58 | And when we go into the Top view and
make sure that they snap to the center.
| | 01:04 | So if you hold down X and then move these
edges, you see that they snap to the gridlines.
| | 01:11 | So just make sure that they're
snapping to the very center of the world.
| | 01:14 | Okay, so let's go back out of
Edge mode and into Object mode.
| | 01:17 | Something else that we want to do is
make sure that the pivot point of the
| | 01:21 | objects is at the center of the world.
| | 01:23 | So just zoom out a little bit in
perspective view and we see that the pivot
| | 01:26 | point is actually at the center of the world.
| | 01:29 | If it's not, you can snap at there by
holding down D. D goes in the pivot point
| | 01:34 | move mode, where you can
move the pivot point around.
| | 01:37 | If you hold down D and X at the same time, then
you can snap to the grid with the pivot point.
| | 01:42 | So now it's at the center of the world.
| | 01:45 | And I think we're ready to
actually mirror this character over.
| | 01:49 | So select half of your model, go
up into the Mesh menu, and do Mirror
| | 01:53 | Geometry with options.
| | 01:59 | Now by default, Mirror Direction is set to
positive X. Let's see what happens when we do that.
| | 02:07 | That is not what that we want,
so let's undo that and go to negative X.
| | 02:11 | However you set up your model
originally, like which side of the model you're
| | 02:15 | doing first will depend on which mirror
direction you choose. So if one of them
| | 02:20 | is not working, just switch
its view in different one.
| | 02:22 | Then we want to merge with the original,
so we want the mirror to be part of the
| | 02:26 | same mesh as the original.
| | 02:29 | And we also want to merge vertices,
so there is a continuous surface from
| | 02:32 | one side to the other.
| | 02:33 | So let's Mirror it.
| | 02:34 | Now I want to zoom in on the face
to see something that happened here.
| | 02:38 | What we can see is that it's merged too
many vertices together, so you get this
| | 02:46 | crunching effect along the
centerline and we don't want that.
| | 02:50 | So let's go into the Channel Box for
the objects and scroll down. We can see
| | 02:54 | that there is polyMirror.
| | 02:55 | So we've just mirrored half of this
character and the Merge Threshold for the
| | 03:04 | vertices was set too high.
| | 03:06 | It was grabbing too many vertices and
merging them together. So we want to reduce this.
| | 03:10 | So what I usually do is 0.01 and hit
Enter, and you can see that the result is
| | 03:18 | now that the mesh has not
merged unnecessary vertices together.
| | 03:23 | So we're done with these tool settings.
I'm just going to get out of the way and
| | 03:28 | let's zoom out a little bit
and see how reflection works.
| | 03:32 | So now we've got both halves and we want
to make edits to one side of this model
| | 03:37 | and have those edits affect
the other side at the same time.
| | 03:41 | So we go in the Vertex mode and select
some of these vertices and then open up
| | 03:49 | the tool settings and go into
the very bottom at Reflection.
| | 03:54 | If you turn on Reflection, any edits
that you make on one side are automatically
| | 03:59 | going to happen on the other side as well known.
| | 04:01 | Now unfortunately, Reflection only
works for Move, Rotate and Scale.
| | 04:06 | If you change the topology, for
example, if you insert any edge loops or if
| | 04:09 | you use the Cut Faces tool, those
edits will not be mirrored automatically
| | 04:14 | over on to the other side.
| | 04:15 | So let's do a little
example and see how that works.
| | 04:19 | I'm going to zoom in and go into the
Object mode and pick my Split Polygon tool.
| | 04:28 | So I'm just going to randomly make a
couple edits just to show how this works.
| | 04:32 | So I'm just cutting up some faces, and
zoom out and you can see that those edits
| | 04:37 | have not happened on the other side.
| | 04:39 | So if you do any of those changes, you
just have to make sure that you delete
| | 04:43 | half of your model and mirror it over.
| | 04:44 | So I'm just going to show
you how I delete half of it.
| | 04:47 | Really quick, I'm going to go on to the Top
view and go in a Face mode and just select
| | 04:52 | faces on one half of the model.
| | 04:56 | Hit Delete, get any faces that I might have
missed, and now we're back to where we started.
| | 05:03 | So, you'll find yourself mirroring a
model many times over throughout the course
| | 05:09 | of modeling a character.
| | 05:10 | If you make any major changes, it's
always good to mirror it over to get a sense
| | 05:14 | of how the whole character looks.
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| Setting up the image planes in Maya| 00:00 | Having a reference image to
help you model isn't cheating.
| | 00:04 | It's the smart way to make sure that your
model has the correct proportions and shape.
| | 00:08 | This video will show you how to get
your orthographic reference into Maya so
| | 00:12 | that you can make sure
your model lines up with it.
| | 00:14 | So we've got a fresh Maya
scene right here. It's brand-new.
| | 00:18 | Let's go into the four views, so we
can place the reference image in here.
| | 00:22 | In the Front view, let's go to its View menu,
| | 00:25 | go down to Image Plane and Import Image.
| | 00:28 | We're just going to find this image in the
Exercise File, hank_reference.png. We'll open it up.
| | 00:36 | This we've got it in the Front view.
| | 00:37 | While this image is still selected,
we can move it around to put it in a little
| | 00:41 | bit more of a convenient location.
| | 00:43 | Right now it's right on top of where
we're trying to model, so let's move
| | 00:46 | that back a little bit.
| | 00:47 | So we can go over the Channel
Box and scroll down a little bit.
| | 00:50 | We can see that the Center X, Center Y
and Center Z, this will locate this image
| | 00:57 | plane in space and we want to move it
back a little bit, so it's not quite in
| | 01:01 | the way of everything.
| | 01:02 | So I'm going to click on Center Z.
| | 01:04 | The way we can change these values is
to either type in a new number here or we
| | 01:10 | can do it interactively by pulling down
Ctrl+middle mouse button and dragging.
| | 01:16 | That will move the image around.
| | 01:18 | So what we want to do is move this
back and out of the way and we can move
| | 01:22 | it back really far.
| | 01:24 | I'm just going to type in -99,
because it's really easy number and it
| | 01:29 | disappeared, but what we can see if we zoom
out is that it just pushed it back farther.
| | 01:33 | What we also want to do is in the Front view.
| | 01:36 | We want to make sure that this
reference image is lining up with the vertical
| | 01:40 | and horizontal axes of this viewport.
| | 01:42 | So let's go into this viewport, so we
can see this more clearly and Center X,
| | 01:48 | let's move this, Ctrl+middle click-drag.
| | 01:50 | I want to just move this so it's lined
up with the center axis of the world.
| | 01:56 | And then Centrer Y. Let's say Ctrl+
Click the middle mouse button and drag and
| | 02:01 | move that so that we are sitting
right on top of the horizontal axis.
| | 02:07 | And go back into the side view. Now
let's put the same reference image into the
| | 02:11 | side view, so View > Image Plane > Import Image.
| | 02:20 | So we've got the same reference image
into this view, except we're going to
| | 02:25 | focus on this portion of it.
| | 02:27 | So we want to reposition this one as well.
| | 02:31 | And this one, this Center X axis, is what's
going to move this farther back in space.
| | 02:36 | So let's click in here and I'm just
going to type in -99 because it's an
| | 02:39 | easy number to remember.
| | 02:41 | Let's move that back now.
| | 02:42 | We just want to move this image so
it's lined up the axes of this viewport.
| | 02:46 | So just go into this and Center Y > Ctrl
+middle mouse drag. Let's put the feet
| | 02:55 | right on the horizontal axis.
| | 02:57 | Centre Z > Ctrl+middle mouse
drag and let's just move it over.
| | 03:03 | This one doesn't really have to be
precise, just roughly somewhere close to the
| | 03:06 | middle of the vertical axis.
| | 03:08 | So we've got our reference images in place.
| | 03:14 | We're ready to start modeling.
| | 03:15 | You'll find that having reference
images in your scene is invaluable for doing
| | 03:19 | all kinds of modeling.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Character Modeling Theory and General SkillsProper edge flow| 00:00 | The structure of your polygon mesh
can be thought of like the structure of
| | 00:04 | a bridge or a tower. In both, you want to
get the most use out of the fewest pieces.
| | 00:09 | The arrangement of the polygons in a
model, like the arrangement of beams
| | 00:13 | in the Eiffel Tower, needs to relate to the
shapes and forms that they're contributing to.
| | 00:18 | The way in which edges relates to
anatomy and to each other is called edge flow,
| | 00:22 | and it's a crucial concept for making
characters that bend and move in correct ways.
| | 00:27 | So we're at this picture of the
Eiffel Tower here and we can see how the
| | 00:31 | different structural members
contribute to the overall shape of the tower.
| | 00:35 | There are these large curving shapes
that they are made up of these little
| | 00:40 | struts, and all the struts are in a
structure that's directionally related to
| | 00:45 | the overall direction of the tower.
| | 00:48 | There's a similar thing that's going
on with our character here in Maya.
| | 00:52 | We can see that there's an edge
flow pattern and it matches the overall
| | 00:57 | direction and structure of the body.
So we can see I've got these color-coded
| | 01:03 | zones here on this model and
this is what I call flow zones.
| | 01:07 | They are different parts of the body that
have the same edge flow pattern to them.
| | 01:12 | So if I click on the body here and I
zoom in on the arm for example, you can see
| | 01:17 | that all of these different edge loops
are parallel to each other. They're all
| | 01:22 | flowing in the same pattern,
almost like a checkerboard grid.
| | 01:25 | That's why I call it a flow zone, is
because this particular part of the body is
| | 01:31 | really in essence just a cylinder.
| | 01:33 | It's kind of been molded into the shape
of an arm, but it's really just a cylinder.
| | 01:38 | Other parts of the body can
also be thought of as flow zones.
| | 01:41 | For example, we've got the pec, the chest area.
| | 01:44 | It's almost like this cape that's been
wrapped around and it follows the anatomy
| | 01:49 | and helps keep things simple.
| | 01:50 | There are other flow zones, for
example, down here on the abdomen.
| | 01:56 | It's really just this ring of faces
all the way around the body and that also
| | 02:01 | takes the shape of a cylinder.
| | 02:03 | There are certain parts of the body
that don't really need to have their own
| | 02:07 | flow zones. They just kind of take
what's left over from other parts.
| | 02:11 | So this is little part under the armpit here.
| | 02:13 | It's really just kind of filling in
the gap of other more important areas,
| | 02:17 | so not every part of the body needs to
have its own specially worked out flow
| | 02:21 | zones, but the important parts of the
body do, the major overall structures.
| | 02:25 | And there are two major types of flow
zones; there's cylindrical flow zones
| | 02:31 | or tubular flows and there
is also circular flow zones.
| | 02:35 | We already saw some tubular flow
zones like on the arm and the abdomen.
| | 02:41 | Now let's look at a circular flow zone.
Usually you find those on the face.
| | 02:45 | So you've got the face here, and
there's this edge loops are going around in a
| | 02:50 | very circular pattern around the mouth
and also around the eyes, and that's very
| | 02:55 | useful, because when a setup artist
goes to set this up for animation, these
| | 03:00 | edge loops are already configured to
match the direction of the muscles and a
| | 03:06 | natural body that pull and stretch on the skin.
| | 03:09 | And so when this character frown its
brow or when it smiles and frowns,
| | 03:14 | these edge loops are already set up to take
the shape of those different anatomical
| | 03:20 | shapes that form, when the character
moves around in those different shapes.
| | 03:24 | There is a few other aspects of the way
I've setup this edge flow that are very
| | 03:29 | important. Let me zoom out
and get a better look at this.
| | 03:32 | So, thus looking generally at the body
overall, you can see that the way these
| | 03:36 | polygons are laid out, it's a very even pattern.
| | 03:39 | It's very predictable.
| | 03:40 | It's just following the anatomy.
| | 03:42 | It's not getting over complicated.
| | 03:44 | There's also something else about it
that's very useful, is that it's mostly square.
| | 03:49 | There's not very many long faces.
| | 03:51 | You know, they mostly maintain
a very square like proportion.
| | 03:57 | Another important thing is that they
follow the anatomy. So if you have a major
| | 04:01 | anatomical structure, like let me take
a better look under the pectoral muscle,
| | 04:06 | you can see there is a major anatomical
structure, and so why not make your edge
| | 04:11 | flow follow those major anatomical structures.
| | 04:14 | Something else that good edge flow does
is it follows where creases will form
| | 04:20 | and where joints will bend.
| | 04:21 | So if I look here on the crotch, you
can see that the edge flow is following a
| | 04:25 | very diagonal pattern from
the crotch up to the hip.
| | 04:29 | Now if you notice you can see how the
crease will form on the natural person in
| | 04:35 | this diagonal pattern, and so when the
animator goes to move this leg around,
| | 04:40 | it's a good idea to have the edge
flow following that same pattern.
| | 04:43 | So that when the crease forms, it's forming
along where you've already got the edges set up.
| | 04:49 | If the edges were very horizontal here,
but the crease forms diagonally, then
| | 04:54 | they would crinkle and you'll have all
kinds of weird artifacts forming in the mesh.
| | 04:59 | So we talked about some of the
different properties that good edge flow has.
| | 05:04 | It's mostly square.
| | 05:06 | It's evenly spaced.
| | 05:07 | It follows the anatomy.
| | 05:09 | It follows where the crease and
different bends will form and it's impossible to
| | 05:15 | perfectly satisfy all of those principles.
| | 05:17 | You want to try a strike a balance
between them, because if you try to make
| | 05:20 | every polygon exactly square and
exactly the same size and follow the anatomy,
| | 05:26 | you're just going to pull your
hair out because it's impossible.
| | 05:28 | But working out a good edge flow is
kind of like solving a logic puzzle.
| | 05:32 | It's fun, but it can also be a
headache when there's a deadline.
| | 05:35 | So, that's why this course is going to
focus on the most straightforward aspects
| | 05:40 | of edge flow, to help you get you
on your way and avoid the hassles.
| | 05:44 | As you get better at character modeling,
you will certainly discover your own
| | 05:47 | techniques, tricks, and
ways to improve on the basics.
| | 05:50 | You'll also work with setup artists and
the animators to find out exactly what
| | 05:55 | it is that this model needs to be able
to do, so you can more effectively tailor
| | 06:00 | the edge flow and the flow
zones to accomplish those needs.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Attaching separately modeled body parts | 00:00 | It's often easier to model some body
parts separately without the rest of the
| | 00:04 | body to get in the way
and then combine them later.
| | 00:07 | However, usually there's more detail
in one body part than in the other.
| | 00:11 | How do you make it work then?
| | 00:12 | Well, I'll show you.
| | 00:14 | The reason that I'm showing you how
to do it at this stage rather than as I
| | 00:18 | model each body part is because the
exact configuration of edge loops and
| | 00:22 | topology is not going to be the
same from one model to the next.
| | 00:26 | Every model is different.
| | 00:27 | But if you learn these four techniques,
you'll be set to handle any attaching
| | 00:31 | situation that you come across, rather
than just the specific scenarios that we
| | 00:35 | will handle in this course.
| | 00:36 | So we have got our Exercise File open,
and here's Hank, and you can see his body
| | 00:43 | is cut into several different pieces.
| | 00:45 | So there's several different ways
that we can combine different body parts
| | 00:49 | together. Most of them involve either
adding edges to one side or subtracting
| | 00:55 | edges from the other.
| | 00:56 | So let's zoom in on the hand and
see what I'm talking about here.
| | 01:01 | I've already counted and on the hand
we have 14 different vertices around the wrist,
| | 01:07 | but on the arm side we have only 12.
| | 01:12 | So, one approach that we can take to
this is add edges to the arm side or
| | 01:17 | subtract edges from the hand side.
| | 01:19 | Now if I were to go and insert an edge
loop with the Insert Edge Loop tool on
| | 01:24 | the arm side, we would create an edge
that goes all the way up into the neck or
| | 01:30 | all the way down the body.
| | 01:31 | I don't want to add all that many
more edges to the arm. We've already got
| | 01:34 | enough and I don't really want to
subtract any edge loops from the hand either,
| | 01:39 | because I've already got things looking
pretty much the way I want here and so
| | 01:44 | I don't really want to mess
up what I have going on here.
| | 01:47 | So there's a way that I can add edge
loops to the arm, but not carry them all
| | 01:52 | the way down into the rest of the body and
that's what I'm going to show you how to do here.
| | 01:55 | So let me zoom in on the wrist
and let's evaluate what we can do.
| | 02:01 | So there's a technique that we can do
called reducing edges, where you have
| | 02:07 | a certain amount of edge loops coming
from the wrist but then you can tie them off.
| | 02:10 | So they don't run all the
way down the rest of the body.
| | 02:14 | And to do that I'm going to grab the
Split Polygon tool and I'm just going to
| | 02:19 | add two more edges on the top and on the bottom.
| | 02:26 | So that we'll have 14 edges on both sides,
on hand side and also on the wrist side.
| | 02:32 | Now there's a way to tie this off
and that's what I'm going to show you.
| | 02:35 | What I'm going to do is make a little
cut from this vertex here up to this
| | 02:39 | vertex here and then I'm also going to go
back to the underside and I can cut like that.
| | 02:47 | So we've got a triangle
here and a triangle up here.
| | 02:51 | Now all we have to do is
connect these two triangles.
| | 02:54 | So we use the Split Polygon tool to just cut
from one of the triangles down to the other.
| | 03:03 | The result we end up with
is that this is four sided now.
| | 03:06 | It's all four sided and we've
effectively tied off the new edges that we
| | 03:12 | had to cut it here.
| | 03:13 | So now there're 14 edges on this
side and 14 edges on this side.
| | 03:16 | So if we combine them together and then
go into Vertex mode, we can select two
| | 03:25 | vertices, go to the Merge Vertex tool,
in the Edit Mesh menu, Merge, and you can
| | 03:33 | see that the edges will merge together.
When I hit G it'll repeat the last tool
| | 03:37 | used and we could go all the
way around and close that off of.
| | 03:41 | It'll be pretty straightforward and simple.
| | 03:43 | So you get two contiguous
surfaces, from one to the other.
| | 03:47 | Let's look at another case, down at the foot.
| | 03:50 | So I'm just going to zoom down in
here and I already know that there are 12
| | 03:57 | edges around the foot, but
there's 13 around the leg.
| | 04:02 | So I've got one more on the
leg that I need to get rid of.
| | 04:05 | We can do this by deleting an edge loop.
| | 04:08 | So let me back out and see where
could I take an edge loop out of this?
| | 04:15 | Well, I could take out one of these
edge loops, but then it would also take
| | 04:18 | out an edge loop that goes all the way up to
chest, or up into the arm or up into the back.
| | 04:22 | I don't want to get rid of one of those.
But if I look at the inner thigh,
| | 04:29 | we can see that there is an edge loop that
runs up here and it just dies of at the crotch.
| | 04:33 | If we get rid of this one, it's not really
going to mess up with the rest of the body.
| | 04:38 | So the way to get rid of an edge loop
is you go to Edge mode, pick one of the
| | 04:43 | edges that's part of the edge loop,
hold down Ctrl on a PC or Command on a Mac,
| | 04:49 | and then while that's held down
hold on the Right Mouse button, and
| | 04:52 | this little menu is going to pop up and
you can mouse over to Edge Loop Utilities
| | 04:58 | and then go up to Edge Loop and hit
Delete, and it's gone. We don't have to
| | 05:03 | worry about it any more.
| | 05:03 | So we've got now 12 edge
loops here and 12 on the foot.
| | 05:08 | So those are going to be merged up.
| | 05:09 | Let's take a look at the head
and see what's going on there.
| | 05:15 | So, I've already counted this out.
On the head we have 14 edge loops and on
| | 05:18 | the body there're 15.
| | 05:19 | There is one too many on the
body, or one too few on the head.
| | 05:23 | We can use the Insert Edge
Loop tool to add an edge loop.
| | 05:29 | Now it's up to you where you would
want to put it. Just keep in mind that it
| | 05:33 | could run up in the places where it
just makes things more complicated.
| | 05:37 | So you can try out different places
to see where you like it the best.
| | 05:40 | Where it's going to be less obtrusive.
| | 05:42 | I just want to stick one right there in the mouth.
| | 05:45 | So that the new edge loop just goes up
into the mouth and it dies off there and
| | 05:50 | nobody really cares what happens deep
down inside the mouth because you will
| | 05:52 | never see it anyway.
| | 05:53 | So now there're 15 edge loops on the body
and 15 on the head, so that problem is solved.
| | 05:59 | Now, our last case is the ear.
| | 06:02 | The ear has 8 edge loops
around here and the head has 10.
| | 06:08 | So you've got to find some way to turn
10 edge loops into 8, and for that we can
| | 06:17 | use a reduction, so it's
called reducing edge loops.
| | 06:21 | So what I'll do is I'll select these
two edges here and go up to this shelf
| | 06:26 | and click Collapse.
| | 06:28 | So now what was before one, two,
three edge loops coming into the ear,
| | 06:33 | there's now just one.
| | 06:35 | If I pick this edge and delete it,
now you can see we've got a four-sided
| | 06:40 | polygon, which is exactly what
we want, and then 10 minus 2 is 8.
| | 06:45 | So it's now 8 and 8, so these two will
also match up nicely if you go and merge
| | 06:51 | all the vertices around it.
| | 06:53 | So making different body parts
flows smoothly into each other is a task
| | 06:57 | that character modelers
are constantly faced with.
| | 07:00 | But if you're armed with these skills,
you'll be ready to take it on with the
| | 07:03 | least amount of stress possible.
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| Managing your scene| 00:00 | Character modeling can quickly create
a messy scene with bits and pieces of
| | 00:04 | models all over the place and with
unused nodes and meaningless names.
| | 00:09 | You can help others to understand your
scene and avoid headaches with these tips.
| | 00:14 | A good way to keep organized
is by setting your projects.
| | 00:17 | Maya likes to remember everything
that's going on by organizing a project
| | 00:23 | folder, so there is a folder and within
that is your scene files, your reference
| | 00:28 | images, your renders.
| | 00:30 | Anything that has to do with the
project gets stored in a folder structure.
| | 00:35 | The way you create that is go to File
> Project and if you're making a new
| | 00:40 | project for the first time just click
New and you can name it whatever you
| | 00:43 | want, so let's call it hank.
| | 00:45 | And this location is on the Desktop. That's good.
| | 00:48 | You don't have to worry
about these other settings.
| | 00:51 | So this project is set.
| | 00:52 | Now Maya knows that if I save this
scene file it's going in that folder.
| | 00:56 | If you've already got a project
started and you want to open it up and
| | 01:01 | start a new fresh day,
| | 01:03 | a project you have already worked on, you can
go to Set and we'll just pick the hank project.
| | 01:09 | So now Maya knows that when I
save this it's going in that folder.
| | 01:13 | Another good way to keep everything
organized is by using Display Layers.
| | 01:18 | You can find the Display
Layers underneath the Channel Box.
| | 01:22 | So let's make a new layer, so
we can put the body in it.
| | 01:25 | Let's go to Layers > Create Empty Layer,
double-click on it, and you can rename it
| | 01:32 | to let's call it hank_body.
| | 01:34 | So we can put the body into it. We'll
just select the body and then hold down the
| | 01:40 | right mouse button on the
name and Add Selected Objects.
| | 01:44 | So everything that's
selected now goes into that layer.
| | 01:48 | You can change the visibility of the
layer by clicking the V for Visibility
| | 01:51 | there is this box here, if you click on
it and get a T. T stands for Template.
| | 01:58 | So a template is geometry that is not
selectable, but it shows up in Wireframe mode.
| | 02:04 | So if you want to see where this
object is, but you don't really want to
| | 02:08 | deal with it, you just want to arrange
object around it, then you can put it in T mode.
| | 02:12 | We'll click it one more time.
It goes into R mode for Reference.
| | 02:17 | Reference is almost the same thing.
| | 02:19 | It's unselectable, but you
can see it's fully visible.
| | 02:24 | So these different modes can come in
handy if you need to get certain things out
| | 02:27 | of the way, you don't want to deal with
them at the moment. You can just hide
| | 02:30 | them or make them unselectable.
| | 02:33 | Let's put the clothes in a layer too.
| | 02:36 | Let's Shift+Select all of these
different clothing objects and go into Layers
| | 02:42 | and Create Layer from Selected.
| | 02:45 | Double-click that and call it clothes.
| | 02:48 | So now we've got clothes in the layer too.
| | 02:55 | Something is really good to do on a
regular basis is to delete history.
| | 03:00 | Deleting history gets rid of all the
information that went into making an object
| | 03:06 | and tells Maya to just remember
what the object looks like now.
| | 03:09 | So for example, this shirt, when I
created it I started with an extrusion and
| | 03:14 | I've cut it into different
pieces and I've smoothed it.
| | 03:19 | And there is all these different things I
did to it and Maya remembers all that history.
| | 03:23 | And so we can bog down Maya's memory,
we can bog down the processor, we can make
| | 03:28 | Maya more likely to crash.
| | 03:30 | So if you got your point on an
object where you know you don't need to
| | 03:34 | remember how you got there, you just
want to remember what it looks like now,
| | 03:38 | you can delete the history.
| | 03:39 | So I'm just going to go up to
Edit > Delete by Type > History.
| | 03:44 | So that just told Maya to forget
everything that went into making this shirt and
| | 03:50 | just told it remember what it looks like now.
| | 03:52 | You've probably wanted to do that on
a regular basis while you're modeling.
| | 03:56 | Another thing that's good
to do is Freeze Transforms.
| | 03:59 | Let me illustrate down on this boot.
I'm just going to zoom into it now and you
| | 04:04 | can see that the boot has
its pivot point out here.
| | 04:07 | If I just rotate the boot around a little
bit and let's make it axis all wonky like this,
| | 04:13 | we can go up to Modify
and Freeze Transformations.
| | 04:17 | What that does is it tells Maya to forget
all of those transformations that we did here.
| | 04:22 | Forget the rotating, forget how it
rotated and how off-kilter it was and just
| | 04:28 | remember the current
position as the new default.
| | 04:32 | So if I undo the Freeze Transforms,
you can see the Rotate here has all
| | 04:35 | these different numbers.
| | 04:36 | If I Freeze Transforms again ,
it's all goes down to zero.
| | 04:40 | It's the new default in
this position right here.
| | 04:42 | Let's say I actually really did want
the bootto be over here like this.
| | 04:48 | So if I go to Freeze Transforms again
now Maya is going to remember this new
| | 04:52 | position as the new default.
| | 04:54 | Another function that can come
in handy is centering the pivot.
| | 04:58 | You can see that pivot point for this
boot right now is out here in the origin
| | 05:02 | of the world, but what if we want
this pivot point to be in a more useful location?
| | 05:08 | We can just go up to Modify
and Center Pivot. The pivot point is now
| | 05:13 | in the middle of the object.
| | 05:15 | So if you rotate around you can see
it's actually more close to the middle
| | 05:18 | of the object and if you want to
rotate it now it's going to rotate into
| | 05:22 | more predictable way.
| | 05:24 | So like keeping a tidy desk, these tips
help avoid clutter and make the process
| | 05:30 | of creating characters run much more smoothly.
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|
|
3. Modeling the HeadBeginning the basic facial structure| 00:00 | The human face is a very complex piece
of anatomy. Not only that, we spend hours
| | 00:05 | a day looking at people's faces, so we
know when something is even slightly off.
| | 00:10 | I'm going to show you how to get off on
a right foot, so you aren't struggling
| | 00:13 | later on with an uncooperative model.
| | 00:15 | The main idea to
remember here is keep it simple.
| | 00:18 | Create the basic flow zones
a face needs with few polygons.
| | 00:22 | It's going to look blocky and ugly
first, but it's easy to add more detail in
| | 00:26 | later on if the base is set up right.
| | 00:28 | So we've got the exercise file set up
here with the reference already set up and ready to go.
| | 00:33 | In the front view let's
look at what's happening here.
| | 00:35 | I'm just going to go in and look at the face.
| | 00:38 | In order to create some geometry for
the flow zones on the face, let me go up
| | 00:42 | to the Polygon plane and just hold
down the X key so we can snap it to the
| | 00:47 | grid as we draw this out.
| | 00:48 | And I'm just going to release the
X key now and you can see we've got this
| | 00:53 | polygon plane and we can put it wherever we want.
| | 00:55 | Let's see where that went in the side view.
| | 00:58 | Okay, so it's right here. It's a
little bit towards the back of the head.
| | 01:01 | I'm just going to scoot this forward so we
can see it more close to the front of the face.
| | 01:06 | I'm just going to make a few tweaks to
this just to make it fit the reference
| | 01:10 | little bit more closely and I'm
going to go in the Vertex mode.
| | 01:12 | Just put this on the forehead
and this closer to the chin.
| | 01:16 | Now, I want to split this polygon into
two halves, so we have a face that goes
| | 01:20 | over the eye and a face
that goes over the mouth.
| | 01:23 | So I'm just going to go into Edit Mesh
and pick the Split Polygon tool and split
| | 01:26 | this into two faces.
| | 01:28 | So what I can do now to create the flow
zone for the mouth is take this polygon
| | 01:35 | that exists over the
mouth and extrude it inwards.
| | 01:43 | I'm just going to switch right to the
Scale tool, so I can shrink this in.
| | 01:45 | And I'll just make it fit roughly
closer to the shape of the mouth.
| | 01:54 | Now, I will see what this
looks like in the Perspective view.
| | 02:01 | Okay, so it created this extra face on
the inside that we don't really need.
| | 02:04 | I'm just going to select that and kill it.
| | 02:06 | I want to go into Vertex mode and just
make sure these lines up a little bit
| | 02:12 | more closely with the face.
| | 02:13 | I can hold down X to snap
this to the central line.
| | 02:15 | Okay, so we've got a flow zone for the
mouth established. Let's just make sure
| | 02:21 | that the lips have some geometry.
| | 02:23 | We can take this face in the center and
just extrude it back to create some lips.
| | 02:27 | We're going to go into move mode and
just push that back a little bit and I
| | 02:33 | can extrude it again.
| | 02:34 | I am going to scale and just
make this a little bit bigger.
| | 02:40 | So let's look in
Perspective and see what we have here.
| | 02:45 | So we have got the inside of the mouth
already going and we extruded this and
| | 02:50 | created some unnecessary faces
that I'm just going to get rid of.
| | 02:53 | And we can get rid of this face
because it's inside of the mouth.
| | 02:59 | Okay, so we've got some very simple lips.
| | 03:02 | The next thing that we're going to do is
create some geometry for extruding the nose out.
| | 03:06 | Now, I want to use Extrude, but we
don't have a face right here that sits just
| | 03:10 | right underneath the nose right now.
| | 03:12 | So let's create some geometry so that we
have a place to extrude this nose out from.
| | 03:16 | I want to go to the Edit Mesh menu and
pick the Insert Edge Loop tool and just
| | 03:21 | click to create an edge that's going
to go underneath the nose and I want to
| | 03:26 | create an edge that's going to go on
the inside of the nostril and another edge
| | 03:32 | that's going to go just on
the outside of the nostril.
| | 03:35 | I also want to create one more edge
loop just above the nose, so that we can
| | 03:40 | establish the laugh line.
| | 03:42 | Okay, so now we've got this edge loop
that's going to establish the laugh line
| | 03:47 | and then this edge loop that's going
to establish the bottom of the nose.
| | 03:50 | And I'll go into Perspective view and grab
these two faces, so we can extrude them out.
| | 03:54 | And let's look in Side view and we're
going to Move mode and just pull this forward.
| | 04:09 | Okay, so the extrude for the nose is done.
| | 04:10 | Now let's go and look at
how we can create the eye.
| | 04:13 | I want the flow zone for the
eye to be in this general area.
| | 04:19 | So let's take these two faces
right here and extrude them inwards.
| | 04:29 | And I can just move this extrude
so it's more on top of the eye.
| | 04:32 | Let me go into the side view and safe
that's lined up well. Okay roughly.
| | 04:37 | Let's go in that Perspective view again
and now we want to kind of just like the
| | 04:40 | mouth where we create the eyelids.
| | 04:42 | We need to push these faces back.
| | 04:44 | So I want to go to Extrude
again and just move these back a little bit.
| | 04:48 | Hit G to do Extrude again.
| | 04:50 | I want to go into the Scale tool
and scale those up a little bit.
| | 04:54 | Let's look at the back. Okay so we've
got the inside of the eyelids going and we
| | 04:57 | can just delete these new
polygons around the inside.
| | 05:00 | So now we have this opening for the eye.
| | 05:04 | The last part of this face that we're
going to create is simply extruding from
| | 05:08 | these edges around the face and we want
to bring them back towards the side of
| | 05:12 | the head a little bit to establish
the jaw and the temple on the forehead.
| | 05:16 | So I'm just going to select these
edges around here and extrude them back.
| | 05:23 | Let's see in the Side view.
We're going to go into Move mode.
| | 05:25 | I'm just going to push these back a little bit.
| | 05:29 | And I'm going to Vertex mode so we can
tweak them so they fit the face just
| | 05:32 | a little bit better.
| | 05:38 | Okay, so this is the
basic block out of the face.
| | 05:41 | You can see we've established the flow
zones for the eyes, for the mouth, the
| | 05:46 | basic structure for the nose, and
we've also got the forehead and the side of
| | 05:49 | the head and the jaw going and
they're all very blocky, very basic.
| | 05:53 | The next thing you want to do is just
take one vertex at a time and just line
| | 05:57 | it up with your reference.
| | 05:58 | So you can see if I go in the Side
view and this is a vertex that's just
| | 06:02 | underneath the lip.
| | 06:03 | So we'll just move that into place
and just make sure it's in place in the
| | 06:06 | Front view as well and just start
moving these verts around, so they line up
| | 06:10 | with the reference better.
| | 06:11 | You can go ahead and do that on your own.
| | 06:13 | So I'm just going to stop tweaking the
verts right here, but you continue going
| | 06:15 | on and make sure everything
lines up with the reference.
| | 06:18 | So this way of starting a face is very fast.
| | 06:21 | It's very easily configurable.
| | 06:23 | You can use it for all but the
most extremely stylized of faces.
| | 06:26 | It even works for many animal faces.
| | 06:29 | Although what we've
established so far is crude and blocky,
| | 06:31 | you can see that the flow zones have
been established, so that when we add
| | 06:34 | more detail it will automatically
follow the major anatomical forms that we've defined.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making the head and neck| 00:00 | A good head and neck structure will set
the stage for the ear as well as create
| | 00:05 | good anatomy in the neck.
| | 00:07 | Sure this section doesn't deal with
parts of the body that are as exciting as
| | 00:10 | eyes and mouths, but it's an important step.
| | 00:13 | So in this exercise file I've got the
face that we started in the previous video.
| | 00:18 | And what I want to do to it, if I zoom
out here in the side view, is I want to
| | 00:22 | create some more some extrusions that
go from the forehead. They're going to
| | 00:25 | wrap around the back of the
head and down the back of the neck.
| | 00:28 | But I want to leave a gap for the ear.
I want to leave an opening right here.
| | 00:33 | So what I need to do is split this edge
in half, so that I've got a face above
| | 00:38 | the ear that I can extrude from.
| | 00:40 | So I just want to do that
with the Insert Edge Loop tool.
| | 00:42 | I want to select the model and
pick the Insert Edge Loop tool.
| | 00:45 | I just want to throw one in right here.
| | 00:50 | Now I can take these edges on the
side of the head and on the forehead
| | 00:54 | and extrude them back.
| | 00:55 | Let me go into Perspective view,
so I can select this more easily.
| | 00:57 | All right, so I'm Shift+Selecting
these different edges up here and let's go
| | 01:02 | into Extrude and then just
go right in the Move mode.
| | 01:05 | I want to move these new edges back.
| | 01:07 | I can also rotate them, so that they
kind of rotate as they're turning their way
| | 01:13 | back around the back of the head.
| | 01:16 | And I'll just do another extrude.
| | 01:18 | I want to move that down and rotate it again.
| | 01:24 | And that's a little bit wide.
| | 01:26 | We don't have that much space between
the back of the ear and the back of head.
| | 01:29 | So I'm just going to scale that in
a little bit and move it into place.
| | 01:33 | And let's just do one more
extrude down the back of the neck.
| | 01:36 | Okay, so if I look in the Perspective view
you can see this is really blocky and simple.
| | 01:42 | There is not a whole lot going on here,
but it set up the basic flow zone, edge
| | 01:47 | flow for the back of the head, so that
when I go in insert more geometry, and
| | 01:51 | insert edge loops, and cut this and add
more detail the structure is already set up.
| | 01:55 | Now it's good that we have this
open space for the ear right here.
| | 01:59 | We want that to be open so I can
insert the ear later, but I do want to close
| | 02:03 | off this gap right here.
| | 02:04 | An easy way to do that is
with the Append Polygon tool.
| | 02:08 | So I'll open the Edit Mesh menu, there
is the Append Polygon tool, and what this
| | 02:13 | wants to do is create a
polygon that gaps between two edges.
| | 02:17 | And so we just need to select the two
edges that it's going to span across.
| | 02:21 | So you just click on one and then you
click on the second one and it creates a
| | 02:24 | new face right in-between the two edges.
| | 02:27 | And I'm just going to hit
Enter to finish the operation.
| | 02:29 | The next thing we need to do is create the neck.
| | 02:32 | So let's look in a Perspective view
and go to Edge mode and I just want to
| | 02:36 | select these edges around the base of the neck.
| | 02:43 | Now that we've got those
selected we can just extrude them down.
| | 02:45 | I'm going to go right into Move
mode and I'm just move them down.
| | 02:51 | Scale them out a little bit so they fit
the size of the neck a little bit better.
| | 02:56 | Let's see in the Front view.
| | 02:57 | Okay, its look like we need to tweak
this up so it's fits the shape of the neck
| | 03:00 | a little bit better.
| | 03:01 | All right, well, close enough for now.
| | 03:04 | We can always tweak it more later.
| | 03:08 | So the next thing I want to do is mirror
half of this mesh over so we get a full
| | 03:12 | face so we can see what
the whole head looks like.
| | 03:15 | So let's select the mesh and what I want
to do is make sure that the vertices in
| | 03:21 | the center are all lined up
with the center of the heads.
| | 03:23 | So I'm going to double-click that open
edge and we can see what we have here.
| | 03:26 | All right, there are extra
selected edges that we don't want.
| | 03:30 | So I'm just going to Ctrl and select
those to get rid of that selection and
| | 03:35 | let's just snap these so that
we get a very clean centerline.
| | 03:43 | All right good.
| | 03:50 | And let's mirror that over.
| | 03:52 | And you can see it accidentally
merged more vertices than I wanted.
| | 04:00 | So I'm just going to go into the
mirror in the inputs of the Channel Box and
| | 04:04 | change the Merge Threshold to 0.01.
| | 04:12 | And let's turn on the Smooth
Preview and see what that looks like.
| | 04:14 | All right, so we got a face going.
| | 04:17 | There is you know some weird things.
You can tweak that to fix that, but what I
| | 04:21 | want to do is create some
more geometry to work with.
| | 04:24 | And instead of just inserting edge
loops by hand manually, one way that I
| | 04:29 | can very quickly add more geometry
to this very basic mesh is use the
| | 04:34 | actual subdivision Smooth.
| | 04:36 | So I want to go up here on
the shelf and just smooth this.
| | 04:38 | So you see what the result is, is it
just subdivided this mesh for us, just
| | 04:43 | created an extra edge loop
in-between every edge loop.
| | 04:47 | So this saves us some of the work of doing
all that inserting of edge loops manually.
| | 04:51 | It just automatically
subdivided everything for us.
| | 04:54 | Now would probably be a good time to go
in and tweak vert-by-vert to make sure
| | 04:58 | that this lines up with reference.
| | 05:00 | The head and neck might not be the most
exciting parts of the body to model, but
| | 05:05 | when done well they really support
good modeling in the parts of they connect to,
| | 05:08 | mainly the ears, chest, and face.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining the mouth| 00:00 | The mouth is one of the parts of the
body that undergoes extreme deformation.
| | 00:04 | Muscles all around the mouth push and
stretch the lips in a very elastic way.
| | 00:09 | Getting the proper edge flow then
becomes crucial to good animation.
| | 00:13 | Luckily we've already established
the flow zone for the mouth, so we've
| | 00:16 | eliminated any guesswork about where
to cut new edges, because we can just
| | 00:20 | insert new edge loops
inside of our existing edge flow.
| | 00:23 | So in our exercise file here, we've got
our head from the last video and I've
| | 00:28 | tweaked it out so it fits the
reference a little bit better.
| | 00:31 | What we want to do is just delete half
of this mesh so we can get it out of the way
| | 00:35 | and just work with a half face again.
| | 00:36 | Let me go under the top view and
make that a little easier to see.
| | 00:39 | I am just going to select that and kill it.
| | 00:45 | Back into the Perspective view.
| | 00:48 | So few parts of this mouth
are a little bit blocky still.
| | 00:51 | Let's insert some edge loops so we
can break up some of these really long
| | 00:55 | faces, make things a little bit more square.
| | 00:56 | We're probably also going to need a few
more edge loops around the corner of the
| | 01:00 | mouth to help define that shape.
| | 01:02 | I'm just going to go into the Edit
Mesh menu and Insert Edge Loop tool.
| | 01:06 | Actually I'm going to turn off Soft
Select so that it doesn't get in our way.
| | 01:10 | You can see it's breaking up those long faces.
| | 01:13 | We get some more even topology now
that we've inserted some edge loops.
| | 01:17 | So I just want to zoom in on lips and
tweak out the shape a little bit more so
| | 01:21 | it's not quite so soft.
| | 01:23 | Right now if I turn on the Smooth Preview,
you can see it's just very soft and mushy.
| | 01:27 | There's not a lot of definition, and it
doesn't really have a lot of character to it.
| | 01:30 | So I'm just going to zoom in
and start tweaking things around.
| | 01:33 | There're a lots of different ways to tweak.
| | 01:37 | You can go over vertex by vertex.
We can move the view around to get a better
| | 01:42 | view on it every time you make a movement.
| | 01:44 | It's usually what I like to do.
| | 01:45 | I'll just go in and just move things around
so that they space out a little bit better.
| | 01:51 | Sometimes you can switch back and
forth between the Smooth Preview and the
| | 01:54 | regular view to help you see
things a little bit better.
| | 01:57 | Then I'll just look
around to see how it's looking.
| | 02:05 | I just want to move things to get
things having a little bit more round shape to them.
| | 02:11 | Something else you can use at this
point is the Sculpt Geometry tool.
| | 02:13 | So I'm just going to go into the
object mode here. Turn on Sculpt Geometry.
| | 02:18 | Let's see the tool settings.
| | 02:19 | So you can use the Sculpt Geometry tool
to fatten up the lip a little bit or
| | 02:26 | you could go into the Relaxed mode.
| | 02:28 | Actually, I want to turn on the
wireframe, so I can see what it's doing here.
| | 02:32 | So you can go into the Relaxed mode and
just space things out a little bit, move
| | 02:36 | some of the roughness.
| | 02:37 | This is really about your
artistic decisions at this point.
| | 02:42 | It's how you as an artist want to
interpret that shape, how you want to make
| | 02:46 | things look more appealing.
| | 02:48 | It's not really so much about
technically setting anything up at this point.
| | 02:53 | It's really just about what looks good to
you and how you would like to achieve it best.
| | 02:58 | Do you like to tweak things one vertex at
a time, do you like pull out the Sculpt
| | 03:02 | Geometry tool and shape things out?
| | 03:04 | It's really up to you how you want to do it.
| | 03:07 | Tweaking like this can take hours
really, to really make a nice looking mesh.
| | 03:13 | You can spend a really long time
working on it and so I don't really have time
| | 03:16 | for that in this video.
| | 03:18 | But I just want to tell you about the
different techniques you can go about tweaking.
| | 03:23 | The last major thing I want to do
the mouth is close off the inside.
| | 03:26 | Let me get a better look at
the inside of the mouth here.
| | 03:28 | So you can see it's open right now.
| | 03:30 | If this character were to be talking,
you could probably see to the inside of
| | 03:34 | the mouth and we don't want that.
| | 03:35 | We just want to close it off so
that you can't see back there.
| | 03:37 | So I'm going to use the Append
Polygon tool like we did before and just
| | 03:43 | close off that gap.
| | 03:51 | I'm just going to do it couple of
times here until it's closed off.
| | 04:01 | So I've closed off the inside of the mouth.
| | 04:03 | If we turn on the Smooth Preview, you
can see how that rounds up, gets all soft.
| | 04:07 | This is kind of a weird pinch, but
it's the inside of the mouth and nobody is
| | 04:10 | ever going to see it.
| | 04:11 | So I don't worry about that too much.
| | 04:15 | So now we can evaluate what we created.
| | 04:17 | I would definitely want to take this
further and refine the shape of the mouth
| | 04:21 | some more, but that just
takes a lot of tedious tweaking.
| | 04:24 | It's not all that fun to watch.
| | 04:26 | It's really just up to you at this
point how you want to shape out that mouth.
| | 04:29 | By keeping the geometry around the
mouth simple and straightforward,
| | 04:33 | we avoid hassles later on.
| | 04:34 | When the topology is simple,
concentric rings, it's easy to add more edge
| | 04:39 | loops and to achieve nice clean
deformation when the riggers and animators get
| | 04:44 | ahold of your model.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Forming the eyes| 00:00 | The eyes are a crucial
part of any character model.
| | 00:04 | The window to the soul needs special
attention in order to look its best.
| | 00:08 | It's worth the time to make sure the
eyes look right, because they're going to
| | 00:11 | be conveying a lot of the characters emotions.
| | 00:14 | Proper edge flow here is crucial to good
deformations and thereby good animation.
| | 00:19 | Luckily we've already
established the edge flow.
| | 00:21 | So we don't have to worry about that.
All we have to do now is add more detail,
| | 00:25 | add more geometry and
tweak it until it looks right.
| | 00:28 | So we've got the exercise file open.
| | 00:30 | The mouth is all tweaked out from the
last video, and I just want to zoom in on
| | 00:34 | the eye and take a closer look
at what we're working with here.
| | 00:37 | So it's still pretty loose.
| | 00:38 | It's very general, very smooth, not a
lot of detail going on, and I want to
| | 00:43 | insert some more edge loops so that we
have some more detail to work with here.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to get out a smooth preview mode
and just make it a little bit easier to see.
| | 00:51 | We're just going to throw
away in more edge loops.
| | 00:55 | We might need some more later,
but that's enough right now.
| | 00:59 | Now there should be an eyeball in here.
| | 01:01 | One thing I want to do is create a sphere
and stick it in where the eyeball should go.
| | 01:05 | That's going to make it easier to
define the shape of the eyelids as they wrap
| | 01:08 | around the sphere of the eyeball.
| | 01:09 | So let's go into the front view.
| | 01:13 | I am going to zoom in a little bit
closer on the eye and I'm going to get a
| | 01:16 | polygon sphere off of the shelf.
| | 01:18 | Just click roughly in the center of
wherever the eyeball is and drag out a sphere.
| | 01:23 | Now you might be wondering how
big you should make this sphere.
| | 01:27 | For a cartoony model it's
really up your own discretion.
| | 01:30 | Cartoony models don't really have to
follow the rules of reality very much.
| | 01:34 | But for a realistic character, I do
have a rule of thumb that makes the size of
| | 01:38 | the eyeball really easy to calculate.
| | 01:40 | What I like to do is I make the size
of the eyeball about the width of the
| | 01:45 | visible part of the eye and then I make
it a little bit bigger about 20% bigger.
| | 01:49 | So once you've created that sphere,
you're making a realistic eye.
| | 01:52 | You can go into the Scale X, Y, and Z
and just make it 1.2. That's 20% bigger.
| | 01:59 | That's roughly the proportion of a human
eyeball to the visible part of the eye,
| | 02:03 | from corner to corner.
| | 02:05 | Since this is a cartoony character, I'm
just going to make it as big as I want to,
| | 02:08 | a little bit bigger than that.
| | 02:11 | So let's start shaping these
eyelids around this eyeball.
| | 02:14 | I want to go into the Perspective view
and first let's move the eyeball so it's
| | 02:18 | up close inside the eyelids.
| | 02:20 | I am just moving it forward until
it's roughly inside the eyelids.
| | 02:25 | Now if I zoom in on the eyeball, let's
just take a look around and see what kind
| | 02:31 | of a gap we're talking about.
| | 02:33 | So we need to move some of these parts
closer to the eyeball and move some of
| | 02:36 | the other parts farther away.
| | 02:37 | I'm just going to go into the Vertex
mode and select some of these vertices and
| | 02:42 | I've got Soft Select already turned on.
Let's make it a little bit bigger so I'm
| | 02:45 | grabbing more vertices and I just want
to push this around, get that little bit
| | 02:50 | closer to the eyeball.
| | 02:51 | Let me go into wireframe mode,
so I can see this more easily.
| | 02:55 | So there're some of these vertices
that are hiding inside the eyeball.
| | 02:57 | I want to pull those out so it's
easier to select them if I do this.
| | 03:03 | Go back into shaded mode by hitting 5.
| | 03:04 | I'll just pull this forward
so it's outside of the eyeball.
| | 03:15 | I'm just going to go all the way
around and just see where there are gaps or
| | 03:19 | where the eyeball might be
intersecting the eyelids and just fix these up.
| | 03:28 | Now I might want to shrink the area of
influence on the Soft Select as I get
| | 03:31 | more and more detailed.
| | 03:41 | Just a couple of more tweaks here and there.
| | 03:49 | That's pretty close for now.
| | 03:50 | I could take it farther, but it's kind of
tedious watching me tweak for hours on end.
| | 03:55 | Now we can get into the real
meat of shaping out the eyelids.
| | 03:58 | If I turn on the smooth preview really
quick, you can see it's still kind of
| | 04:02 | just a very generic oval-like shape.
| | 04:05 | We want to bring some more character into this.
| | 04:07 | Now we want to define the eyelid.
| | 04:09 | So there's actually this bag underneath
the lower eyelid, to separate that from
| | 04:13 | the rest of the face.
| | 04:15 | We want to create some more
definition and bring out the upper eyelid.
| | 04:18 | We want to tighten up the corners a little bit.
| | 04:21 | All these different edits that we're
going to make bring more character and
| | 04:24 | personality into this.
| | 04:26 | It really helps it feel like it's a
real character with a real personality.
| | 04:30 | Some other ways I can make these edits.
| | 04:32 | I'll start with the lower eyelid.
| | 04:34 | I just want to create a little bit of a
definition, kind of a separation between
| | 04:39 | the lower eyelid and the rest of the face.
| | 04:40 | So I'm just going to do that with Soft Select.
| | 04:44 | I'm just tweaking these vertices to
create a little bit more a sagging bag
| | 04:50 | shape under the eye.
| | 04:51 | I can also push in some of these vertices and
I'll create kind of that crease or an indentation.
| | 05:01 | So now we're getting a little bit
of our lower eyelid shaped out here.
| | 05:07 | We can also do the same thing with the
upper eyelid and take some of these
| | 05:12 | vertices and push them in a little bit.
| | 05:14 | Take some of these and pull them out.
| | 05:16 | It's really up to your artistic
discretion at this point, how you want to
| | 05:19 | shape these eyeballs out.
| | 05:20 | Do you want a more simplistic
cartoony eye or do you want something that's
| | 05:24 | in-between realistic and
cartoony or do you want realistic?
| | 05:29 | It really just comes down to the look
you're going for and deciding how much
| | 05:33 | detail you need and how much you
need to refine until it looks good.
| | 05:35 | So now we're getting some upper eyelid.
| | 05:39 | It even brings out the brow a little bit.
| | 05:41 | Let's go into the Sculpt Geometry tool.
| | 05:43 | Make sure we turn on our
settings and let's go to pull.
| | 05:47 | It's okay that I don't have Reflection
on, because I'm going to go and delete
| | 05:51 | this other half anyway later on, but for just
right now I just want to shape out this eyebrow.
| | 06:01 | Maybe that was a little too much. Maybe I
want to go into the Relax and just tone
| | 06:05 | that back a little bit.
| | 06:10 | Something else I might want to do to get
this guy a little bit more character is
| | 06:14 | tighten up the corners.
| | 06:15 | They're a little bit loose.
| | 06:16 | If we tighten up the corners, it's
really going to help the character feel like
| | 06:19 | there's some solidity to these eyes.
| | 06:21 | So if I zoom in on the corner of the
eye right here we can even add a little bit
| | 06:30 | of a crease to help define
the outside corner of the eye.
| | 06:34 | I'll push this in and I can take these
vertices here and push them down a little bit.
| | 06:39 | You can see that there's just that much
more personality coming out in the eyes now.
| | 06:44 | So you can really spend all day
tweaking on this if you want and you probably
| | 06:49 | will to get the result you're going for.
| | 06:51 | But if you just compare this side of
the eye that I haven't touched with this
| | 06:55 | side that I have edited, you can see in
just a few minutes you can really start
| | 06:58 | bringing out a lot more
personality in these eyes.
| | 07:01 | With attention to detail, patience,
and a lot of tweaking, the eyes that you
| | 07:05 | model can really show personality and emotion.
| | 07:08 | The great thing about this method is
that it's easily adapted to almost all
| | 07:11 | cartoony and realistic eyes.
| | 07:14 | Just line up your model with whatever
reference you're using and then keep
| | 07:17 | tweaking it until it looks right.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building the nose | 00:00 | Noses come in all shapes, sizes and
levels of complexity especially for
| | 00:05 | cartoony characters.
| | 00:07 | Let's take a look at how to get a
basic structure that can then be customized
| | 00:11 | easily in the most kinds of noses.
| | 00:13 | So, we have got our Exercise File here.
| | 00:14 | It's picking up from a
more left off with the eyes.
| | 00:17 | I just want to zoom in on the nose and
take a look at what we have got going on here.
| | 00:21 | So it's a very simple, very basic nose shape.
| | 00:24 | There is not a lot going on.
| | 00:25 | One of the things I want to address
right away is how it's has got this really
| | 00:29 | smoother transition from the
nose into the rest of the face.
| | 00:32 | I want to put in some more detail
here to really define a crease right in
| | 00:36 | here behind the nostril.
| | 00:38 | So, an easy way I can do that is I am just
going to pull out the Insert Edge Loop tool.
| | 00:42 | I just want to drop in an edge
right here. Turn off the Soft Selection
| | 00:49 | so that's not in our way.
| | 00:51 | And I will just insert another one and
this is going to create some vertices
| | 00:55 | that I want to tuck inside the created crease.
| | 00:57 | So, I am just going to go in to Vertex
mode and select some of these vertices
| | 01:02 | and zoom in on them and tweak them
so they are tucked in a little bit.
| | 01:06 | Just take a look around and see what
that looks like. A little adjustment here.
| | 01:12 | So if we can turn Smooth preview back on,
you can see we have got a nice crease,
| | 01:18 | a separation between the
nose and the rest of the face.
| | 01:21 | Maybe I just want to tweak
that up just a little bit more.
| | 01:24 | It's really up to you.
| | 01:25 | At this point, once you have got the
basic structure in, it really comes down to
| | 01:29 | the artistic decisions that you want to
make and how you will shape the nose out.
| | 01:34 | So let's see about putting nostrils in.
| | 01:38 | Let's select underneath the nose. There
are some faces that we can pick and just
| | 01:43 | extrude up for nostrils.
| | 01:44 | So I am just going to grab these
faces right here, whatever seems right to you,
| | 01:48 | and hit Extrude, I am going to switch
to Move tool and just move these up inside.
| | 01:54 | And now we don't need those faces up there.
| | 01:55 | So I am just going to delete them.
| | 01:57 | So now, you have just
created very simple nostril here.
| | 02:00 | Let's see what it looks like
with Smooth Preview turned on.
| | 02:05 | So we have got a nice, big gaping nostril.
| | 02:10 | You can edit the shape of this anyway you want.
| | 02:12 | I like the Sculpt Geometry tool.
| | 02:13 | I am going to turn the tool settings
here and you can use Relax or Smooth.
| | 02:18 | You can modify the shape of it-- just make
sure I have got the object selected. Go into
| | 02:24 | the Sculpt Geometry tool.
| | 02:25 | So again, if you want the shape to be a
little bit more rounded, you can use this.
| | 02:36 | Something else I would like
to use it the Soft Select.
| | 02:39 | So if you select some of the vertices
on the nose and turn on the Soft Select,
| | 02:42 | there you can see that I can get all
kinds of different nose shapes out of just
| | 02:48 | really this one simple basic structure.
| | 02:54 | So cartoony noses offer many
opportunities for exaggeration that can add to
| | 02:58 | your model's personality.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Crafting the ears| 00:01 | In the real world, most ears are almost
identical, but when it comes to cartoony
| | 00:05 | stylization, ears can range from simple
nubs that stick out of the side of the head,
| | 00:10 | all the way to very
complex and stylized forms.
| | 00:14 | They might be done away with altogether.
| | 00:16 | I'll show you one way to make an ear
that kind of falls into the middle ground,
| | 00:19 | one that's relatively
common in 3D toony animation.
| | 00:23 | After you learn these techniques you
should be able to modify them into creating
| | 00:26 | any sort of ear you want.
| | 00:27 | So we have got the Exercise File open.
| | 00:30 | This is the head that we have created up
to this point, and what I want to do is
| | 00:34 | create a separate object to start out
the ear and then we'll attach it later.
| | 00:38 | I don't want this head to get in the way,
so actually I am going to put it on a
| | 00:41 | layer and make it so I can't interact with it.
| | 00:44 | So let's just select this head, and
I have got a layer already created.
| | 00:47 | I am just going to hold down the
right mouse button on it and go to
| | 00:50 | Add Selected Object.
| | 00:52 | So now the head is part of this layer,
I can go ahead and put it on T mode, kind
| | 00:56 | of get it out of the way for now.
| | 00:57 | Okay, I am going to open up my four
views here and I want to start out making
| | 01:02 | this ear with a poly cube.
| | 01:04 | So I am just going to pick my Poly
Cube up off the shelf and just drag it
| | 01:08 | roughly over where I want that ear to be,
in the Side view or in the Perspective
| | 01:12 | view you can kind of drag out the
height of it, just roughly we can edit it
| | 01:16 | later to make it to fit more exactly,
and now I'll just move it into place.
| | 01:20 | I think I am going to rotate it a
little bit too because the ear kind of sticks
| | 01:25 | out at an angle from the side of the head.
| | 01:27 | Okay, let me look at this in the
Perspective just see if everything lines up all right.
| | 01:32 | Okay, that looks pretty good.
| | 01:34 | Now the ear is attached to the
head by kind of a stem shape.
| | 01:38 | So I am going to create
that stem by extruding it out.
| | 01:41 | I am going to zoom in on the ear here.
| | 01:42 | I want to select this face that's
closest to the head and just extrude it out
| | 01:48 | closest to the head, and then I'll
insert an Edge Loop in between here that I'll
| | 01:56 | shrink down to create a stem shape.
| | 01:58 | Now if I go into the Scale tool and
just scale this edge loop down, you can see
| | 02:08 | that we are creating a stem shape.
| | 02:09 | Now I am just going to delete this face
on the inside and if we turn on Smooth Preview,
| | 02:13 | we can see that there is
kind of interesting shape here now.
| | 02:18 | The next part of this ear that I want
to create is the pattern on the inside.
| | 02:22 | Just kind of a looping, sweeping
pattern that goes on in the inside and I'll just
| | 02:27 | create it really quick to show you how this works.
| | 02:29 | So I am just going to select this face
and go to Extrude and switch to Scale
| | 02:38 | and just bring that in a little bit and
I am going to do that a second time as well,
| | 02:42 | just hitting G, go into Scale
mode and bring the size of this down.
| | 02:48 | This is just giving me some geometry
to work with, so that I have more edges
| | 02:53 | and faces to work with inside of this
area that I can then manipulate to create
| | 02:56 | the shape that I want.
| | 02:57 | The next thing that I want to do is
extrude some of these faces inwards, to
| | 03:03 | create kind of a cavity inside the ear.
So I want to select these faces right here.
| | 03:08 | Go to Extrude and just push them in.
| | 03:11 | Now if we turn on the Smooth Preview,
you can see that the ear is starting to
| | 03:16 | take a shape that looks a little bit
more like a cartoony stylization of an ear.
| | 03:21 | I want to edit it a little bit
though. It's kind of symmetrical.
| | 03:25 | So I want this kind of C shape to
have a little bit more character to it.
| | 03:29 | So I am going to just edit some of these points.
| | 03:38 | If I move these down a little bit, now
you can see we are getting a little bit
| | 03:41 | more of an interesting shape.
| | 03:43 | So if I turn off the Smooth Preview on
this object, you can see that the basic
| | 03:47 | polygon shape is extremely blocky and simple.
| | 03:50 | There is almost no relation
between the smoothed version and the
| | 03:53 | unsmoothed version.
| | 03:55 | And we can stand to make
this a little bit more dense.
| | 03:58 | Instead of doing that by hand, a really
quick way to do that is to simply just
| | 04:02 | use the Smooth tool and you see
that this has subdivided the objects.
| | 04:06 | So now we have a lot more detail and
it actually looks closer to the smoothed
| | 04:11 | end result, which is what we want.
| | 04:12 | Now it's time to attach the ear to the head.
| | 04:16 | Let me get the head and turn
it off of the Template mode.
| | 04:22 | Put it back into Editable mode and
let's select both of these and combine
| | 04:26 | them into the same mesh.
| | 04:27 | What I want to do now is move the edges
of the head, so they are little bit more
| | 04:33 | in line with where the ear is.
| | 04:34 | You can see that I have accidentally
put the ear a little bit too far for but
| | 04:37 | that's okay. We'll just move his
holes forward to kind of line up better.
| | 04:41 | So I just double-clicked on one
of those edges and it selected the
| | 04:44 | entire border edge.
| | 04:46 | So we'll move him a little bit closer forward.
| | 04:48 | Now you can just simply select two
vertices that you want to merge together.
| | 04:54 | So these two, and then you can go up to Edit
Mesh and Merge and they will snap together.
| | 05:01 | So you can go ahead and go and do
this all the way around, until you have
| | 05:05 | snapped up the entire head.
| | 05:09 | So there we've got a finished
ear and it's combined to the head.
| | 05:13 | One thing you might
notice is that these two parts,
| | 05:15 | the ear and the head, have
two different material types.
| | 05:18 | one is shiny and the other
is more of a matte material.
| | 05:22 | That's because I put a shader on the
head that has more shiny quality to it.
| | 05:28 | That makes it easier to see the
forms that have more highlight on it.
| | 05:31 | Whenever you create an object by
default, it has a more matte material on it.
| | 05:35 | So let's give this whole
body the same shiny material.
| | 05:38 | If you just hold down the right mouse
button on the object and you go down to
| | 05:41 | Assign Existing Material and let go
over the mouse when it's over blinn, then
| | 05:48 | the whole objects is going to
get the same shiny material.
| | 05:51 | Blinn is shiny and so that's the effect we get.
| | 05:54 | And now you see that the ear
has the same material as the head.
| | 05:57 | You could go ahead and clean this up a
little bit with the Sculpt Geometry tool,
| | 06:01 | kind of smooth out the transition, but
there is how you put the ear on the head.
| | 06:05 | So when you do a cartoony modeling,
you will often find that the simplest and
| | 06:08 | easiest approach is the best.
| | 06:10 | Modeling this ear is bare-bones basic.
| | 06:12 | But it gives a good toony result that
can be modified into lots of different ear shapes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making the teeth and gums| 00:00 | Making the teeth and gum is a good
opportunity to learn about the power of
| | 00:03 | instances, where multiple objects are
updated whenever you change just one of them.
| | 00:09 | There is also a bunch of little
modeling tips and tricks sprinkled throughout
| | 00:12 | this that will help you in all kinds
of ways, not just when modeling these
| | 00:15 | specific body parts.
| | 00:17 | So in this Exercise File, I have got
the teeth and gums already built to show
| | 00:20 | you an example of what we are going
to end up with at the end of this.
| | 00:23 | Let me zoom in on this, so we have got
these teeth and gums, and what I mean by
| | 00:28 | instance is that these objects are
all a copy of each other and they all
| | 00:32 | automatically update
when you change one of them.
| | 00:34 | So if you make any edits to it,
all of the others get the same update.
| | 00:38 | The gums also are instances.
| | 00:40 | So if you move any part of the gums,
the other one will move as well.
| | 00:47 | So let's delete these and
start making them from scratch.
| | 00:50 | I am going to move down to the grid here.
| | 00:53 | It's easy to construct these things.
If we have got the girds, so we can make
| | 00:56 | sure everything is precise and lined up.
| | 00:58 | Let me go up to Polygon Pipe up on-the-
shelf, and I am going to hold down X so
| | 01:05 | we can snap it to the grid as we pull
this out, and just roughly there, we can
| | 01:09 | always resize it later, and then I am
also going to drag it down a little bit
| | 01:12 | so that we can get some size to it.
| | 01:14 | I am going to hit Enter.
| | 01:15 | Now this shape is going to be the base
for the gums but we don't need all these
| | 01:20 | faces on the backside.
| | 01:21 | I am just going to go into
face mode and delete these.
| | 01:31 | We also don't need a lot of these faces
on the underside of the object either.
| | 01:35 | So I am going to try to zoom
in here and select all these.
| | 01:44 | Okay, so you can see if we do the Smooth
Preview on this, get a nice soft round gummy shape.
| | 01:49 | Now I am going to start a tooth. I am
just going to go into the Top view and
| | 01:57 | build this tooth based
off of where the gums are.
| | 02:00 | I want to create a polygon that sits
right here over this part of the gums.
| | 02:06 | So let's go up to the Mesh menu
and pick the Create Polygon tool.
| | 02:10 | I just want to click out a shape
that's roughly in the shape of one of these
| | 02:15 | polygons on the gums, and just hit Enter.
| | 02:18 | So let's look at this in the Perspective View.
| | 02:20 | We can see we have got this polygon
floating in space right here over the gums.
| | 02:24 | If I just go up to the Extrude on the shelf
and move this up, it extrudes out a box shape.
| | 02:31 | So this is going to be the
start of one of the teeth.
| | 02:33 | Now if we go onto Object mode on this
tooth and pick like the Move tool, we can
| | 02:42 | see that the pivot point of this is
actually right in the middle of the world.
| | 02:47 | So if we rotate this object, we can
see it's rotating from the middle.
| | 02:50 | When we go to duplicate this tooth,
it's going to duplicate in this perfect
| | 02:57 | curve that fits the curve of the gums.
| | 02:59 | So this is very useful.
| | 03:01 | So the way I am going to make multiple
duplicates of this tooth is by going to
| | 03:05 | the Edit menu and
Duplicate Special with Options.
| | 03:11 | So these are few different settings in here.
| | 03:12 | If I set it to Copy, all of the
teeth that get duplicated are going to
| | 03:16 | be separate objects.
| | 03:17 | If I set it to Instance, they are
going to be instances, which means if you
| | 03:21 | opted one of them they all get updated.
| | 03:23 | So this is what we want.
| | 03:24 | We want the duplicates to rotate by a
certain degree and now I have done the
| | 03:28 | math and I have calculated out that I
need 18 degrees to rotate so that each new
| | 03:33 | tooth is spaced out
appropriately, and I want it on the Y axis.
| | 03:38 | So -18, I actually don't want to rotate
it anymore in any other axis and I want
| | 03:45 | 10 teeth. I have already got one,
so we'll do nine duplicates.
| | 03:49 | So 10 in total and let's see what
happens if this works. Okay, great.
| | 03:54 | So I hit Apply, now you can see we
have got all these duplicated teeth
| | 03:58 | filling out the gums here.
| | 03:59 | Now let's click on one and edit it a little
bit so that we can get a nicer tooth shape.
| | 04:07 | If you can see if we hit the Smooth
Preview, a cube will simply smooth out into
| | 04:12 | this really round soft
spherical shape, but I don't want that.
| | 04:16 | I want it to be a little bit boxy,
kind of like a rounded corner box.
| | 04:21 | So if we insert some edge loops around this
box, it's going to help hold a more boxy shape.
| | 04:34 | So now with Smooth Preview turned on,
you can see we get a rounded corner box.
| | 04:39 | I also want to edit some of these
vertices, so that we can get a little bit more
| | 04:43 | of an even shape here.
| | 04:44 | That is just a little bit off. The
teeth are looking just a little bit jagged.
| | 04:52 | See what that looks like from above, okay
so we have this much more evenly space now.
| | 04:57 | Now we need to make the gums fit the teeth.
| | 05:00 | You might have noticed that gums have
this wave pattern where they go up higher
| | 05:04 | in between each tooth and then in the
middle of the tooth they drop down and
| | 05:06 | then they go up higher.
| | 05:08 | So the way we are going to create that
is we need to create some more geometry
| | 05:11 | in here. We need to actually have some
vertices in the middle of each tooth so
| | 05:15 | they can pull those
vertices down to create that shape.
| | 05:18 | Quick way to do that is
by using a Smooth up here.
| | 05:21 | That's just going to subdivide everything.
| | 05:24 | Now we have got the geometry that we need
| | 05:26 | to edit this into shape.
| | 05:30 | So what I want to do is pull the gums
down in the middle of each tooth and raise
| | 05:34 | them up in between each tooth.
| | 05:37 | So I am just going to double-
click every other edge loop.
| | 05:41 | Holding down the Shift key, so we'll
pull these down. I want to move out the gums
| | 05:52 | just up a little bit more and actually
you can scale up the gums a little bit,
| | 05:56 | because they were a little bit small.
| | 05:58 | All right, cool, so something like that.
| | 06:01 | We actually have the gums with the
teeth sitting inside them and it kind of
| | 06:05 | feels natural the way they undulating like this.
| | 06:09 | So what we want to do now is
make the teeth parented to the gums.
| | 06:13 | What that means is when something is
parented, there is a child and a parent
| | 06:18 | relationship, and where you move the
parent, the child is going to follow along.
| | 06:23 | So if we select all of these teeth
and then select the gums last, whatever
| | 06:29 | is selected last is going to be in green.
| | 06:30 | If you hit P, that parents.
| | 06:34 | So all of these teeth are
now children of the gums.
| | 06:36 | If we click on the gums,
everything gets selected.
| | 06:39 | If you move the gums around,
everything goes with it.
| | 06:43 | From this point it's very easy
to create the upper teeth as well.
| | 06:45 | They are just going to be an
instance of the lower teeth.
| | 06:48 | So we have got our lower gum selected with
all of the teeth parented along with it.
| | 06:55 | We'll go up to Edit and Duplicate
Special again and this time we want to
| | 06:59 | rotate on the Z-axis.
| | 07:01 | But we want to rotate
halfway around, so 180 degrees.
| | 07:05 | We don't want to rotate any more in
the Y-axis and we only want one copy.
| | 07:11 | Let's see if this works.
| | 07:12 | Okay, cool, kind of overlapping each other.
| | 07:15 | Let me move this up a little bit.
| | 07:16 | Okay, so we have got our two sets of teeth.
| | 07:20 | Let's see how we can fit these into the head.
| | 07:22 | Let me zoom out a little bit. Okay, so
they are really big. We need to shrink
| | 07:26 | this down which is pretty easy to do.
| | 07:28 | We just go under Scale and we'll
shrink it down and because the teeth are
| | 07:32 | parented, the teeth get shrunk
down right along with the gums.
| | 07:35 | Let's move these closer into place,
and select just the bottom teeth now and
| | 07:42 | move these up. Give them a
little bit of an under bite.
| | 07:45 | Since he's got such a big jaw. Let's see
how this fits in. Just a little bit big still.
| | 07:59 | Now that's pretty close.
| | 08:00 | So this method of making teeth works
really well for clean, regular, cartoony teeth.
| | 08:05 | It's also a solid foundation upon
which you can build realistic teeth.
| | 08:09 | From here, all you do is tweak and
add complexity to create all kinds of different teeth.
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| Modeling the tongue and eyebrow| 00:00 | So now that we have got some of the
heavy lifting out of the way, let's go and
| | 00:03 | do something a little bit more simple.
| | 00:05 | Let's do the tongue and the eyebrows.
| | 00:07 | These are pretty much tweaked out boxes.
| | 00:10 | They are going to be pretty quick to get
through and this is going to show that
| | 00:13 | sometimes a simple approach is the easiest.
| | 00:15 | I'm going to start with the tongue.
| | 00:17 | So for making the tongue,
I want to start with a poly box.
| | 00:21 | I am just going to drag it out in the top view.
| | 00:22 | I want to zoom out here so
I can see what I'm doing.
| | 00:26 | I also want to be able to see
it in the side view as I create.
| | 00:30 | So, I am just going to hold down X so
I snap to this grid point and I want to
| | 00:35 | drag it down to this other grid point down here.
| | 00:38 | And I want to drag up the height and
you can see it in the Side view how high
| | 00:41 | this is going to be.
| | 00:42 | We can always just scale it later if it's off.
| | 00:46 | So looking in the Perspective
view, we have got this box here.
| | 00:48 | We just want to give it some more
subdivisions so that we can shape out this box
| | 00:52 | and turn it into a tongue.
| | 00:53 | If we go into the Channel Box, you can
go to the poly cube and we want to give it
| | 00:58 | some more subdivisions.
| | 00:59 | Let's just try it giving it some four
subdivisions in the width and let's give
| | 01:04 | it some depth
subdivisions as well,. Let's try four.
| | 01:08 | So what we want to do is take this
shape and just edit it a little bit.
| | 01:13 | I am going to go and select some of
these edges here and just move this down so
| | 01:17 | we get a little groove going
down in the middle of the tongue.
| | 01:19 | We also don't need these
faces at the back of the tongue.
| | 01:23 | So I'm just go to select these and delete them.
| | 01:24 | We are going back to the
front of the tongue again.
| | 01:28 | Let's see what this looks like smooth.
| | 01:29 | So we've got a little bit of a dip in the
middle but it's not really a groove so much, is it?
| | 01:35 | It's just this indentation.
| | 01:37 | So if we take these edges right here on
the sides and then squeeze them a little
| | 01:43 | closer to the middle, it's going
to create a sharper indentation.
| | 01:46 | Click on the Scale tool and I will
just pull those a little bit tighter.
| | 01:52 | You can see in the Smooth Preview that we
what we get is little bit more of a groove.
| | 01:59 | If I undo that, you can see the farther
apart they are, it is a more smooth channel.
| | 02:05 | And if we redo that, then
we'll get a little tighter crease.
| | 02:09 | So that looks good for basic tongue.
| | 02:12 | I am going to zoom out and
let's fit this tongue into the head.
| | 02:24 | Let's shrink it down a little bit.
| | 02:25 | That's a little bit big for a tongue.
| | 02:26 | All right, it's okay that
it's intersecting with the mouth.
| | 02:33 | Nobody is really going to see
it back there. So that's okay.
| | 02:36 | Now let's do the eyebrows.
| | 02:37 | Let me move my Side view so we can see
up close on what's going to happen with
| | 02:44 | the eyebrows in all these different views.
| | 02:51 | So the easiest place to make eyebrows is
in the Front view because we can see in
| | 02:54 | the reference with the eyebrow is exactly,
and I'm just going to draw out a box.
| | 02:58 | We will make this box roughly
the shape and size of the eyebrows.
| | 03:02 | It doesn't have to be exact just again.
| | 03:04 | So we've got a box and we can move it
now in the Perspective view so it's more
| | 03:09 | in place on the front of the face.
| | 03:10 | I will zoom in on it.
| | 03:13 | So now I can break this box into several
pieces, just like I did with the tongue.
| | 03:16 | We can go into the Channel Box and
increase the subdivisions and the widths or
| | 03:19 | the depths and the height.
| | 03:20 | So let's try four
subdivisions in the width. Okay.
| | 03:23 | So we have broken that up a little bit.
| | 03:26 | And now all I need to do is select some
of these vertices and just tweak them a
| | 03:29 | little bit to give the eyebrow
a little bit of an arched shape.
| | 03:37 | So now you can see when I turn on
Smooth Preview, we've got a nice little
| | 03:40 | blob of an eyebrow.
| | 03:41 | And let's see what it looks like from
all around. And it doesn't quite fit on the
| | 03:46 | head but that's a simple enough fix.
We can just rotate it till it matches the
| | 03:50 | angle of the forehead
and move it into the place.
| | 03:52 | Let's see what that looks
like from the distance. Okay.
| | 03:57 | So that's pretty simple, pretty
straightforward, but sometimes that's the easiest
| | 04:01 | solution or the best solution
to any problem you might find.
| | 04:04 | You don't always have to make
everything really complex and detailed.
| | 04:06 | Sometimes the simplest solution is the best.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Modeling the BodyModeling the upper torso| 00:00 | The chest and shoulder of your
characters are a particularly tricky area because
| | 00:04 | of all the different
movements that a shoulder can make.
| | 00:07 | It can go up and down, and back
and forth, and can rotate in so many
| | 00:10 | different directions
| | 00:12 | that it is really hard to create a single
topology that can be most effective for all
| | 00:16 | those different types of movements.
| | 00:18 | The approach that I'm going to show
you in this video is how to set up an
| | 00:22 | average sort of "one size fits all"
way of dealing with the shoulder.
| | 00:27 | It works for vast majority of cases
but you might need to adapt it for the
| | 00:31 | specific situations you
find yourself working with.
| | 00:33 | Let's take a look at this Exercise File
of sort of in-progress torso and we can
| | 00:40 | look at it and zoom in, and see how
the flow zone is going in this looping
| | 00:44 | pattern up and across the chest, up and over
the shoulder, and around the back of the body.
| | 00:49 | It's kind of the a collar or cape
shape, and this matches the human anatomy
| | 00:55 | pretty nicely because in the real
musculature of a real person, the muscles of the
| | 01:00 | deltoid kind of follow in this pattern
and they come down and meet up with the
| | 01:04 | pectoral muscles and they go
across the chest like this.
| | 01:06 | So this edge flow pattern really helps mimic
the natural muscular patterns of the human body.
| | 01:12 | And I am going to open up the other Exercise
File that doesn't have a body in it, bodystart.
| | 01:20 | So to start out, I am going to start
with a primitive, just to give us a bulky
| | 01:24 | shape to start out and then we will
modify it and adapt it for our needs.
| | 01:28 | I am going to select the Poly Cylinder
and just use the X key to snap it to the
| | 01:32 | center of the world and
let's see here in this view.
| | 01:36 | We will drag the height.
| | 01:37 | Something like that is roughly what we want.
| | 01:39 | I am just going to the
Channel Box for this object.
| | 01:44 | I am going to Inputs and I am going
to change the Subdivision Axis to 12.
| | 01:47 | I just want to simplify it a little bit
so we don't have so much detail to work with.
| | 01:52 | I want keep it simpler.
| | 01:53 | Subdivision Caps, I want to change that
to zero so that the caps don't have any
| | 01:57 | subdivisions just to make it easier to
delete because I just want to go in here
| | 02:01 | and delete half of this, because we
only work on half the character at once.
| | 02:04 | So I am just going to move this cylinder
up so it's roughly over the body of the
| | 02:09 | character, over the chest.
| | 02:10 | Let see how that looks in
the Front and Side view. Okay.
| | 02:14 | That's pretty good. In the Front view
and in the Side view it could be just
| | 02:18 | scaled a little bit smaller. Okay.
| | 02:22 | So we need to get these polygons to
go looping up and over the shoulder.
| | 02:26 | It's pretty easy to do that.
| | 02:28 | I am just going to zoom in and grab this
one edge right here and turn on Soft Select.
| | 02:33 | So I want to falloff to grab lot of
these faces and I just want to rotate this
| | 02:40 | about 90 degrees horizontal.
| | 02:42 | So I if move this up in the Front view
so it's sitting up on top of the deltoid,
| | 02:47 | you can see now we've got this kind
of cape-like collar shape that's going
| | 02:52 | across the chest and up and over the shoulder.
| | 02:53 | Now we just simply tweak these
vertices so they lineup with my reference.
| | 03:02 | Let me spend some time to clean this up.
| | 03:08 | Just a couple more tweaks here and there. Okay.
| | 03:13 | Now let's extrude an arm out of this structure.
| | 03:16 | We don't quite yet have exactly the
topology we need to extrude an arm out.
| | 03:20 | We need to create first this sort of
armpit underneath where the arm would go and
| | 03:24 | then we can have this open
space to extrude the arm out.
| | 03:26 | So I just want to create a new face in
between the front and the back of this.
| | 03:31 | So I am going to go into Edit Mesh,
and do Append to Polygon tool.
| | 03:35 | I am going to click this first edge and
I want to attach it back here to the back.
| | 03:39 | So I made a new face for us.
| | 03:40 | I am going to hit Enter to finish that,
and then I can just do Insert Edge Loop,
| | 03:46 | and create one edge loop
right underneath the armpit.
| | 03:49 | So if I move this down, now we've got
this open space right here where we can
| | 03:52 | extrude the arm out from.
| | 03:54 | I am just going to double-click this
and it selects the entire open edge.
| | 03:57 | I hit Extrude, I go into the Move
tool and I just pull that out, and we have
| | 04:02 | got an arm started.
| | 04:03 | I am going to bring that out to the elbow.
| | 04:05 | Now the shape of it is a little weird.
| | 04:08 | If I use the Scale tool, I can
just flatten that shape a little bit.
| | 04:12 | Scale it to fit the reference a little bit.
| | 04:13 | That looks good. We can extrude it one
more time and I will bring out the wrist
| | 04:19 | with a Move tool, and
the wrist is even narrower.
| | 04:22 | So I am just going to shrink that up a little.
| | 04:23 | All right, close enough for now.
| | 04:28 | The next thing I want to do is extrude
the torso down the abdomen a little bit.
| | 04:32 | So I am just going to select these
edges that are on the underside of our chest
| | 04:36 | right now, and hit Extrude, and
we're going to bring these down.
| | 04:40 | I just want to see them closer the
reference so I can see what I am doing with this.
| | 04:51 | Okay. So it's a little bit
off to the reference.
| | 04:53 | It's pretty easy to just
tweak this back into the shape.
| | 04:55 | I see what this looks like from
all the way around. All right, cool.
| | 05:02 | So we've got our rough
block-out of the torso finished.
| | 05:05 | It's very loose, very blocky, but you can
see we have established the flow zones
| | 05:09 | that we going to need later on.
| | 05:10 | We've got this flow zone for
the chest and the shoulder.
| | 05:13 | We have got a flow zone for the arm and
we started this flow zone for the abdomen.
| | 05:18 | This approach to modeling a torso is
very versatile because it's allows to you
| | 05:21 | create either toony
characters or realistic ones.
| | 05:24 | The only difference is the amount of
detail that you put into it and how far you
| | 05:28 | push those details to match
anatomy or your reference.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working from the waist down to the feet | 00:01 | The hips of our character is another
area that requires special attention.
| | 00:04 | I'm going to zoom-in on this half
formed character, and see what the hips are
| | 00:08 | doing, and why there is
something so special about them.
| | 00:12 | You can see that the edge flow pattern
from the crotch up to the hip is going in
| | 00:16 | this diagonal direction.
| | 00:18 | This is important because when
characters move their hips around, very often a
| | 00:23 | crease forms in the diagonal right here.
| | 00:25 | If your edge flow isn't following
that diagonal and the character bends,
| | 00:30 | a crease is not going to
form in a nice diagonal shape.
| | 00:32 | It's going to be kid of crunched up.
| | 00:34 | It's not quite going to form right.
| | 00:35 | It's going to look bad in animation.
| | 00:38 | So what you want to do is figure out
how your character is going to move.
| | 00:42 | If it's a realistic person or if it's
sort of realistic, it's probably going to
| | 00:46 | bend in the same way.
| | 00:47 | If it's a really extremely toony
character like Gumby, then it is kind of
| | 00:51 | open to interpretation how that's going to bend.
| | 00:53 | But this is a semi-realistic cartoony character.
| | 00:55 | So we want it to move in a realistic way.
| | 00:58 | So I've got this diagonal angle here.
| | 01:00 | I'll show you how to create that,
if we just open up our Exercise File.
| | 01:09 | Okay. Let's take our Exercise File
where we left off from the torso before.
| | 01:13 | I just want to select these
edges around the bottom of the waist.
| | 01:20 | We can extrude these down to the crotch.
| | 01:22 | I'm going to go up to Extrude.
| | 01:24 | It's easy to see in the Front view.
| | 01:26 | So I'm just going to go to the Move tool,
and in the Front view bring these down.
| | 01:29 | I just want to create a diagonal.
| | 01:32 | So I'm going to go into Vertex and just
tweak these edges up into a diagonal shape.
| | 01:39 | The next thing I want to do is
extrude some legs out from this.
| | 01:43 | If we look in the Perspective view,
you can see that there is this one big
| | 01:46 | open shape right here.
| | 01:47 | We can't really extrude legs out of this.
| | 01:50 | So what I want to do is I
want to insert some edge loops.
| | 01:52 | So we can create a polygon that spans this
shape across the crotch a little bit better.
| | 01:58 | So let's go to Insert Edge Loop tool,
and throw-in an edge loop right about
| | 02:04 | there and on the
back side right about over there.
| | 02:07 | So now we can use the Append to
Polygon tool to connect these two new edges
| | 02:11 | that we've created.
| | 02:12 | I'll click on one and then
click on the other. Oops!
| | 02:17 | I put it in wrong place.
| | 02:18 | So I am going to do a reface.
| | 02:22 | So I just want to go up to the Append
to Polygon tool in the Edit Mesh menu.
| | 02:26 | Let me zoom in so I can see this better.
| | 02:29 | I want to click on one of these edges,
and then the second one, and it spans a
| | 02:34 | new polygon across the two.
| | 02:35 | I'm going to hit Enter to lock that in.
| | 02:37 | So now we've got this open edge right
here that we can extrude the legs down from.
| | 02:42 | I'm just going to double-
click that and hit Extrude.
| | 02:45 | Let's go into the Front view, so you can
see more easily where we're going to put this.
| | 02:50 | Now go into the Move tool,
and just pull this down.
| | 02:52 | It's still at a diagonal.
| | 02:54 | But I want the knee to be horizontal again.
| | 02:56 | So let's just go into the Scale, and
we can scale this down, flatten it out.
| | 03:01 | See what that looks like in Side view.
| | 03:05 | It's a little bit big in the Side view.
| | 03:06 | Let's scale that, and move it over the knee.
| | 03:11 | We want to extrude it again down to the ankle.
| | 03:13 | It's a little bit big. We'll scale it in.
| | 03:18 | We can extrude it one more
time down to the heel. All right!
| | 03:25 | Let's see what this looks like
in the Perspective view. Okay.
| | 03:27 | So we've got this flow zone for the
leg going down. It's pretty good.
| | 03:31 | We've got an open space
right here at the bottom.
| | 03:34 | We need to close that off.
| | 03:36 | So while we've got these edges selected, we can
just go up to the Mesh menu and hit Fill Hole.
| | 03:41 | What that's going to do is going to
look for any edges that you've got selected
| | 03:45 | and if it's bordering on an open hole,
it just caps it off with a polygon.
| | 03:50 | From this point, we can
continue building out a foot.
| | 03:52 | We go into Face mode, and select this
face right here where a foot will grow out of.
| | 03:57 | We'll go to Extrude,
and just extrude that forward.
| | 04:00 | Now, this character is
going to be wearing shoes.
| | 04:05 | So he is not going to have his toes visible.
| | 04:08 | I'm not going to go ahead and bother
to model the toes, because it'd just be
| | 04:11 | more work that we're never going to see.
| | 04:13 | If you want to know how to model toes,
you can watch the video on modeling
| | 04:16 | fingers, because toes and fingers
are pretty much the exact same thing.
| | 04:20 | So if you modify the techniques I show
in finger modeling to toes and just make
| | 04:25 | them a little bit shorter and stubbier,
you'll end up with something that will
| | 04:28 | work perfectly well.
| | 04:29 | So let's take one final look at
what we've done here in this video.
| | 04:34 | We've created a flow zone for the leg, and
we've created this diagonal edge flow for the hips.
| | 04:39 | You always want to keep in mind that
the edge flow is there to support the
| | 04:43 | anatomy and the movements that
the character is going to make.
| | 04:46 | If any creases are going to form in
your character, you want the edge flow to
| | 04:50 | follow those creases, so that
it animates in a natural way.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Constructing the palm and thumb | 00:00 | Hands are widely regarded as one of the most
complex anatomical structures for the artist.
| | 00:06 | The steps that I'm going to show you
are going to break down and simplify the
| | 00:09 | hand into the most important shapes first.
| | 00:12 | Many people struggle for days to
make good hands, because they haven't
| | 00:15 | established a good base
structure for them first.
| | 00:18 | So I wish that you have to do it
right and start with a good foundation.
| | 00:22 | So in your scene file, we can see
we've got the body and the head.
| | 00:25 | I've put them on a template layer,
so that they won't get in the way.
| | 00:29 | We can still see them, but I just
don't want them to be in the way.
| | 00:33 | I want to start out by
creating a box over the palm.
| | 00:35 | So let me zoom out in the Top view
and the Front view, so we can see where
| | 00:39 | this box is going to go.
| | 00:41 | I'm just going to drag it out roughly
over the shape of the palm and I'll just
| | 00:45 | move that into place.
| | 00:47 | So I'm going to zoom in to this box
in the Perspective view and see how we
| | 00:50 | can work with this.
| | 00:56 | So we know we're going to have to
connect this hand to the wrist at some point.
| | 00:59 | So I'm just going to delete this
polygon here towards the wrist.
| | 01:03 | We don't need to deal with that.
| | 01:04 | Also, we're going to be
putting some fingers on here later.
| | 01:07 | So I'm going to just delete that,
so we have that opened up too.
| | 01:11 | Now, if we look at where the thumb is
going to go, we could make a face right
| | 01:15 | here and extrude the thumb out of this side.
| | 01:17 | But if you look at your own hand, you
can see that the thumb isn't actually
| | 01:21 | coming out of the side of the palm, but
actually a good one-third of the palm of
| | 01:25 | your hand is made up of the thumb.
| | 01:28 | So let's build the thumb, so it
actually comes out of a good chunk of the palm
| | 01:32 | as well as the side of the hand.
| | 01:34 | I want to insert an edge loop, so that we
can create faces for extruding the thumb out.
| | 01:39 | I am going to split it horizontally, and
then I'm also going to split it right here.
| | 01:45 | So now you can see if the thumb were to
be extruded out of these two polygons.
| | 01:50 | That is pretty good place for the thumb to go.
| | 01:52 | So now I'm going to go up to some Extrude.
| | 01:56 | We'll just pull these faces out.
| | 01:59 | I'm going to go into Move mode in the Side
View, so I can see it a little more easily.
| | 02:02 | In a natural resting position, the
thumb kind of sticks down at a 45-degree
| | 02:07 | angle and it also moves forward at
kind of a 45-degree angle as well.
| | 02:12 | So I'm just going to shape
this and move it into position.
| | 02:19 | See what this looks like. Okay.
| | 02:20 | So we've got the angle established.
| | 02:22 | The tip of this is still kind of weird.
| | 02:24 | So let's work with the shape a little
bit and maybe let's say we'll move these
| | 02:27 | vertices up, so we get little bit more of a
flat spot and let's round this out a little bit.
| | 02:34 | I am going to go into Face mode and shrink
these down a little bit. These are too big.
| | 02:41 | I'm going to tweak this vertex right back here,
so we get a little bit more of a natural shape.
| | 02:48 | So what we have right here is the basic
flow zone for the thumb and for the palm.
| | 02:55 | Very, very, bare bones simple.
| | 02:57 | But you see if we hit the Smooth Preview,
it looks like a little soft mitten shape.
| | 03:01 | But everything is here that we need.
| | 03:03 | If we want to add more detail, it's very
easy to do at this point, because we've
| | 03:06 | established the basic flow zone structure.
| | 03:10 | One more adjustment I want to make to
the tip of the thumb here is to angle it
| | 03:14 | so that the tip of the thumb is in line
with the angle of the direction of the thumb.
| | 03:18 | So let's see if I move to a view
like this, and just rotate that tip.
| | 03:22 | Okay, so that's now more in line
with the overall direction of the thumb.
| | 03:28 | So now if I insert some more edge loops,
we can start to shape out this thumb here.
| | 03:33 | So I inserted an Edge Loop and I'm just
going to shrink that down a little bit,
| | 03:35 | and see what that looks like.
| | 03:40 | Okay, so that's going good.
| | 03:42 | Now with Smooth Preview turned on,
we can see that the thumb with just these
| | 03:46 | very simple edge loops is
really starting to take shape.
| | 03:50 | So the hand is a good example of
learning how to break objects down into the
| | 03:55 | shapes that they're made up of.
| | 03:57 | The thumb and the hand are very complex
when you first look at them in the real world.
| | 04:02 | But if you break it down into a box that
has an extrusion coming out of it at an angle,
| | 04:07 | it's really easy to think about
it that way, and if you just model it
| | 04:11 | barebones basic like that, and then
just continue to add detail to it.
| | 04:14 | It comes out much better in the end.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making fingers and finishing the hand| 00:00 | Modeling fingers is a good way to learn
some timesaving techniques by modeling
| | 00:04 | just one finger and then
copying it for the others.
| | 00:07 | Let's look at our Exercise
Files that we've got the hand base
| | 00:10 | already constructed.
| | 00:11 | Let me zoom-in on the Perspective view
and let's see what we are working with here.
| | 00:17 | So we've got to make some fingers that
come out of this open area in the palm.
| | 00:20 | Let's make a cube from the Polygon shelf.
| | 00:23 | We'll just drag it out over the Front view.
| | 00:27 | Well, let's make something
that roughly looks like a finger.
| | 00:29 | I am just going to move it into place.
| | 00:33 | So in the Perspective View let's see if we
can move this little bit closer into place.
| | 00:36 | Okay, that looks good.
| | 00:38 | So we're going to attach
this eventually to the hand.
| | 00:40 | So I am going to go into Face mode and just
delete this face right here. We don't need it.
| | 00:44 | We also want to make room on the
palm for receiving these fingers.
| | 00:49 | So there should be three faces.
| | 00:51 | We're going to make three fingers, so
there should be three edges along this
| | 00:55 | and three edges along the palm side.
| | 00:57 | So let's just go to Insert
Edge Loop tool and make those.
| | 01:00 | And on the palm side, we'll go
right here. I am going to scoot these
| | 01:08 | vertices over so that it's
spaced out more evenly later.
| | 01:16 | All right! This adds a little
bit more detail to the finger.
| | 01:20 | I am going to insert some edge loops and
just refine the shape of this a little bit more.
| | 01:26 | I want to put one right here and shrink it down.
| | 01:28 | If you look at your own finger you
might notice how just past the knuckle the
| | 01:32 | fingers actually get kind of thin.
| | 01:33 | So I am going to put in an edge loop
there, and shrink it down a little bit,
| | 01:37 | and then fingers kind of get a little bit
thicker again towards the middle of the finger.
| | 01:41 | So if I insert an Edge Loop there,
I am just going to leave it that size, and
| | 01:46 | then we'll shrink down this polygon at the end.
| | 01:48 | Make it a little bit smaller.
| | 01:50 | Now I just want to insert a few more
edge loops just to make things a little bit
| | 01:54 | more squarer, and evenly spaced, and
maybe I'll shrink that just a little bit.
| | 01:59 | Hit G to redo the Insert Edge Loop tool.
| | 02:07 | So if we hit the Smooth Preview,
you can see we've got the start of the
| | 02:10 | finger going on here.
| | 02:12 | Just as a stylistic choice, I want to
make the tips of the fingers just a little
| | 02:15 | bit flatter and squarer
since it is a cartoony character.
| | 02:19 | So I am going to put in just another edge
loop right there towards the end of the finger.
| | 02:23 | So you can see that extra edge loop
towards the end just gives the finger just a
| | 02:28 | little flat look towards the tip. All right!
| | 02:30 | Let me move this finger just a
little bit closer to the palm.
| | 02:39 | So now we can duplicate
this finger into the other two.
| | 02:42 | I am going to hit Ctrl+D or
Command+D on a Mac, and it just creates a
| | 02:47 | duplicate of the finger.
| | 02:49 | I am going to slide that over a little
bit and we can just repeat that same thing.
| | 02:52 | Ctrl+D on a PC or Command+D on a Mac.
| | 02:55 | So now we've got three fingers going.
| | 02:58 | I might want to rotate the index
finger out just a little bit, and also
| | 03:04 | rotate the pinky out just a little bit,
and maybe the middle finger I want to
| | 03:10 | be a little bit longer than the other, so
I'll just scale that, and move it into place.
| | 03:17 | Now all we need to do is
make this one continuous mesh.
| | 03:21 | So I am going to select everything
and just go up to Mesh and Combine it.
| | 03:24 | So we've got one single mesh here.
| | 03:27 | Now, I want to snap the
vertices together with Merge.
| | 03:31 | So if I zoom-in on this vertex,
we can go up to Edit Mesh and Merge.
| | 03:35 | I am just creating one continuous
surface, and I am hitting G to repeat
| | 03:41 | the Merge function.
| | 03:47 | Let's zoom out and see what we've got.
| | 03:49 | So if we hit the Smooth Preview we
can see we've got some fingers going.
| | 03:54 | Lets add some detail to the thumb to
make it look more like what we've got
| | 03:57 | going to the fingers.
| | 03:58 | I am just going to insert an edge
loop and shrink this one up a little bit.
| | 04:03 | Maybe I want to insert another Edge Loop
closer towards the tip of the thumb, so
| | 04:12 | it also has the kind of flattened
appearance that the fingers do, and maybe I
| | 04:16 | want to give the thumb a
little bit of a knuckle as well.
| | 04:19 | So I'll insert an edge loop and
increase the size of it for little bit of a
| | 04:23 | knuckle on the thumb.
| | 04:30 | Now, at this point, you can just use
your artistic judgment and tweak the shape
| | 04:34 | of the fingers and the thumb.
| | 04:36 | You can insert more edge loops and you can
detail them out to make them look the way you want.
| | 04:40 | It's really up to you.
| | 04:42 | So this technique of
duplicating objects can really save time.
| | 04:45 | If you create one of them, then
you can duplicate it and make little
| | 04:48 | adjustments to each of the duplicates,
so you don't have to model each of
| | 04:52 | them independently.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying artistic principles to the body| 00:00 | So we've got the basic block
out of Hank going right here.
| | 00:03 | What I need to do now is start fleshing him out.
| | 00:06 | We're going to add detail and we're
going to tweak it to fit the reference.
| | 00:09 | But what I really want to get into with
this is the artistry of what's going to
| | 00:13 | make this character look good.
| | 00:15 | Whether you're designing your own
character or you're basing it on an existing
| | 00:19 | concept, there are some methods that
you can use to think about the shapes that
| | 00:23 | you'll be modeling in an artistic way.
| | 00:25 | What I want to show you is that there
are some principles of good appealing
| | 00:28 | character modeling that will really
help you make the best model that you can.
| | 00:31 | When it comes to artistry, don't
think in terms of rules because rules are
| | 00:35 | always going to be broken.
| | 00:37 | These are some principles that will help
guide you to make the best model you can.
| | 00:41 | In order to start shaping out this
character we need to add some more geometry.
| | 00:45 | Let's go into the Edit Mesh menu
and grab the Insert Edge Loop tool.
| | 00:50 | Anywhere that the character looks a
little undefined or un-detailed you'll
| | 00:54 | probably want to add some more geometry.
| | 00:56 | This character is really blocky right
now, so pretty much anywhere you want to
| | 00:59 | add an edge loop will probably help it out.
| | 01:02 | But we can look at the reference to
see where we really need some more help.
| | 01:05 | I am just going to turn on the Smooth
Preview mode, so we can see these black lines.
| | 01:10 | In some places that's really not
matching up with the reference, especially
| | 01:13 | right here in the chest and the back.
| | 01:15 | So I just want to insert an edge loop
right here to help us flesh this out.
| | 01:18 | So I put in an Edge Loop, I just want to
use the Scale tool to help this fit the
| | 01:23 | reference a bit better.
| | 01:24 | Now there are lots of other places
on his body that could line up with
| | 01:28 | the reference better.
| | 01:29 | I am just going to go into Vertex
mode and use Soft Select to tweak some
| | 01:33 | of these into place.
| | 01:40 | Let's see in the Front
view how this is working out.
| | 01:41 | So we can see right away that the
armpit and the shoulder are way off.
| | 01:46 | So I just want to move this around a little bit.
| | 01:48 | Now at this point, it really comes
down to where you see the need for more
| | 01:55 | detail and how you see the need to shape it out.
| | 01:59 | The exact way that I'm doing this
might not be the same way that you want to
| | 02:02 | do it, but the basic principle is to continue
adding detail and tweak it until it looks good.
| | 02:08 | But what looks good?
| | 02:10 | That's where your artistic
judgment comes into play.
| | 02:12 | So what I am going to do is skip ahead
to an Exercise File where I've already
| | 02:16 | added all the extra geometry and I
have already tweaked it till it looks good.
| | 02:20 | So let's take a look at
this entire body as a whole.
| | 02:25 | So looking at the geometry you can see
that there is a lot more Edge Loops here,
| | 02:28 | a lot more detail, and it's been
shaped into a more pleasing form.
| | 02:33 | Now I want to talk about the
artistic decisions that I made to bring the
| | 02:37 | model up to this point.
| | 02:38 | Following the reference is one
thing, but the reference is a
| | 02:41 | two-dimensional image.
| | 02:42 | In 3D, there is a lot more complexity to
the shape that you have to think about.
| | 02:47 | That's where your artistry comes in.
| | 02:49 | The first thing I want to
talk about is silhouette.
| | 02:51 | Now if you press 7 on your keyboard,
you'll go into Silhouette mode.
| | 02:55 | This shows simply the outline of the
character without any of the internal
| | 02:58 | detail to get in the way.
| | 03:00 | In a TV show or a movie, the audience
might only have a second or two to see the
| | 03:05 | character on screen and they won't
be able to take in all the details.
| | 03:08 | A well-defined silhouette will help
the viewer to instantly recognize the
| | 03:12 | character by its overall shape.
| | 03:14 | So if we look at hank from all
different angles in this mode, we can see that
| | 03:18 | his personality is really coming across.
| | 03:20 | We can see his big protruding chin.
| | 03:23 | We can see his barrel chest.
| | 03:24 | We can see his small legs.
| | 03:25 | It makes it really easy for the
audience to tell what this character is about
| | 03:31 | just by the way his overall
shape as seen in silhouette.
| | 03:34 | I am just going to hit 5 to go back
into Shaded mode and talk about another
| | 03:38 | artistic principle that helps me make decisions
while modeling this character. That's simplicity.
| | 03:44 | You want to ask yourself when you're adding
detail form or shape, is this really necessary?
| | 03:50 | What is this adding to
the design of the character?
| | 03:53 | Think about the saying "less is more."
| | 03:55 | Don't just add things because it looks
cool. Add things because without it the
| | 04:00 | design wouldn't work as well.
| | 04:01 | So you can see in the Hank model as
it is right now, I didn't add a lot of
| | 04:06 | muscular detail to the chest
or the arms or the abdomen.
| | 04:09 | I could have put a big six pack on his
abs and I could have given him big biceps
| | 04:15 | that are separated from his triceps and
all that, but it really wouldn't add to
| | 04:19 | the character very much.
| | 04:20 | What's important about him is the size
of the chest, and the size of his head,
| | 04:25 | and the size of the legs in
comparison to everything else.
| | 04:29 | Adding all those extra details would
detract from the impact that this character
| | 04:33 | has in its simplicity.
| | 04:35 | Playing into simplicity is
the artistic principle of focus.
| | 04:39 | Think about features that are most
important to the character and emphasize them;
| | 04:43 | then de-emphasize
things that aren't as important.
| | 04:47 | So the focal point to Hank is really
his big upper body and his big chin.
| | 04:52 | Other parts like his hands and his
legs and his feet are less important.
| | 04:56 | That's okay. Not everything needs
to be built up to the same importance
| | 05:00 | of everything else.
| | 05:01 | You want to have a focus that makes
the character easily identifiable.
| | 05:06 | Some other things that I've done to
help bring focus to the chest and the face
| | 05:10 | are the way I used hard lines.
| | 05:12 | So let me look underneath this
character and see how I built this sharp line
| | 05:16 | underneath the pectoral muscles.
| | 05:18 | This helps to frame the upper body.
| | 05:20 | It helps to separate the upper
body from the rest of the body.
| | 05:24 | The last principle I want
to talk about is rhythm.
| | 05:27 | Now you might think of rhythm in
terms of music or dance, things that are
| | 05:31 | moving and changing over time, but a still image
like a painting or a sculpture also has rhythm.
| | 05:37 | Your eyes moving across the model
actually creates a sense of rhythm.
| | 05:41 | Let's take a closer look at how this works.
| | 05:44 | Hank is made up of smooth
sections punctuated by hard edges.
| | 05:50 | The eye moves very easily across the
smooth chest, and then it comes to hard
| | 05:54 | lines, and then there are smooth
sections, and then there is an area of detail
| | 05:58 | again, and then more smooth sections.
| | 06:00 | This creates a visual rhythm that helps
identify the character and make it seem more solid.
| | 06:06 | Especially for cartoony models, you can
kind of think about modern car design.
| | 06:11 | A lot of cars on the street are
designed with impeccably smooth surfaces
| | 06:15 | punctuated with crisp sharp edges.
| | 06:17 | A cartoony character like Hank can
benefit from thinking in this way.
| | 06:22 | So as you get more experienced to
character modeling, you'll find yourself
| | 06:25 | drawing on these
principles as you work all the time.
| | 06:28 | It becomes second nature to evaluate
the forms as you model them and ask
| | 06:32 | yourself if these artistic principles
could help guide you to improve the character.
| | 06:36 | Don't get frustrated if at first
it's not coming out the way you hoped.
| | 06:40 | This is a skill that can
be learned with practice.
| | 06:42 | The important thing is to keep trying,
and you'll find yourself improving
| | 06:45 | over the course of time.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Modeling the HairDrawing the NURBS curves for hair| 00:00 | Hair is one of those things that
can be done in so many different ways.
| | 00:04 | In the real world there is an infinite
variety of hair styles to choose from
| | 00:08 | and then the way you interpret those
hair styles in 3D can also be done in so
| | 00:12 | many different ways. There is dynamic hair,
there is textured planes, there is fur dynamics.
| | 00:19 | The way I want to focus in this
course is modeling and with polygons.
| | 00:23 | So I am not going to really try to
get into any dynamic things. That's kind
| | 00:27 | of straying away from what I want to do
with modeling. Also it's a cartoony character.
| | 00:32 | So if I make hair out of these clumps
it kind of maintains a sort of very clay
| | 00:36 | cartoony feel to it and so I think
that's very appealing for this type of
| | 00:40 | character and it's also a way of
working that can be adapted into many
| | 00:43 | different hairstyles.
| | 00:44 | One way to create this type of hair is
to create each one of these clumps as
| | 00:48 | a separate polygon cube and then you
could tweak that cube into shape, but
| | 00:52 | that would be tedious.
| | 00:53 | I want to show you how to do it in a
more fun way, in a more direct way, and
| | 00:56 | it's probably going to go faster too.
| | 00:58 | So I just want to delete all this
hair that I made so we can start fresh.
| | 01:02 | I'm going to select everything and then
Ctrl+Select the head and Ctrl+Select the
| | 01:06 | eye to get that out of the way and
just hit Delete, so we can start fresh.
| | 01:10 | The way I want to start this hair is by
creating NURBS curves on the surface of
| | 01:14 | the character's scalp and one way you
can do that is to make the surface live.
| | 01:19 | Now what does that mean?
| | 01:21 | If we go into the Modify
menu you can select Make Live.
| | 01:24 | That takes any selected object
and it now makes it like the grid.
| | 01:28 | So if you are drawing any NURBS curves
they by default get stuck to the grid.
| | 01:32 | This makes anything that you create,
any NURBS curves, any polygon primitives,
| | 01:37 | it creates them on the surface of
the object that you have made live.
| | 01:40 | So in order to draw some NURBS curves
I am going go into the Curves palette
| | 01:44 | right here on the shelf and
just pick this EP Curve tool.
| | 01:47 | Let me rotate around to get a better
view of the top of this guy's head.
| | 01:50 | So I just want to draw out some
curves on the surface of the head.
| | 01:54 | You can draw five or six, however
many that you think it's going to take.
| | 01:57 | When you finish drawing out a curve you can
hit the Enter key and it will finish that curve.
| | 02:01 | You just want to hit G and start another curve.
| | 02:05 | Really you can put these curves
wherever you want to. It just matters
| | 02:08 | whatever the style is.
| | 02:09 | So I am just going to skip to the same
file that where I have already created all
| | 02:16 | these curves, but first I want to show
you how to make this surface not live so
| | 02:20 | that your actions won't
snap to the surface anymore.
| | 02:23 | So with nothing selected, I want to go into
Modify and now this is called Make Not Live.
| | 02:29 | It basically says now the grid is the
default for creating anything instead of
| | 02:32 | that object we have selected before.
| | 02:34 | So when you are done laying out all
your curves, make your surface not live.
| | 02:47 | Okay, let me zoom in on the hair
so we can see what this looks like.
| | 02:53 | So we have got all these different
curves made. They are sort of laid out in
| | 02:57 | this pattern on the head that roughly
matches the hairstyle that we are going for.
| | 03:02 | So I want to be able to work on these hair
curves without the body getting in the way.
| | 03:05 | So I just want to select the body and
the eye. I am going to go ahead into the
| | 03:08 | Layers palette here on the Channel
Box and go Create Layer from Selected.
| | 03:14 | So now we have got a layer with the eye
and the body on it. I just want to make
| | 03:17 | it reference so I can see
it but I can't click on it.
| | 03:20 | I don't want it to get in the way.
| | 03:22 | So at this point you can edit these
curves and kind of style them, lift them up
| | 03:26 | off the head, make them flair out a little bit.
| | 03:29 | If you right-click on a curve you can
go and edit its control vertices. So you
| | 03:33 | can use the Soft Select just like you
would on a polygon object and I just want
| | 03:38 | to edit the shape of these curves a
little bit. So you can use a move, rotate and scale.
| | 03:42 | I just want to get a better view
on this and make some of these curves
| | 03:46 | fly-up away from that head a little bit.
| | 03:50 | You can do this one at a time on these
different curves, but you can also work
| | 03:53 | on multiple curves at once, by
changing the Soft Select settings to Global.
| | 03:58 | So I am just going to go to the tool
Settings and change Soft Selection mode to Global.
| | 04:04 | So you can see that selecting
vertices on all the different curves.
| | 04:08 | So if I go in here and pick Control
Vertex, the Soft Select is affecting
| | 04:13 | vertices on all the curves.
| | 04:14 | So now if I want to pull this up
off the scalp-- let me get a different
| | 04:17 | better view on this.
| | 04:18 | So you can very quickly make edits to
lots of different hair curves at once.
| | 04:25 | You can rotate them around.
| | 04:27 | Really get a style that you are going for.
| | 04:29 | So now that you know how to make edits
to the hair curves I am just going to
| | 04:32 | open up another same file where I have
already made all the edits that I want.
| | 04:35 | I just want to close the tool settings
for now and let me zoom in on the hair.
| | 04:47 | Turn off Soft Select and I just might
change this from Template mode to Reference.
| | 04:52 | Okay, so we have got these different
hair curves and I have already made these
| | 04:54 | edits to have the hair
lifting off the head a little bit.
| | 04:57 | I have these little extra sprouting
clumps at the crown of the head that are
| | 05:01 | kind of doing their own thing.
| | 05:03 | The next step in creating this hair
is to extrude a circle along these hair
| | 05:08 | curves in order to create polygon tubes.
| | 05:11 | Now Extrude works a little bit differently
with NURBS curves than they do with polygons.
| | 05:15 | Let me show you how it works.
| | 05:17 | What you want to do is have a separate
NURBS curve object like this circle, for
| | 05:21 | example. You want to draw it on the grid.
| | 05:24 | This circle is going to be an
object that gets pulled along the hair
| | 05:28 | curved to create a tube.
| | 05:29 | So we have got a circle here on the
ground. I just want to move it up closer to
| | 05:32 | the action so you don't have two things too
far apart that we are trying to work with.
| | 05:36 | So we have got a circle up here.
| | 05:38 | I do want to make one
little change to the circle.
| | 05:40 | So I would zoom in on this circle and
hold down the right mouse button on it and
| | 05:48 | go to Control Vertex. So by default this
circle is set to have 8 sections to it.
| | 05:54 | There is 8 control vertices.
| | 05:55 | If I just change the Sections to 4 you
can see that it simplifies the object.
| | 06:00 | It just means that there is going to be
less cumbersome detail to work with at first.
| | 06:04 | Okay, so let's go to the Object mode of
this circle and let's select it and then
| | 06:09 | we want to Shift+Select
one of these hair curves.
| | 06:13 | So when we go up into the Surfaces
menu here, pick Surfaces and then
| | 06:17 | Surfaces menu within that.
| | 06:19 | What Extrude is going to do is it's
going to sweep this circle along this path
| | 06:25 | and create a tube for us.
| | 06:26 | Let's go into Extrude with options.
| | 06:30 | And there are lots of
different options to choose from here.
| | 06:32 | I am going to reset this so that it's
in the default, the way you are most
| | 06:35 | likely going to see it yourself.
| | 06:37 | So what do we want to do here?
| | 06:39 | Well it would take too long to really
explain what all of this does. I just
| | 06:43 | want to show you what the most
predictable stable result you are going to get
| | 06:47 | and how to set that up.
| | 06:48 | So let's change this to at path, change
this to Component. 99% of the time when
| | 06:53 | I'm doing extrudes I am
going to set it up this way.
| | 06:56 | It just creates a very predictable result.
| | 06:58 | Something I also want to
change is Output geometry.
| | 07:00 | I want to work with Polygons
instead of NURBS and we've got a whole bunch
| | 07:04 | more options down here.
| | 07:06 | I do want the output result to be Quads,
so squares rather than triangles, and I
| | 07:12 | also want to change this to control points.
| | 07:15 | That just makes things very simple.
| | 07:17 | Instead of giving you all these
extra options, it just simplifies things.
| | 07:21 | We'll see how that works.
| | 07:23 | So let's hit Extrude and see what happens.
| | 07:26 | Okay, so as we look around this we can
see that it's created this kind of boxy
| | 07:31 | tube shape along the hair curve.
| | 07:35 | Now why is it a box rather than a circle?
| | 07:37 | Well it's because we have created polygons.
| | 07:40 | So polygons are going to be defined by how
many control vertices are in this path object.
| | 07:45 | So if we go to Control Vertex we can
see that there is 4 control vertices.
| | 07:49 | It's four sided basically.
| | 07:51 | The resulting polygon extrusion is going
to have four sides because of that, and
| | 07:55 | that's good because it keeps things
simple. We don't want to have too much
| | 07:58 | geometry to work with at first.
| | 08:01 | Something else that's cool about
this is that you can change any of these
| | 08:05 | NURBS curves after you have created
the extrude and the extruded surface will
| | 08:09 | update automatically.
| | 08:10 | So you can change the size of
this path. You could go and edit the
| | 08:14 | control vertices on the hair curve
and it would move around the extruded
| | 08:17 | object in real-time.
| | 08:19 | I just want to turn on Smooth
Preview here on this curve here.
| | 08:22 | Okay, so I've made this kind of small
just so that this extrusion doesn't get
| | 08:27 | in the way. So once I've extruded this
shape along all of these curves, I can go
| | 08:32 | and scale up the size of this again so it's
something that's a little bit more natural.
| | 08:35 | So go ahead and select your circle on
then Shift+Select the different hair
| | 08:40 | curves and repeat the Extrude
option until you have got them all done.
| | 08:43 | So you can see that this way of making hair
is very powerful and it works very quickly.
| | 08:49 | It's also a good way to make all kinds
of different things, like tentacles or
| | 08:53 | grass or anything that
needs a roughly tubular shape.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Sculpting the polygonal hair clumps| 00:00 | So we have some polygon extrusions here.
| | 00:03 | They look a little bit blocky and there
are still lots of things that we need to
| | 00:06 | do to it, but it's a solid start for moving on.
| | 00:09 | Let's zoom in and see what we are working with.
| | 00:12 | So each one of these polygon extrusions,
it's very simple at this point, but
| | 00:17 | that's what we want to work with.
| | 00:18 | They also have this open end to
them. We need to close that off.
| | 00:21 | The first thing I want to do is just
get rid of these NURBS curves. They are
| | 00:26 | getting in the way. We don't need them anymore.
| | 00:27 | So we will just go up into Show menu
in the Viewport menu and just go up to
| | 00:31 | NURBS Curves. We just want to hide all those
NURBS Curves. So it just hid all those curves.
| | 00:37 | First let's close off these holes.
| | 00:39 | It will be easier to do if these hair
extrusions are all just one object, so I'm
| | 00:43 | going to select all of
these and go to Mesh > Combine.
| | 00:47 | So now that they're all one object we
can just close off all those holes at once
| | 00:51 | and go into Mesh > Fill Hole.
| | 00:52 | I am going to turn off Soft
Select to make it easier to see.
| | 00:56 | Okay so all of these holes have been capped.
| | 00:59 | Maya just went and looks for any open
areas and capped it off with a polygon.
| | 01:02 | Let me go into Smooth Preview mode so we
can see what this hair is going to look
| | 01:07 | like when it's actually smoothed out.
| | 01:08 | So it's pretty simple at this point.
| | 01:12 | It looks like something it might
come out of a Play-Doh extruder.
| | 01:14 | All of these hair clumps are the
same thickness all the way along.
| | 01:18 | So what would make this hair more
appealing is if that changes in thickness, so
| | 01:22 | maybe it gets a little thicker in the
middle and then as it gets towards the tip,
| | 01:24 | it's get a little bit thinner.
| | 01:26 | We can do that really easily
with this Sculpt Geometry tool.
| | 01:29 | Let me just go up and pick this Sculpt
Geometry tool and turn on tool settings
| | 01:35 | and let me use Pull to make
some parts of this hair thicker.
| | 01:39 | What Pull is going to do is basically
just going to thicken up parts of this and
| | 01:43 | push different vertices away from each other.
| | 01:54 | Now to make the tips
thinner I want to use the Smooth.
| | 01:57 | Now you might not think that
Smooth would make these thinner, but the
| | 02:01 | geometry is so simple at this point that
Smooth is basically just working as a shrink ray.
| | 02:08 | It just shrinks everything up.
| | 02:16 | Something else that you can do style
this hair is to use Soft Select, so I just
| | 02:19 | want to select some of these
vertices and hit B to turn on Soft Select.
| | 02:24 | So if you want to change the shape of
one of these clumps overall, just change
| | 02:28 | its position a little bit,
it's really easy to do with Soft Select.
| | 02:30 | We can also change the Falloff mode
to Global, so now you can affect all
| | 02:34 | the other clumps as well if you want to make
more sweeping changes to the style overall.
| | 02:38 | All right, let's evaluate what we have so far.
| | 02:42 | I'm going to go into Objects mode
and we have got Hank on the Template layer.
| | 02:46 | Let's just change that to
Reference so we can see the body in
| | 02:49 | relation to the hair.
| | 02:51 | So some of these clumps are looking
pretty good. There are a few bald spots and
| | 02:55 | when are filling those bald spots is to
go and create some more hair curves and
| | 02:58 | you could extrude them again.
| | 03:00 | Something that might work out faster,
however, is if you duplicate some of these
| | 03:03 | hair clumps into more hair clumps.
| | 03:06 | I just want to separate these clumps
again into separate objects and everything
| | 03:10 | turned into Unsmooth mode.
So let me just re-smooth it.
| | 03:13 | So you can take one of
these separate hair clumps.
| | 03:15 | I am going to turn off Soft Select. And
do Ctrl+D on a PC or Command+D on a Mac,
| | 03:20 | and it will just duplicate that clump.
| | 03:22 | Then we go into Move mode and
we wonder where our pivot point is.
| | 03:26 | When you duplicate an object it creates a new
pivot point for the object down at the origin.
| | 03:31 | So let's just move that pivot point up
and make it easier to work with. I am
| | 03:36 | going to zoom in on it again.
| | 03:37 | So now we have got two clumps here.
We can just move one and position it
| | 03:41 | somewhere else to help fill in some bald spots.
| | 03:47 | So let's select all of our hair curves,
and I want to turn off the Smooth Preview.
| | 03:52 | You can see it's really chunky.
| | 03:54 | So I just want to smooth everything,
just make it a little bit more dense and
| | 03:58 | also make its unsmooth version a
little bit more of a close approximation to
| | 04:03 | what the smooth version is
going to look like in the end.
| | 04:05 | So you can see it's a little bit more
dense and it's nice to make it denser
| | 04:09 | after you have tweaked the shape so
that you have fewer points to work with
| | 04:12 | while you are trying to edit it, and
then if you want to make finer adjustments,
| | 04:16 | then you smooth it and you
have more detail to work with.
| | 04:18 | So although it's impossible for me to
demonstrate every possible way to make hair,
| | 04:22 | the skills learned by doing it
this way can help you make not only hair,
| | 04:26 | but tentacles, anything
that has a tubular shape to it.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Modeling the ClothesModeling the pants| 00:00 | Modeling clothing can be tricky
because the way it comes into such close
| | 00:03 | contact with the skin.
| | 00:05 | By creating the clothing directly from
the body, not only does it become easier
| | 00:09 | to manage, but it's faster since you
already have the geometry created for it.
| | 00:14 | So, the pants are pretty
much the same shape as the legs.
| | 00:16 | You can just steal what we've already made
from the legs and repurpose it for the pants.
| | 00:20 | I'm going to zoom in and see how we can do that.
| | 00:28 | So, the pants are probably going to come
up to on the waist to about this point.
| | 00:32 | So we already have an edge loop
here that can be the top of the pants.
| | 00:36 | We also have an edge loop down here at the
bottom of the pants that can define the cuff.
| | 00:41 | Everything in between is also the correct
topology, so this is going to be really easy.
| | 00:45 | Now, I don't want to cut up the body.
I want to make a duplicate of this so that
| | 00:49 | we can extract the pants from a duplicate.
| | 00:50 | I'm just going to hit Ctrl+D
and make a duplicate of the body.
| | 00:55 | So I want to get the
body out of the way for now.
| | 00:58 | So, I'm just going to go up into the
Display menu and go to Hide > Hide Selection.
| | 01:04 | So the body is hidden for now. We can
do whatever we want to this object that's
| | 01:08 | going to become the pants.
| | 01:10 | So, one way to start cutting this
up is if we go into Face mode, we can
| | 01:14 | establish which faces we
want to be the top of the pants.
| | 01:18 | I'm going to delete this ring of faces
right here in order to separate the pants
| | 01:23 | from the upper body that we don't need anymore.
| | 01:25 | So we click one of these polygons,
I'm going to turn off Soft Select, go to the
| | 01:31 | polygon next to it, hold
down Shift and double-click.
| | 01:34 | It's going to select the entire ring of
polygons and I just want to delete it.
| | 01:38 | I can do the same thing down here too
to separate the pants from the feet,
| | 01:45 | and the same thing on the other side.
| | 01:46 | Let me go into Object mode and
zoom out so we can see what we have.
| | 01:55 | So, that's pretty much just
the body with the pants cut out.
| | 01:58 | If we go into the Mesh menu and hit
Separate, it's going to break all of these
| | 02:02 | separate parts into separate objects.
| | 02:05 | So I can just get rid of these parts that I
don't want anymore and just zoom in on the pants.
| | 02:11 | Okay, let's bring back the body that
we hid before, so we can see how it
| | 02:15 | relates to the pants.
| | 02:16 | Go up to Display > Show > All.
| | 02:19 | So, you can see the pants are
sitting directly on the body.
| | 02:22 | we need to move those out a little bit so
that they're not overlapping so exactly.
| | 02:26 | One quick way to do that is
with the Sculpt Geometry tool.
| | 02:29 | I turn that on and turn on the tool settings.
| | 02:35 | Now, I could use the Pull and just go
and sculpt on here and pull the pants away
| | 02:40 | from the body a little bit, but one
way that I can do it very evenly is with
| | 02:44 | this Flood function.
| | 02:46 | What Flood is going to do is
it's going to go and affect all the
| | 02:49 | polygons equally at once.
| | 02:51 | Let's see what happens when I click
this and I'll click it a few more times.
| | 02:54 | As you can see it's pulling the
pants out away from the body.
| | 02:57 | So, I'm going to close these tool
Settings for now and zoom in on the pants and
| | 03:01 | see what this looks like.
| | 03:05 | It's pretty close.
| | 03:07 | One issue we have is that the edge flow
for the body was kind of going in this
| | 03:11 | little wavy pattern, which is
fine for the body but the pants,
| | 03:14 | I want to have at a little bit straighter line.
| | 03:16 | So let's figure out how we can get
this top of the pants to be straighter.
| | 03:21 | I'm going to go into the Edge mode and
double-click on an edge so we can get
| | 03:24 | this entire edge ring. So I
just want to flatten this part out.
| | 03:27 | One way you can do that is with the Scale tool.
| | 03:30 | So, we got Scale and if I just grab
on this handle up here and scale down,
| | 03:34 | everything flattens out to a really flat line.
| | 03:37 | Let me turn on Wireframe mode.
So you can see that this ring has now been
| | 03:41 | flattened, but it's intersecting
with the body here and it's going down
| | 03:46 | inside the pants here. Not to worry.
| | 03:49 | It's really easy to deal with this.
| | 03:50 | So, I'm going to turn Shaded mode back on
by hitting 5 and let's go ahead and rotate.
| | 03:55 | I do want the pants line to be rotated
forward a little bit. Let's move it up
| | 04:00 | just a little bit too and I can just
use Scale and Move to position this ring
| | 04:07 | a little bit better in relation to the body.
| | 04:10 | Zoom in here and look at it all the way around.
| | 04:11 | All right, that's pretty close.
| | 04:14 | Maybe I want to pull these in a
little bit closer so I just want to go into
| | 04:19 | Vertex mode and hit Soft Select.
| | 04:23 | Now, you notice we've already got
Reflection turned on. To remind you if
| | 04:26 | you want to turn on Reflection,
it's up in the tool settings for any of
| | 04:29 | your translation tools.
| | 04:31 | So Reflection, we've got that turned on.
| | 04:32 | So, I'm just going to zoom in here and
we can just move these vertices so that
| | 04:39 | they're a little bit closer to the body.
| | 04:40 | Okay that looks good.
| | 04:42 | The one issue that we're having now is
that a lot of these edges now are kind of
| | 04:47 | unevenly spaced out.
| | 04:49 | It's actually going to be really easy to
address that with the Sculpt Geometry tool.
| | 04:53 | If we go to the Relax, what this is
going to do is it's going to help space out a
| | 04:59 | lot of these vertices so that they're
more even, and we can just start brushing
| | 05:03 | on it and you can see it's just doing
exactly that, spacing everything out.
| | 05:12 | We are almost done with these pants.
| | 05:13 | There is just one thing we need to do.
| | 05:15 | I'm going to zoom in on the top of the
pants so we can see what I'm talking about.
| | 05:19 | The pants don't have any thickness.
| | 05:20 | It's just one single polygon plane thin.
| | 05:23 | Let's give it thickness by going to
Extrude and Extrude can work on the entire
| | 05:28 | object at once, rather
than just individual polygons.
| | 05:32 | I'll zoom out and see...
| | 05:34 | Okay, so we want to grab on this blue handle.
| | 05:36 | What this is going to do is, just
going to expand this new extrusion out
| | 05:40 | away from the pants.
| | 05:41 | You can extrude it out this way.
| | 05:42 | You can also extrude it in towards the body.
| | 05:45 | So, that looks pretty good. Let's
see what happens if we turn on the smooth
| | 05:47 | preview with that and we
get out of the Extrude mode.
| | 05:53 | So we've got a nice round top to these pants.
| | 05:57 | Also same thing down here the bottom.
| | 06:00 | So, anytime that you need clothing
or accessories that closely relate to
| | 06:04 | the topology of the body, you can
use this technique to make it very
| | 06:08 | quickly and easily.
| | 06:09 | It works for anything like belts,
wristbands, masks, anything that's close
| | 06:15 | to the body.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating the shirt| 00:00 | Modeling clothing based on the body
can be quick and easy, but what if the
| | 00:04 | article of clothing doesn't
match the geometry of the body?
| | 00:08 | I want to show you some ways of
modifying the initial clothing for other styles.
| | 00:12 | So we could extract this shirt off
of the body and if we wanted to make a
| | 00:16 | T-shirt, we could cut off at this
edge up here and we can cut off the neck
| | 00:20 | of the shirt up here.
| | 00:21 | But what if we want to make a tank top where
the sleeves are going to be cut off right here?
| | 00:26 | You can see that the topology of the
body doesn't match where we would want to
| | 00:30 | cut off the sleeves for a tank top.
| | 00:32 | I'll show you how to take a T-shirt
that we've extracted from the body and
| | 00:35 | modify it into a tank top.
| | 00:38 | So the first thing I want to do is
create a duplicate of the body so that we can
| | 00:41 | cut away a T-shirt from that without
messing up the body that we've already got.
| | 00:45 | I'm going to hit Ctrl+D to duplicate
this body, Command+D on a Mac, and we just
| | 00:52 | want to get this body out of the way.
| | 00:53 | So, I'm going to go to
Display and Hide > Hide Selection.
| | 00:57 | So the body is hidden right now.
We've just got this thing that we're going
| | 01:00 | to turn into a shirt.
| | 01:01 | So, let's go into the Face mode and
zoom in and decide where we want the top of
| | 01:06 | the neck of the shirt to cut off.
| | 01:07 | So I'm just going to click one of
these faces and just turn off Soft Select
| | 01:12 | and then Shift+double-click a face
next to it so we get a ring of faces and
| | 01:16 | let's just delete that.
| | 01:18 | I also want to delete some of these
faces so we get the sleeve cut off.
| | 01:23 | So let's click one and Shift+double-
click the next and over here on the other
| | 01:27 | side let's do the same
thing and in the same way.
| | 01:29 | So, let's Shift+click one of these and
Shift+double-click one next to it and delete it.
| | 01:35 | Let's go down to the waist and decide
where we want the shirt to cut off here.
| | 01:41 | We can do just the same thing and cut it off.
| | 01:44 | So let's go back into Object mode and see
we've got the shirt separated from the body.
| | 01:52 | So let's actually break this up into
separate objects with Mesh > Separate.
| | 01:58 | So, these are separate objects.
| | 01:59 | Now we can delete these things
that we don't need in the way anymore.
| | 02:09 | Let me zoom out and let's
take stock of the situation.
| | 02:13 | So, we've got sleeves on his T-shirt
and this would be fine if all we want to
| | 02:16 | do is make a T-shirt.
| | 02:18 | Let's figure out how we can get a
cut right here to make this a tank top.
| | 02:23 | In the Edit Mesh menu, Maya has a
tool called the Cut Faces tool and let's
| | 02:28 | just see how this works.
| | 02:30 | If we click and drag anywhere out here,
Maya creates this line and whenever I
| | 02:36 | release the mouse button, Maya is
just going to go ahead and cut through
| | 02:40 | whatever faces are cut by this line.
| | 02:43 | If I just release it here, we can see
that Maya just go and cut this for us.
| | 02:48 | Let's take a look around
and see what this looks like.
| | 02:51 | So, basically there's a circle cut out
and now we just need to delete all of
| | 02:55 | these faces that are on
the other side of this line.
| | 02:59 | I'm going to go into Face mode and
start selecting some of these faces.
| | 03:04 | So quick timesaving tip right here.
| | 03:06 | You can grow the selection. So you can
select all of the adjacent faces to this
| | 03:10 | one by hitting Shift and period, and
you can just keep hitting that as many
| | 03:15 | times as you need to and it'll
keep growing out the selection.
| | 03:19 | We just want to find a quick
way to delete all these faces.
| | 03:25 | The selection has actually grown out
past beyond where I wanted it to, so I can
| | 03:29 | hold down Control and click and delete
some of these faces that I don't want to
| | 03:33 | be deleted. And I'll just hit the
Delete key to get rid of these, and let me
| | 03:39 | continue to go around and see
what faces I can get rid of.
| | 03:55 | I just want to get a
better view on some of these.
| | 03:57 | I'm going to zoom in closer and some of
these I just need to delete one at a time.
| | 04:01 | It's just a little bit of
busywork to go in and clean all these up.
| | 04:05 | So let me take a look around here.
We've got some more to delete on the back.
| | 04:09 | Let me see if we've got them all.
| | 04:14 | Okay, so that's good.
| | 04:15 | We've established the
cutoff point for the tank top.
| | 04:19 | The next thing that we need to do is
clean up a little bit of this geometry.
| | 04:22 | Let's see what I mean by that.
| | 04:25 | In a few of these places where it cut
it off, it didn't make such a clean break.
| | 04:29 | What we want to do is clean up
some of this extra mess that it made.
| | 04:34 | So we can merge some of these vertices
together and make this a little bit more clean.
| | 04:39 | Go to Edit Mesh and Merge.
| | 04:41 | We just want to look around and see
what other places things might have got
| | 04:46 | messed up a little bit,
a few more tweaks here and there.
| | 04:49 | You want to find any places where
5-sided faces have been created and merge
| | 04:54 | together any straight vertices.
| | 05:02 | I'm just looking for any places where
there is a lot of vertices close together
| | 05:07 | and it's not really doing
much to contribute to the shape.
| | 05:12 | So going back into Object mode, I can see
that that edge has been cleaned up a lot.
| | 05:18 | Now, it's okay that there
are some triangles around here.
| | 05:20 | Clothing actually doesn't
need to be as clean as anatomy.
| | 05:25 | You can get away with a
little bit more messy things.
| | 05:27 | You can get away with triangles more often.
| | 05:30 | Clothing doesn't need to bend in
as quite a precise way as anatomy does.
| | 05:36 | So, after cutting off one of the
sleeves, we can delete the other side of the
| | 05:39 | shirt and then mirror it over.
| | 05:41 | So, I just want to go into the Front
View and make this a little bit more easy
| | 05:44 | to select these faces.
| | 05:46 | I just want to select
half of this and delete it.
| | 05:50 | Now in the Perspective view, I can
go into Mesh and Mirror Geometry, and
| | 05:56 | let's see what we got.
| | 05:59 | So that looks pretty clean.
| | 06:01 | Let's do a little bit of cleanup done
here at the bottom and make the shirt tuck
| | 06:05 | into the pants a little bit more neatly.
| | 06:06 | First I want to make the body come
back, so that we can see where we're
| | 06:10 | positioning the shirt relative to the body.
| | 06:12 | Let's go to Show > All, and let's go
down here to the bottom of the shirt and I
| | 06:21 | want to select this edge drip at the
bottom and turn on Soft Select, so that we
| | 06:25 | can move the shirt altogether and
position it and tuck it inside the pants.
| | 06:31 | You can use a combination of
Move, Rotate and Scale to get this
| | 06:34 | positioned correctly.
| | 06:38 | So that's looking pretty good.
| | 06:40 | Just like the pants, I want to
expand the shirt out a little bit.
| | 06:44 | So, I want to go into the Sculpt
Geometry tool, turn on the settings, just make
| | 06:47 | sure we've got the Pull operation
selected, and just flood this a little bit so
| | 06:52 | it'll pull the shirt out away from the body.
| | 06:54 | Let me zoom in and see.
| | 06:59 | Okay, that did pretty well, and
we can also give the shirt thickness.
| | 07:04 | So, let's go out of the Sculpt
Geometry tool and extrude the shirt.
| | 07:09 | With the whole shirt selected, hit
Extrude and we can see we've got the standard
| | 07:13 | Extrude gizmo here and we just want to
pull out on the blue arrow so that we can
| | 07:16 | give the entire shirt thickness.
| | 07:20 | Let's go out and let's see what this
looks like with the Smooth Preview turned on.
| | 07:27 | So we get a nice clean edge here.
| | 07:31 | The thickness looks good, the smoothing
looks good, and it looks that the shirt
| | 07:37 | is penetrating with the pants just a little bit.
| | 07:39 | Let me do a little clean up here to
get the shirt tucking inside the pants a
| | 07:42 | little bit more nicely.
| | 07:44 | Just make sure Soft Select is turned
on, go to Scale, let's shrink that up
| | 07:48 | making sure it fits inside the pants.
| | 07:50 | Let's smooth the pants. Okay,
so that's looking pretty good.
| | 07:56 | So this is a good way to see that
instead of modeling something from
| | 07:59 | scratch, see if there's a way to
duplicate it and modify it from something
| | 08:03 | that you've already made.
| | 08:05 | This saves a lot of time and effort.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making the shoes| 00:00 | Up until this point we've been modeling
objects that have a soft, organic quality to them.
| | 00:06 | Shoes are a good example of creating
an object that has a hard surface to it,
| | 00:10 | hard sharp corners.
| | 00:12 | Objects like this require a certain
precision of edge hardness. Just like before
| | 00:17 | we can base the shoe on the body
geometry so let me zoom in and see what
| | 00:21 | this foot looks like.
| | 00:23 | So for the most part we can use the
foot here for the upper part of the boot.
| | 00:26 | All we have to do is delete it from the body
and extrude the heel and the sole downwards.
| | 00:30 | Let's hide the pants to get it out of
the way. We will go to Display and Hide >
| | 00:36 | Hide Selection and let's also create
duplicate of the body so that we can
| | 00:40 | extract the shoe from it.
| | 00:41 | I'm going to hit Ctrl+D to
duplicate, Command+D on the Mac.
| | 00:45 | So now we've got a duplicate of the body.
| | 00:48 | I just want to hide that as
well. Display > Hide > Hide Selection.
| | 00:51 | Now we want to create the boot so it's
coming up roughly to this aream so I'm
| | 00:57 | going to select faces around here and
delete everything above it. So if I just
| | 01:02 | select one face and hold down Shift
and double-click the one next to it
| | 01:05 | we select that ring of faces
and I can just delete it.
| | 01:08 | If we go back in to Object mode and go
in to Mesh > Separate, it's going to cut
| | 01:14 | that into two separate objects. So I
can just get rid of this rest of the body
| | 01:17 | that I don't need anymore.
| | 01:19 | Now if you look at the top of the shoe
you can see it's a little bit wavy.
| | 01:21 | It's not quite as precise as we need it to be.
I just want to zoom in here and show you.
| | 01:26 | So this is a little bit wavy. It works
fine on the body but for the boot we want
| | 01:29 | it to be a little bit more precise.
| | 01:31 | So I'm go in to Edge mode and double-
click on this edge so we can select it and
| | 01:36 | I am going to go in to Scale tool.
| | 01:38 | For bringing down the scale in the
vertical axis, you can see it's just
| | 01:42 | flattening everything out.
| | 01:43 | There is only one little issue with
this and this is that the vertices aren't
| | 01:47 | spaced quite as evenly anymore. So we
can just fix that really quick if we go in
| | 01:51 | to Object mode and turn on Sculpt
Geometry and turn on the tool settings.
| | 01:56 | We just want to go and make sure that
we got Relax set and we can just sculpt
| | 02:02 | with Relax and space out
these vertices a little bit.
| | 02:06 | Just helping to keep things more even
and clean. Okay so for this style of boot
| | 02:15 | we want to have a heel and heel is
going to be a little higher than the rest of
| | 02:19 | the sole. So let's zoom in and see
how we can raise up part of this heel.
| | 02:24 | I'm going to use Soft Select to raise
up the heel so as more space between the
| | 02:28 | ground and the heel. So if I just
select these vertices right here?.
| | 02:32 | If I remove these up, it would kind of
do what I want, but I'm going to turn
| | 02:36 | on Soft Select, so that we get a
gradual fall off. So that this part of the
| | 02:41 | heel will raise up and then it's going
to angle down to the part of the sole
| | 02:44 | that's flat on the ground so let me just
raise this up a little bit. That looks about good.
| | 02:50 | Now I want to extrude the faces out of
the bottom of this boot here so I'm going
| | 02:54 | to go in the Face mode and I
could select all these faces by hand.
| | 02:58 | If I turn on Soft Select here,
| | 02:59 | I could select them all by hand, but
that would be time consuming I want to find
| | 03:04 | a little way to speed this up a bit.
| | 03:05 | So I'm going to select one of these
faces and then just Shift+Double-click one
| | 03:10 | of these faces over here
and it connects the two.
| | 03:12 | Then if I do Shift+Period,
that will grow the selection.
| | 03:17 | So that just saved me a lot of work of
selecting all those faces by hand and now
| | 03:20 | I can just Shift+Select
all these other faces by hand.
| | 03:23 | It saves me a lot of time and I just
want to zoom in here make sure I am
| | 03:27 | selecting the right faces.
| | 03:29 | Okay so these faces are going to
be extruded down to create the heel.
| | 03:33 | I just want to hide the tool settings.
I don't need them in here right now and
| | 03:37 | let's go to the Extrude tool and the
heel needs to expand out a little bit
| | 03:42 | wider first. So I'm going to switch in
to this Scale tool and just make this a
| | 03:46 | little bit bigger and wider. And now I
just want to extrude again to create the
| | 03:52 | height of the sole.
| | 03:53 | The next thing I want to extrude is
the heel and I want to deselect the faces
| | 04:01 | that are over here where the heel won't
be, so I just going to go and hold down
| | 04:05 | the Ctrl key while I do a marquee-select
of all these faces where the heel won't be.
| | 04:10 | That's just going to deselect those
faces and we can just hit Extrude again
| | 04:14 | and pull that down.
| | 04:16 | So this looks like it might almost be done now.
| | 04:18 | Let's look at it in Object mode
and turn on the Smooth Preview.
| | 04:21 | We can see that Smooth Preview has
softened out a lot of these edges and this
| | 04:27 | isn't what we want. We want to keep a
nice crisp sharp edge around the sole and
| | 04:32 | the heel to give this
object some more visual weight.
| | 04:35 | We want it to feel more solid.
| | 04:37 | If we give it a sharp crisp line around
these hard edges, it's going to help the
| | 04:42 | boot feel like it's a lot more solid.
| | 04:43 | So going out of Smooth Preview mode I need
to find a way to make these edges harder.
| | 04:51 | There's a thing called holding edges
and what that is, is when you have two edges
| | 04:55 | that are very close together.
| | 04:58 | When two edges are very close together,
that creates a sharper corner so that
| | 05:02 | when you do the Smooth Preview the
edge will appear to be much more solid.
| | 05:06 | Let me just select all of the edges
that we want to have harder. I'm just going to
| | 05:10 | double-click on that edge loop and we
will double-click this one with Shift held
| | 05:15 | down so that we add to the selection,
just selecting all these different edges
| | 05:20 | that we want to have hardened.
| | 05:23 | Okay so I have got all the selected.
If I go in to the Edit Mesh menu and select
| | 05:28 | Bevel you can see that the result is
that it's doubled up all of these edges
| | 05:32 | that we had selected.
| | 05:33 | So I just undo this you can see the
result, it's like single edge everywhere we
| | 05:37 | have selected. If I Redo than you can
see it just doubled everything up so that
| | 05:41 | when you turn on Smooth
Preview the result is a lot sharper.
| | 05:46 | Now Smooth Preview does one
little thing that's weird.
| | 05:49 | It assigns a different material to these
faces that it created in between the double edge.
| | 05:54 | So we can just give it the same material.
| | 05:56 | If I just click with the right
mouse button on this shoe and go down to
| | 06:01 | Assign Existing Material and pick blinn,
it's just going to give it all the same material.
| | 06:07 | Lots of situations in modeling
require hard edges and precise corners.
| | 06:11 | The things we learned in this video
about beveling, creating holding edges, and
| | 06:15 | flattening surfaces are really going
to help in lots of modeling situations.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Refining the ModelCreases and hard edges| 00:00 | A big part of creating a
believable model is the surface quality.
| | 00:04 | Surface quality is the sense that the
model is made of a particular type of
| | 00:08 | material just by the way the surface is shaped.
| | 00:10 | So let's look around at this model and
see what types of surface qualities we see
| | 00:15 | and they can be
either artificial or organic.
| | 00:19 | It can be round or beveled
or angular or straight.
| | 00:22 | So we can see here for example,
I'm going to zoom in on the chest area.
| | 00:26 | You can see we've got a hard edge right
here. This is really defining the chest
| | 00:31 | area and this is a very big muscular
type of character, so we really want to
| | 00:35 | define the chest area.
| | 00:36 | This crease is really helping us do that.
| | 00:38 | I want to get even closer on this chest
area and examine exactly why this area
| | 00:43 | is creasing the way it is.
| | 00:44 | I'm going to turnoff the Smooth
Preview and we can see that there's a lot of
| | 00:48 | edges here close together.
| | 00:50 | They're closer than edges are in the
rest of the model, and one thing that
| | 00:54 | happens when you put edges close
together is you form a tighter crease.
| | 00:58 | This effect is often called a holding
edge, because it holds a tighter corner.
| | 01:03 | Now, we can control the edge quality of a
model by moving edges closer or farther apart.
| | 01:09 | So if I were to go in closer to this and
edit this, let me select a few of these
| | 01:13 | vertices and I'm going to grab this
one and this one here, and let's turn on
| | 01:18 | Smooth Preview and I just want to
move some of these edges a little farther
| | 01:21 | apart from each other.
| | 01:29 | So we can see, the crease has
greatly diminished and there's a little bit
| | 01:33 | of weird stretching in here, but the
overall effect is that the crease has
| | 01:38 | been diminished greatly.
| | 01:39 | By the same token, you can make creases
even sharper or tighter by moving edges
| | 01:44 | and vertices closer together.
| | 01:46 | So I'm just going to do that right here.
| | 01:53 | So, if I turn on Smooth Preview, you
can see that that crease is much sharper.
| | 01:57 | If I undo those changes, you
can see the crease getting softer.
| | 02:02 | So, let's create a brand new crease of our own.
| | 02:06 | The forehead is a really
good area to add some creases.
| | 02:09 | There are very natural furrows that
happen in the brow and so we should probably
| | 02:13 | have a crease in here to really help the
setup artist to know where to place the
| | 02:18 | control so that we can create a furrowed brow.
| | 02:20 | So let me zoom in here
and see how we can do this.
| | 02:23 | There is an edge running right now
sort of halfway across the forehead that
| | 02:27 | looks like it's in the right
place for us to put a brow furrow.
| | 02:31 | So what I want to do is just select
these edges that should be creased.
| | 02:34 | Let me get out of the Smooth Preview and
it'll be a little bit easier to select this edge.
| | 02:41 | Okay, so we got that side.
| | 02:42 | Okay, so I've selected all of
these edges right across the forehead.
| | 02:49 | Now, let's go up into Edit Mesh and
Bevel but I want to do it with Options,
| | 02:54 | because I wanted to
actually create two segments.
| | 02:57 | If I were to do it right now, hit
Apply, it splits that one edge into two.
| | 03:01 | I actually want to split it into three.
| | 03:03 | It creates two edges.
| | 03:04 | I want to create three edges. I want
to undo that and change Segments to 2
| | 03:09 | and see what happens.
| | 03:11 | Okay, so we've got three
edges where there used to be one.
| | 03:14 | Let me close this now.
| | 03:15 | There are some triangles here at the end.
| | 03:18 | You can fix that really easily just
by selecting that edge and deleting it.
| | 03:25 | Now we can double-click on this edge
right here and it just selects the entire
| | 03:28 | edge loop right there in the middle.
| | 03:29 | I just want to push this a
little closer in to the forehead.
| | 03:32 | Let's bring it down a little bit too.
| | 03:34 | All right, I'm going to smooth this
model and let's see what effect this has.
| | 03:42 | So by inserting those edge loops and
increasing the detail on that area, you can
| | 03:45 | see we get a really nice
crease across the forehead.
| | 03:48 | You could continue to tweak this, move
some verts around, maybe take out the
| | 03:50 | Sculpt Geometry tool, and smooth
out this edge so you get a little more
| | 03:54 | gradual transition.
| | 03:55 | Actually let me show you
how that works really quick.
| | 03:59 | So, I've got Relax on.
| | 04:00 | I'm just going to relax this area slightly.
| | 04:06 | Just to make the forehead crease fade
out a little bit more gradually instead of
| | 04:09 | stopping so abruptly.
| | 04:13 | If you already have a good deal of edges
in a particular area and you don't want
| | 04:17 | to add anymore to create a crease,
you can also crease things by just moving
| | 04:21 | some vertices around.
| | 04:22 | So for example, right here where the
nose meets the face, it's a little bit soft.
| | 04:26 | Let's say I want to make that crease a
little bit sharper, so I can just go in
| | 04:29 | here and select some of these
vertices and let me zoom in on that.
| | 04:34 | So I can take some of these vertices.
I can tuck them in back here a little bit
| | 04:41 | and maybe take these right here.
| | 04:45 | I just want to move them back a little bit.
| | 04:49 | So you can see the effect that we get is
a much tighter crease right here and it
| | 04:57 | creates a more appealing effect as well.
| | 04:59 | It really helps separate the
nose from the rest of the face.
| | 05:02 | So if I undo this, you can
really see the difference.
| | 05:04 | Now I'm going to redo it again really quick.
| | 05:06 | So that just creates a much
more appealing result on the face.
| | 05:12 | You can also remove edges if you
don't want a crease to be quite so hard.
| | 05:16 | So let me look right up here.
| | 05:18 | Let's say this crease
looks a little too hard for me.
| | 05:20 | We can go in here and say maybe
this edge right here, it's too much.
| | 05:26 | We don't need all of this geometry
right here to define this crease.
| | 05:30 | So, one way to delete an entire edge
loop is we hold down the Control or
| | 05:35 | Command on a Mac, hold down the right mouse
button and we get this little menu that pops up.
| | 05:39 | If you mouse over to Edge Loop
Utilities, you're going to get the second
| | 05:43 | menu and then you move over To Edge Loop and
Delete, and so that edge loop just disappeared.
| | 05:50 | So, let me undo that and
so we can see the result.
| | 05:54 | Okay, so there it is with
the edge and I'm going to redo.
| | 05:57 | So you can see that crease just softened up.
| | 05:59 | So a lot of times if you want to
decrease the amount of crease, one way is
| | 06:03 | to smooth it out with the Sculpt Geometry
tool, or you could just remove some geometry.
| | 06:07 | You might have too much geometry in
an area anyway and getting rid of some
| | 06:11 | unnecessary edge loops can
help clean up your model.
| | 06:13 | So, how do you decide where creases should
be sharper and where they should be softer?
| | 06:19 | It really comes down to
your artistic discretion.
| | 06:21 | When I'm doing cartoony models,
I really like to create a pattern, almost a
| | 06:26 | rhythm of hard and soft.
| | 06:28 | If you're looking at this face, you
can see there's all this soft area and
| | 06:33 | then you get a harder crease for the laugh
line or you get some creases around the lips.
| | 06:39 | Creating sort of a pattern or a rhythm
of these hard and soft areas can create a
| | 06:44 | character that's much more appealing
than one that just sort of has hard and
| | 06:48 | sort of has soft areas all over.
| | 06:50 | If you can simplify it and break your
character down into areas that are going
| | 06:54 | to have very smooth continuous
surfaces that are broken up by sharper edges,
| | 06:59 | that can really add to a character's appeal.
| | 07:01 | A character without any creases or
hard edges would usually look way too
| | 07:05 | soft and undefined.
| | 07:07 | Cartoony models are going to have
even more and obvious creases, while
| | 07:11 | realistic models will have uneven and
more subtle creases. But they're still
| | 07:16 | going to be there and they're still
necessary for creating models that have
| | 07:19 | appealing surface quality.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Cleaning up problem areas| 00:00 | In a production setting, the 3D models
are some of the first things that are
| | 00:04 | created and everyone later on in
the pipeline works on the models.
| | 00:08 | So you create the model and then
someone else textures it and someone else rigs
| | 00:12 | it and someone else animates it.
| | 00:14 | Any problems that exists in the model
from beginning are going to cause problems
| | 00:18 | for people later on.
| | 00:19 | So, in order to stop people from
knocking at your door asking you to fix things
| | 00:23 | all the time, I want to show
a few very common problems
| | 00:27 | you can make sure to cleanup before
you send the model off to anybody else.
| | 00:30 | So in this Exercise File, you've a few
problems in this model, some that were in
| | 00:35 | the model when we created it and also
some that I created just for this video
| | 00:39 | so we can see how to fix them up.
| | 00:41 | The first thing I want to talk about
is six-sided stars or six-pointed stars.
| | 00:47 | A six-pointed star is what happens when you
have a vertex that's connected by six edges.
| | 00:53 | Let me zoom in on the face,
so we can see what that means.
| | 00:55 | So, most of these vertices on the face
are simply connected to four other edges.
| | 01:01 | So one, two, three and four.
| | 01:05 | But every once in while, you'll find six
different edges connecting into one vertex.
| | 01:10 | That gives this one vertex
weight over a very large area.
| | 01:15 | It has more weight than it should probably have.
| | 01:17 | So we want to clean this up, so we
don't have any more six-pointed stars here.
| | 01:21 | I've come up with an approach that
helps clean these up that's really
| | 01:25 | straightforward and simple.
| | 01:27 | So what you want to do when you have
got a six-point star is you want to find
| | 01:31 | one edge that you want to keep. So
there might be this edge required here that
| | 01:34 | you want to keep and you want to get
rid of edges on the other side of it.
| | 01:38 | So let's say that this is the edge I
want to keep. So there are two edges on
| | 01:42 | this side of it and there are
two edges on the side of it.
| | 01:45 | Let's get rid of these,
one, two, three and four.
| | 01:49 | So I'm going to delete these edges
and so we're left with this one edge
| | 01:53 | loop down in the middle. That's good!
| | 01:54 | We want to keep that one.
| | 01:56 | The next thing I want to do is go
into Edit Mesh menu and grab this
| | 01:59 | Split Polygon tool.
| | 02:00 | What we want to do is cut across this edge
that we kept from edges on the other side.
| | 02:06 | So I'm going to start cutting from
right here and just cut across this edge in
| | 02:11 | the middle that we kept and
cut across to the other side.
| | 02:14 | And then from this vertex and cut across
to the other side and then finally from
| | 02:21 | this one and cut across to the other side.
| | 02:23 | So you can what we're left with is
much cleaner geometry. There is no more
| | 02:29 | six-pointed stars and this is what we want.
| | 02:32 | Something else that can cause a
problem is just simply messy geometry.
| | 02:36 | I'm going to move the shirt out of the
way really quick, so we can see what's
| | 02:39 | happening in the chest.
I'm just going to delete it for now.
| | 02:42 | So, on the chest is what you might see
if someone did a sloppy job of connecting
| | 02:47 | the head to the body, for example.
| | 02:48 | And if you have got different
things running in all kinds of different
| | 02:51 | directions and they weren't quite sure
exactly how to connect different parts.
| | 02:55 | So this might happen in real life and
there's a simple way to clean it up.
| | 02:58 | I'm going to go into Edge mode and
just select a bunch of these edges that
| | 03:05 | need to be cleaned up.
| | 03:06 | I want to grow the selection by holding
down Shift and pressing the Period button.
| | 03:09 | I just want to delete some of these
edges that are just messy. I want get them
| | 03:14 | out of the way. So I've
deleted everything that was messy.
| | 03:19 | Now all you have to do is go and select the
Split Polygon tool and just re-cut everything.
| | 03:25 | So, we've got one edge loop that is
pretty contiguous right here, so we can
| | 03:28 | assume that this one up
here should also be continuous.
| | 03:31 | We've just cut across from here to here
and just start connecting the dots and
| | 03:36 | filling in the gaps.
| | 03:37 | You just want to keep cutting across
until the whole thing is filled in.
| | 03:43 | One last common problem is five-sided faces.
| | 03:47 | Those are faces that have more than four edges.
| | 03:50 | So right here on the back side, you can
see I've got a five-sided polygon right
| | 03:54 | here and this needs to be cleaned up.
| | 03:56 | One way to clean it up is to cut a
new Edge Loop that continues all the way
| | 04:00 | across this and turns this five-sided
polygon into two four-sided polygons.
| | 04:05 | So I'm going to go in Edit Mesh and
Insert Edge Loop tool and just throw in a
| | 04:09 | new edge loop right here.
| | 04:11 | And if I go to Split Polygon tool and
just connect across here, you can see now
| | 04:16 | we have all four-sided faces.
| | 04:19 | That's one solution, but it causes you
to insert an edge loop and might create
| | 04:22 | more geometry than that
you want in other places.
| | 04:25 | So another solution is to
delete this edge on this other side.
| | 04:29 | So I'm just going to go to the Edge
mode and select one of these edges and we
| | 04:34 | can delete the entire edge loop at once.
| | 04:36 | If we hold down the Ctrl key and right-
click and go to Edge Loop Utilities and
| | 04:41 | Edge Loop and Delete.
| | 04:42 | So that's cleaned up that five-sided polygon.
| | 04:46 | So fixing problem areas might not be
the funnest part of modeling, but it's
| | 04:49 | important to check them off
your list every time you model.
| | 04:52 | These are some of the most common
problems that I run into and so it's best to
| | 04:56 | take care of them before you
send the model off to anybody else.
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| Putting on the finishing touches| 00:00 | Well I hope you are excited because
we are almost finished with this model.
| | 00:03 | There is just a few more finishing
steps we need to do to clean it up so that
| | 00:07 | nothing gets in the way for anyone
else who might want to use this model.
| | 00:11 | The first thing I am going to do
is go through and name everything.
| | 00:14 | You want everything in your scene
to have a name that makes sense.
| | 00:17 | So let me get in closer on
this and just select any object.
| | 00:21 | We can see over here in the Channel Box,
this object is named polySurface 34.
| | 00:24 | It's not a very appealing name.
| | 00:27 | I want to double-click on this and
name it something that makes sense.
| | 00:31 | Now if you are working on a team,
there might be a naming convention that
| | 00:34 | you have to follow.
| | 00:36 | If you are working by yourself, just name
it something that makes sense to you.
| | 00:43 | Okay. I am not going to go
through and name everything.
| | 00:45 | That might take too much time but I
want to go through and name everything and
| | 00:49 | get used to a naming convention,
naming things in a way that make sense.
| | 00:53 | The next thing we want to do
is delete the history and freeze
| | 00:55 | the transformations.
| | 00:57 | As a refresher, deleting history
tells Maya to forget all the steps that
| | 01:01 | went into creating an object and just
remember the way the object looks now.
| | 01:06 | So I can select everything in the scene and
go up to Edit, and Delete by Type > History.
| | 01:12 | So now Maya has just forgotten all the
steps that went into making everything.
| | 01:16 | Also what we want to do is go into
Modify and Freeze Transformations.
| | 01:20 | You might have noticed over here when
we did that, all of these numbers
| | 01:23 | reset to neutral value.
| | 01:24 | If I undo it, you can see that there
is all these translates and rotates.
| | 01:29 | I am going to redo the Freeze
Transformations and we can see everything is reset to zero.
| | 01:33 | So now Maya thinks that everything
is in the neutral original location.
| | 01:37 | Now you might notice that our character
has only one shoe on and only one eyebrow.
| | 01:43 | Let's take care of that.
| | 01:44 | I am going to zoom in on the boot and
we are going to duplicate this boot over.
| | 01:48 | Duplicate is Ctrl+D on a PC or Command+
D on a Mac, and so you see we've got a
| | 01:54 | second boot here created.
| | 01:56 | Now one way to put it over to the
other side is to go into the Scale mode.
| | 02:00 | So we have got the pivot point for this
object in the middle and actually this
| | 02:04 | works out perfectly for this because
when we are scaling this, you can see it
| | 02:08 | gets bigger or smaller but if we push
it to the other side, the boot goes over
| | 02:12 | and snaps into place.
| | 02:14 | Now we can see in the
Channel Box, it went over -1.029.
| | 02:16 | Let's just make this around -1 so we
know that it's exactly in the right place.
| | 02:25 | Also what we want to do is go up to
the eyebrow and do the same thing.
| | 02:31 | So we see that the eyebrow's pivot
point is actually in the center of the
| | 02:34 | objects, not in the center of the world.
| | 02:36 | Let's move that so that when we scale the
object over it goes into the correct place.
| | 02:40 | I want to go into the Top view, and
switch the Move tool, and I want to hold
| | 02:45 | down the D key, that allows us to move
the pivot point, and at the same time, I'm
| | 02:49 | going to hold down X. That lets us snap to grid.
| | 02:52 | So when we move this, we can see the
pivot point is now snapping to the grid.
| | 02:56 | Let's make sure it's right in
the center and release the mouse.
| | 02:59 | I am going back to the Perspective view.
| | 03:00 | Let's duplicate the eyebrow, go into
Scale mode, and just scale it over.
| | 03:06 | And I want to type in -1 in the Channel
Box to make sure we have got it exact.
| | 03:12 | So feel free to do the same thing with
the eyeball. Make sure the pivot point
| | 03:16 | is in the center of the world, duplicate it,
and scale it over. Make sure it's scaled -1.
| | 03:22 | Okay, there's just two more things to do.
| | 03:25 | We want to delete the image planes
and we want to clean up the outliner.
| | 03:29 | So we have got these image planes
back here and we are done modeling.
| | 03:32 | So we don't need to see them and no
one else needs to see them either.
| | 03:35 | Let's open up the Hypershade.
| | 03:38 | If we go into Rendering Editors, under
the Window menu, we can open Hypershade.
| | 03:45 | And there is a lot going on here. We
can ignore it all and just go right to
| | 03:48 | the Utilities tab and this is going to show
us whatever image planes are in our scene.
| | 03:52 | We are just going to
select these and delete them.
| | 03:56 | The last thing to do is clean up the outliner.
| | 03:59 | So back into the Window menu, we want
to pick Outliner, and you want to go
| | 04:04 | through here and see if there's
anything in the Outliner that doesn't
| | 04:06 | actually exist in the scene.
| | 04:08 | So let me zoom out a little bit.
| | 04:11 | Sometimes when you're creating and
you're modeling, there's things that get
| | 04:15 | created and then you might end up deleting
them but there is a kind of ghost left behind.
| | 04:19 | And it will show up in the in the Outliner.
| | 04:20 | So I am just going to go through all
of these different things and just make
| | 04:23 | sure that they all exist in the scene somewhere.
| | 04:32 | Okay. So everything
actually exists. That's good.
| | 04:35 | If you click on something and it
shows you like a pivot point out here and
| | 04:39 | there's nothing there, then you can
just go ahead and delete in your Outliner.
| | 04:43 | It's not going to cause any problems.
| | 04:45 | So this finishing work is important,
not only to make your model look its best
| | 04:50 | but it keeps your colleagues happy
because everything is all neat and tidy for
| | 04:53 | them so when they continue to work on it,
there's nothing that's going to get in their way.
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| Adapting one model for many characters| 00:00 | Modifying one character into several
other similar types of characters can be
| | 00:04 | a huge advantage because modeling a character
individually from scratch can take so much time.
| | 00:10 | As long as the basic structure between
the two characters doesn't change very much,
| | 00:13 | these techniques can
really speed up your workflow.
| | 00:16 | So we have got our Exercise File with
Hank here and let's say we want to change
| | 00:20 | him into an older, leaner type of character.
| | 00:24 | The main techniques I am going to use
for this is with Soft Select and the
| | 00:27 | Sculpt Geometry tool.
| | 00:29 | So the first thing I would like to do
to Hank is make his chest less big, make
| | 00:34 | his shoulders less broad.
| | 00:35 | So I am going to use the
Soft Select tools to do that.
| | 00:38 | I am just going to go into Vertex mode
and select some of his arm and actually
| | 00:43 | what I want to do is I want to turn off
Reflection so that we can compare at the
| | 00:48 | side of his body that I alter to the
side of his body that I leave the same, so
| | 00:53 | you can see what the difference looks like.
| | 00:54 | So I am just going to go into the tool
Settings and turn off Reflection. Okay.
| | 01:00 | So I am going to zoom in here.
| | 01:01 | I am going to change the area of
influence of this a little bit so that we can
| | 01:04 | have a gradual falloff from
that arm across the chest.
| | 01:08 | Something else I'd like to do is turn
on Global Soft Select so that we can
| | 01:13 | get his shirt as well.
| | 01:15 | So going into the Move tool I am just
going to move in the chest a little bit.
| | 01:20 | I can just pick different areas that I
want to bring in and maybe this area down
| | 01:24 | here needs to come in a little bit.
| | 01:25 | I can also look at it from the front
and side and just say the front of the
| | 01:31 | chest can come in, his back doesn't
need this thick out quite so far, just
| | 01:40 | thinning up the character a little bit.
And I also like to give him longer legs.
| | 01:44 | So just look at it from the front view.
| | 01:47 | I am just going to select the foot up
to the ankle and then I want Soft Select
| | 01:52 | to just gradually select everything from
the ankle up to the hips roughly and if
| | 01:57 | we just pull this down, you can see
that that Soft Select is just spreading out
| | 02:01 | the vertices in a more natural way.
| | 02:04 | Soft Select can also do fun things to the face.
| | 02:06 | Let me select part of his jaw so we can
zoom into it. Ad I just want to change
| | 02:15 | the Falloff mode from Global to Volume
and I also want to turn on Reflection
| | 02:20 | just to make it easier to see how
this change is affecting the face.
| | 02:23 | I am going to shrink down the area of
influence little here and just bring in
| | 02:28 | the jaw a little bit and just let's see
in the Front view. Let's make this jaw
| | 02:32 | little pointier, a little
less wide and less protruding.
| | 02:36 | So I am just going to move
this back a little bit and up.
| | 02:39 | So you we can see the
character has much narrower face now.
| | 02:44 | You can continue to make modifications to this.
| | 02:46 | I am just going to bring in a little
bit of the jaw here, and a little bit of
| | 02:53 | the inside of the mouth is protruding through.
| | 02:55 | So we can also go in and select part
of the gums and move those in as well.
| | 03:05 | Another fun way to use Soft Select
is to modify the shape of the nose.
| | 03:08 | I am just going to go and select some
faces on the side of his nose, make a
| | 03:13 | narrower shape for the nose, and let's
also look at from the side and stretch it out.
| | 03:29 | So already we are getting a
very different character type here.
| | 03:32 | One last thing I want to do to him
is shrink up his arms a little bit.
| | 03:35 | They are still a little bit bulky arms
so let's make them a little bit leaner.
| | 03:40 | The Sculpt Geometry tool
is really good for that.
| | 03:43 | If we set the Sculpt Geometry tool
to Push mode and then we sculpt on the
| | 03:47 | character, what that's going to do is
it's going to push all the vertices closer
| | 03:50 | to each other, which
basically is going to shrink it up.
| | 03:52 | I want to turn off Reflections so
that we can see a change from one side to
| | 03:56 | the other and now if I just brush with this, you can
see it's just really thinning up the character.
| | 04:08 | One thing that Sculpt Geometry
tool can't do unfortunately is affect
| | 04:11 | multiple objects at once.
| | 04:13 | It only works on one object at a time.
| | 04:15 | So if you want to change the body
underneath the clothing with this Sculpt
| | 04:18 | Geometry tool, you will have to make
any edits to the clothing afterward.
| | 04:21 | But we can shrink up his chest a little
bit with this and the clothing will fit
| | 04:25 | more loosely on him then.
| | 04:33 | So let me just get this menu out of the
way so we can see the character more up
| | 04:36 | close and see the entire body together.
| | 04:39 | So you can see it's very easy to
modify your character into other body shapes
| | 04:44 | very quickly with these two tools.
| | 04:47 | Although there is clearly some cleanup
to be done, using the Sculpt Geometry
| | 04:50 | tool and Soft Select is a quick way
to build in some different shapes and
| | 04:54 | proportions to your character.
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ConclusionRecap and further recommendations| 00:00 | Sadly we are close to the end of this course.
| | 00:03 | I just want to recap the things that
are most important to take away while it's
| | 00:06 | still fresh in our minds.
| | 00:08 | Before you start modeling, you
should look at your reference images and
| | 00:11 | understand what it is that the character is
supposed to be able do when it's animated.
| | 00:16 | You want to talk to the animators, to
the setup artist, and the director to
| | 00:20 | find out how the character is going to move.
| | 00:22 | This will inform the level of detail,
topology, flow zones, and complexity that
| | 00:27 | you are going to have to
build into the character.
| | 00:30 | Next, break the character down into flow zones.
| | 00:33 | You are going to want to establish which
parts of a character need a cylindrical
| | 00:36 | edge flow pattern and which parts
need a circular edge flow pattern.
| | 00:41 | In Maya, block out those flow zones
with basic proportions as simply as
| | 00:46 | possible. You don't want to get
too much geometry at this point.
| | 00:50 | You just want to establish the
basic proportions and the flow zones.
| | 00:53 | If you have too much geometry, you are
going to bog yourself down with lots of
| | 00:56 | unnecessary detail at this point.
| | 00:59 | Then add edge loops to flush out the form
while tweaking it to follow the reference.
| | 01:04 | Continue adding geometry by whatever
means necessary to create the proper
| | 01:08 | detail level, surface quality, and any
additional objects and accessories the
| | 01:12 | character might have.
| | 01:14 | Step back and evaluate the model, ask
other people for their critiques, and then
| | 01:18 | rework the model as needed.
| | 01:20 | If you want to take this character
beyond the scope of this course, check out
| | 01:23 | many of the other great lynda titles.
| | 01:25 | There is Maya 2011 Essential Training.
| | 01:29 | That course will teach you how to prepare
the model for texturing by laying out the UVs.
| | 01:33 | Then you can look at its rigging section to
learn how to set up your model for animation.
| | 01:37 | If you want to know how to show off
your model with professional looking lights
| | 01:41 | and shading, check out the Maya 2011:
Lighting and Rendering in mental ray.
| | 01:46 | That will show you how to make the
model look like it's in a realistic space.
| | 01:50 | It will really give the model some
weight and it will look really sharp.
| | 01:53 | So as you become more experienced
with character modeling, you will
| | 01:56 | certainly find your own shortcuts and
discover your own ways of doing things
| | 02:00 | and get faster and faster.
| | 02:01 | Character modeling is a rewarding
and challenging discipline that always
| | 02:05 | leaves me wanting more.
| | 02:06 | So good luck on your
character modeling journeys.
| | 02:09 | It's been a pleasure to create this
course, and I hope it has given you many
| | 02:12 | insights into character modeling and
that by following it you will be able to
| | 02:16 | model faster and better.
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