From the course: Modeling Vehicles in Maya
Adjusting the separate panels - Maya Tutorial
From the course: Modeling Vehicles in Maya
Adjusting the separate panels
Once the hood and other panels are broken off, there's still some work to be done to make them look just right. We need to tweak them, and size them, so that the gaps and overlaps are good. There's also a few odds and ends to cover as well. So, let's get down to it. Now that the pieces are separate, you can check to see if it's lining up with the blueprint. Let's check it in the top view. I'm just going to zoom in here. So, you can see that we've got the hood and the blueprint right here, but after we separated it, the edge kind of shifted over a little bit. So, it's a little bit off; we need to adjust that. So, what I want to do is go into Vertex Mode, and pick these vertices, and just tweak them. Now, one thing you might notice is that when we're in Smooth Preview Mode, the edges kind of spread apart a little bit. So, if I go into Regular Mode, all the vertices snapped back to where they were originally. So, that will make it a little bit easier to select. So, for example, we need to select these vertices here. Let me deselect that one, and then go back into Smooth Preview Mode. You can see that they spread out. And, there's actually a lot more visible right here, just because they are spreading out. So, now that we've got them selected, we can just tweak them until this curve lines up better with the blueprint. It was looking better here. It looks like I pushed it a little too far with these other ones. And, I'll just tweak these a little bit. You can also just kind of drag a selection over it, and that's okay for now, but sometimes you can accidentally select vertices that are on, say, the back side of a vehicle. So, you want to be careful when you're doing that. We'll just tweak this into place. Looks like I could tweak these a little bit. Okay, pretty close. Let's go into our Perspective view. I'm just going to get out of Vertex Mode, and maximize our Perspective view, so we can see something. So, notice how there's not a lot of gap between the hood and the body. And, when we look at our photo reference, you can see that there is a little bit more of a gap there. So let's fix that. Now, right now, the body and the hood are still the same object. They're just kind of split off into separate pieces of the same object. So, I'm going to go into Mesh and Separate to truly make them separate objects. Now, when you separate or combine meshes, it turns off their Smooth Preview, so just hit 3 to turn that back on. All right, let's select the hood, and we want to shrink it. So, I'm going to zoom out a little bit, and go into Scale Mode. So, if we shrink it right now, you'll notice it shrinks away from where it should be. So, what we need to do is move the pivot point of the scale, so it's up here with the hood. So, what I'm going to do is hold down D. When you hold down D, you can move the pivot. So, let's move the pivot, so it's right here in the middle of the hood. I'm just going to rotate around to see this from another view, just to make sure it's all good. Okay, good. So now, I just want to shrink the hood a little bit, so that I get a little bit of a gap between the body and the hood. And, let's compare that to the photo. So, I think that's pretty close. Great! So, one thing you might be noticing is that you can see a little bit of light between the two. And of course, in the photo, you're not going to be able to see through to the ground. So, we need to build a little bit of a loop around the body. We'll select the body, and I want to go into Edge Mode, and let's go around to where we extrude it below. Now, what I want to do is select all these edges around the hood. So, first I'm going to start up by just selecting this one here, and there's a quick way to select all the ones that I want. I want to come around to the end of the selection that I want, hold down Shift and double-click the selection that connects the two. Now, what I can do is extrude them. So, this is going to create another row of polygons that just kind of tucks in underneath the hood. Let me zoom out just to make sure that looks good everywhere. All right, great. So, I'm going to exit Edge Mode and just to make sure this looks good. Great! So, that loop that we made, it goes underneath the hood, and it keeps us from being able to see through the car. Okay, one last thing to look at. Here on the door, you can see that the door and the body aren't quite lining up the way they should. Let me look at a photo, so we can see what that should look like. Okay, so it's this point right here, and you can see in our model that it's kind of rounding out when it should be a little bit more of a corner there. So, what we can do with this is, I want to select it. I want to turn off Smooth Preview, and let's just get the Interactive Split Tool. And, what I am going to do with this is create another little extra edge right here. I am just going to click along here, right-click to lock it in, and let's turn on Smooth Preview. And actually, I'm still in the Spit Tool, so I'm going to hit W to go out of that. Let me just click one more time to deselect that, so we don't have those edges in the way. All right, looking pretty good. So, if I hit Z a few times to undo that, you can kind of see what that extra edge is doing. It's just tightening up that corner. We'll go ahead and do the same thing on this corner right here, and then also the same thing for the trunk that we did for the hood. And, we'll pick it up at that point in the next video. So, it's this type of precision that's required when modeling a car. A lot of pieces have to fit together tightly. By making each panel this way, we can maintain a high degree of accuracy. It may seem like a lot of work, but if there's anything off about it, people will notice.
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