Leg detail - Maya Tutorial

- [Narrator] So we're here in the mayafile 0405 start and we're actually going to finish the leg piece that we had started in the video previous. So we had gotten our medallion shape built and extruded out our leg using the bridge tool. And then what we need to do now is add that third dimension we can't just leave it as this flat shape. So, that's what we're going to do. So the first thing we're going to start with is we need to extrude that third dimension in there. Now I can't just take the whole shape and extrude it because of this ornate medallion shape that we have. So what we're going to do is actually start with the outside edge. So we'll select that and extrude. And add a local thickness here. And just kind of push that back. And I'm going to set that to one. And this is going to be negative one. In centimeters here. So we'll end up with a two centimeter wide leg which would be about a three quarter of an inch total width here. Since we are modeling this in real world scale at this point So now that we have that what we want to do is mirror this medallion over. Again, we can't just flip it it won't actually go, or extrude anymore. So we're going to select our leg here, and go to our front view. And I'm going to isolate it. And we need to move the pivot point here. The mirroring and the duplicate special tool are all based off this particular point so we're going to hold down V as in Victor for point snapping. And just point snap that to that interior edge loop that we have created. So we'll go back out to our perspective view here. And we're going to use the mirror function for this. So this is going to need to mirror over into the positive X we had modeled it in the negative side of X. So we'll go to mesh, mirror, open up the dialogue box here again, I'm going to reset these settings so that we can go through and get them set for this particular object. We're not going to cut the geometry. We're going to mirror the axis position based on the object not the world. We are going to want to mirror this in X and I do want to go in the positive direction here. And I'm going to combine with the original. And I'm going to set this to a custom option here. And for some reason it's not lettin' me change my direction so let's hit apply. And it did actually work. I have noticed that sometimes the order that you make selections in the mirror tool will blank out the direction axis. So you can see that we do have our fully developed shape and if hit three you can see now that we're in a third dimension. How much closer that actually looks to these leg shapes in our reference image. So now what we're going to do is come in and add those extra details. And again, this is just going to be a lot of beveling. So we'll go not on the whole object we're going to come in on an edge by edge basis. So that we have a little bit more control over what's going on. So you'll see that with the way that these objects were split that the edge loop selection of double clicking is not going all the way around but we'll just quickly get all of those. And I am going to go ahead and double click on this one here across the bridge part to sharpen this up, right in this little nook. And we'll start with the first bevel. Lower our fraction size down to let's go with a point 2 that was a little too much there and add an extra segment. So if we hit three you can see that that should sharpen it up nicely right along that edge and give us that nice kind of crease right there. Now we'll come into the medallion and add the extra edge loops here as well. So I do need this to be really really sharp right up against the edge of this so we'll come in with the, again, edge selection. And I'm actually going to come to the other side as well on this interior and we're going to do a bevel and add a very small fraction to that. With two segments. So if we hit three you can see how that kind of rounds it out and now depending on what you want the top part of this extruded edge to look like we could come in and do a larger bevel. So leave it something like this. And so that will not be as sharp. And it kind of rounds out like the one that we have here. And we're going to come in and add a few more along this little center part of the flower. With this I'm actually just going to use the multi cut tool and get very, very close so that, that will give us a very sharp edge right in here. And again, we'll use the multi cut tool and kind of start making these flower petals just a little bit sharper to the edge of the base part of the medallion here. So we'll quickly just throw these in. And I'm not going to do each one of these exactly the same. These, oops, wrong selection there. These petals were hand carved so having them not be exact will actually give it a little bit more life and a little bit more detail that this type of model needs instead of just making sure everything is exactly the same. The last thing we're going to do here is try to get these petals to touch a little bit closer and we're going to grab each of these vertices right along here. And this should be the last little detail we need on this. And then we'll duplicate all of our legs back on to the body of the table itself. So to move this what I'm going to do is actually hold down control and middle mouse on the Z and this moves objects to their normals. And I'm going to hit the three on the keyboard here and you can see how we can kind of expand that out. And get those petals to actually be much closer to each other right in that particular section. There we go. So we get a nice little ornate flower on the legs here. So we will have to go through each of these I'll leave that to you to go through and do that. And again, it's going to give it more of that handcrafted feel if you do each one of these medallions by hand just real quickly with those extra edge loops as this goes around. We don't have to worry about that outer shape there. Just the inner flower pieces. And again it's going to look a little bit more interesting if they're not exact. And you could start bumping these around a little bit so they're not so perfectly in a circle just to give it that hand feel again. For this sculpted leg. So let's make sure that we're scaled correctly with this shape. Let's move that up so they are actually touching both top and the bottom. There we go. And what I want to do is duplicate this to the other two tripod stands here. So for that to happen is what we're going to do is hide the rest of our objects we'll leave the tripod up but the base table here put that out of the way. Go to our top view. And we're going to use the duplicate special again. Now, the duplicate special I've said many times and I'll keep sayin' it is based on the pivot point of the object itself. So we're going to turn the grid on hit insert with that object selected and I'm going to hold down X and move this pivot point again to that center grid line right in the middle of the scene. Hit insert again to come out. And we're going to go to edit, duplicate special and we are going to actually use the settings that we had last time but again, we'll reset them what this is going to be is two copies and we're going to rotate those 120 degrees each. So we hit apply. You'll see those will all snap right where they're supposed to on top of each one of those little pedestals on the tripod here. And then we'll bring our other geometry back up and we now have our ornate legs with those flower shapes which will really kind of stand out next to this side table. Most of these shapes are very very smooth and round. And then you get these nice sharp edges of these flower petals. Which will really kind of stand out with that extra detail. For those models to stand out I do want to show you just the feet of these as well. So it was that exact process that I just explained on how we can create those. And let me just bring those back up with visibility. And we can take a look because once you see this final model with those feet and having those little ornate pieces on there it'll make the roundness and kind of the plainess of the rest of that oject really stand out. So literally the way I created these was the same way we did these legs. Is I started with the medallion piece. I actually duplicated it over and made it a little bit smaller over here for the flower. Bridged across that. Drew in the extra edge looping here for the rest of the pattern that was in these hand carved feet. Then extruded the edge to the middle. Mirrored it over. And then just came in and added this extra geometry piece here that these feet have or these kind of little leaflets that are being cut into the edge. And so when we smooth that we can actually get that in there so again, going the extra mile for that detail especially on an object as plain as just a side table really is worth the extra effort. There's multiple ways of getting it but different work flows. But I typically find if you can actually add the ornate decoration into your models and have them directly sculpted into the shape or extruded into the shape that it will make your models stand out in the time especially when it comes time at the end of your project for rendering.