Free Friday Tutorial #11 Hard Surface Modeling In Maya 2012
 

Hard Surface Modeling In Maya 2012 on Vimeo

Interesting video by ctbram thanks again.

I did not know about the merge verts tool thanks Rick(cant teach a old dog new tricks yes you can).....LOL..........dave

That was a feature in 3ds max for a long time and I am greatful that autodesk added it to maya a couple revs back.

I was finding it difficult to answer ipatches questions so I thought it best to to record the process.

???? run that by me again dave????

Yes Bullet I didnt know about the merge vert tool as shown in this tutorial, I have only seen tutorials were they move "v" together then highlight the verts then merge. This should save some time............dave

LOL well now you know man...jeez mate that must have been painful to do your models ...wow...oh well move into the light mate.

cheers bullet

No worries Dave. I did not know they had added the modify convert polyedge to curve tool until bullet pointed it out to me recently. I then spent a day going through every tool menu and watching all the whats's new videos from maya 2009 to 2012 lol.

That merge vertex tools comes from the 3ds max target weld tool. For all the complaints I have about maya's aging modeling tools I guess I should commend autodesk for making some long needed additions. For instance did you know maya's edge extrude never had offset, and the poly extrude never had thicken until recently. As a technical modeler it's inconceivable to not have this functionality and I am very grateful they added it.

Now we just need solid drill, stencil, true fall offs, background constraints, and pattern selection. Fingers crossed! (smile)

You've got some N-gons on the top there! I am always a little confused about N-gons. Some people tell me to avoid them like the plague but online I sometimes see really good models made of entirely triangles. Whats the reason to work in all quads- and why did you leave some Ngons in the big circle in the middle of the model?

Thank you for the video!

Here watch this ngons and low poly myths - YouTube

Should explain it for you.

Video thanks to ctbram.
Dave :)

BTW the reason you see models made entirely of triangles is certain software is only capable of working with triangulated geometry. Realflow for instance.

Watch ctbrams video he explains it much better than I could here.

Dave :)

Is there any chance that these vids will go on the SimplyMaya YouTube channel? I have an extremely slow internet connection because the Tories are trying to pull the UK back into the 1980s (don't look at me, I didn't vote for them) and Vimeo vids are a hideously slow pain in my backside, too hi-res, and you can't scale them down. On youtube selecting 240p works fine if I let it load for a bit first. Might this happen?

KartoonHead Sure give me a second I'll upload it there now, well actually give me a collection of seconds to upload it.

Yes there are ngons at the cylinder caps. Those are planar and will not deform so they will render just fine and so I left them there intentionally.

The thing with ngons is that if you are working in a studio pipeline or you intend to sell your work you can not always know how your model will be used and ngons can cause problems if the model is deformed or when uv'ing and texturing.

For this video I did mention that you should strive for all quads and the the occasional unavoidable triangle.

However, I did fail to mention that I left the ngons in the model intentionally because I know that an ngon on a planar surface will render fine and that the model is not part of a studio pipeline and that it will not be deformed, uv'd or textured.

The purpose of the video was to demonstrate an alternative method to putting holes or extracting circular details from a surface. Instead of making the surface and then drilling holes, I proposed creating the holes and then filling in the gaps between them to create the overall surface. I only intended to demonstrate this idea and not develop a perfect final model.

I also tried to demonstrate a generous subset of the modeling tools that would be helpful to someone new to maya - combine, bridge, edge extrude, insert edge loop, target welding verts, deleting edges, poly extrude thicken and offset as well as how to control edge tension with control edges and the use of the marking menu system.

I hope this clears up some of your questions.

Awesome! Thanks a bunch. And I think you just broke the world record for the quickest evaluation, response and action time of any webmaster ever. (an impressive 6 minutes!)

Ya but my upload speed sucks today sorry about that. About 23 min. remaining... according to youtube.

Dave :)