Maya 2022 Beginner: Modeling Tools

Name: Maya 2022 Beginner: Modeling Tools
Author: Stephen Steinbach

Explore the basic modeling tools in Maya 2022.

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Course: On-Demand

Hello, my name is Steven Steinbach, and in these lessons, we're gonna cover the basics of modeling in Maya 2022. In Maya, there are two major surfaces that you can model from. There are NURB surfaces, that stands for Non-unison Rational B- splines or NURBS, and Poly. We're gonna focus mostly on poly primitives. But I do wanna show you the difference. So here I'm going to just create a NURBS Torus. And I'm gonna create a polytaurus. Now, let's look at the inputs. I'm gonna decrease the inputs. Let's do 10 and 10. Okay. And we can also hit three to smooth this out. So, so if I right click onto the marking menu here, and here, I'm going to, you can select isoparms, and object modes, control vertexes. And with this, you can see if I move this here, it kind of moves this whole region. So, so NURBS are really good for smooth surfaces, but getting onto the surface, and modeling on the surface is a little bit more challenging. Now over here, we have a polygon. And let's just go to one here. And you can see that when I right click on here, I'm gonna get to the vertexes. And on this one, you can actually see, like these control vertexes, if you look at these, they're off the model. And these are actually directly right on the model. So I can actually select this particular vert and move it. Now the use soft selection, hold the B key. And with the left mouse button, drag. And this is how big your soft selection is. So if I select it like this, I can now move this whole area. And let me press the B key. And let me do this again, where I go larger. And now this whole region goes. So this is a quick little shortcut. So now it's really big. And if I type the three key, it kind of acts like a NURB surface. And NURBS are, are very useful. I just wanna show you this real quickly. So if I just delete this here, delete this, and go into a, let's do a side view panel perspective. Let's do a front view here. Okay, so if I click on curves, and go to my curve tool, my EV curve tool, and I'm gonna type, I'm gonna hold the X key to snap to, point. And I'm just gonna quickly create a little shape like this. And like that. So this, now if I right click or actually just hit enter, so this is just a curve. What's nice about NURBS, is you can do this, you can do a revolve like this. And you have a nice potted plant or something. And then what's also cool, is it can update here, whereas you can go to the control vertex right here, and you can make modifications. So it's a quick way to create something symmetrical, though a lot of game engines can't support NURBS, so they have to be converted over to Poly. So once I have this here, first I'm gonna delete by type history. And that makes this this, when I delete type by history, this no longer is connected. So, it's just a surface. Now, let me just delete this. And you can see here, that it looks really nice, and it's nice and smooth. It's kind of hard to get corners on NURBS, sharp corners. But if you want a nice smooth surface, you can do that. And now if I go, modify, convert, NURBS to polygons... And let's just move this over. And you can see this. Well, it did a pretty good job converting this, but we have a lot of ingons here. What that means is, you can see here that this base here, right here, it actually has one, two, let me just go up to the, let me do this real quick. I'm gonna right click and go to vertices to vertices. Okay. Now, this one poly has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven vertexes. So that's not really a legal polygon. And you also have, so, so there's some cleanup to do with doing it this way. And a new way to do this now is in object mode. If I, first I'm gonna modify center pivot, and then I'm gonna go to, mesh, read to polygize. And let's click on here. And let's preserve hard edges. And then hit, apply. So what that did, is it tried to make all quads. So each one of these faces are all have four, four vertexes. And you can see how it kind of solved that down here. So this one's a little bit different. There's a couple right here and right here, that this has three. So this vertex right here has three sides instead of four. And there's here. And there's another one over there. But it solved it pretty well. Okay, so we have another poly here. And again, we can see that we'll stay in non smooth mode. Now with polygons, you have loops and you have rings. A loop, gonna click, right click on my marking menu, and go to edge, and click on this edge, and then double click on the next one. And you can see it loop the whole edge here. That's gonna be important later on when we start getting into the modeling tools, which are here, by the way. And then there's rings as well. To select a ring, select the first edge, hold the shift key and double click. And you can see what it did here. And now this whole ring is selected. Polygons are made up of vertexes, which are basically the corners of a polygon. Edges, which is between the polygons, and faces as well, which is the polygon. Polygons are actually made up of two triangles together. And so these are the actual, the triangles, you just don't see them normally. It's harder to see the edge flow when you have the triangle selected. So what we have here is two triangles together, make a quad. And you can see that here. And depending on how close these loops are together, is gonna be a tighter curve. So if you look at this right here, you can see that this is a nice, nice edge and you get a nice reflection. Whereas this one, if I hit smooth, it rounds our more because I don't have as many loops around that. So in review, a poly surface has an edge here, it has a face here, and it has vertexes here. Thanks for watching.

Beginner Provider : Stephen Steinbach 8 Lessons · 55m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

In these lessons, you will create and manipulate primitive shapes using the basic modeling tools in Maya 2022. You will edit vertices, edges and faces using Maya’s marking menus. In addition, you will modify basic primitives using Maya’s modeling toolbar.

Starting with primitive polygon objects, you will learn how to move, rotate, and scale objects in the viewport. Using marking menus, you will modify the vertices, edges, and faces. With advanced marking menus you will learn how to switch between sub-object modes and grow and shrink selections, as well as add and remove selection loops and rings. In addition, you will use Maya’s modeling toolbar to create more complex shapes, including combining, booleans, and bridging objects. Using the multi-cut and slide edge tool, you will learn how to create more complex shapes from simple primitives. After that, you will use these tools to create proper edge flow with locking loops for proper smoothing. You will also learn how to avoid and fix illegal polygons (N-Gons) for rendering, and how to create proper edge flow in a logical sequence.

What You'll Learn

Create and manipulate primitive polygon shapes using the basic modeling tools in Maya 2022
Move, rotate, and scale objects in the viewport starting from primitive polygon objects
Modify vertices, edges, and faces at the sub-object level using Maya's marking menus
Manipulate objects with the modeling toolbar to combine, boolean, and bridge shapes
Build more complex shapes from simple primitives using the multi-cut and slide edge tools
Generate locking loops to create proper edge flow for mesh smoothing and avoid illegal polygons (N-Gons)

Key Takeaways

The course starts with primitive polygon objects and teaches how to move, rotate, and scale them in the viewport.
Marking menus are used to modify vertices, edges, and faces, switch between sub-object modes, grow and shrink selections, and add or remove selection loops and rings.
Maya's modeling toolbar is used to create more complex shapes through combining, booleans, and bridging objects.
The multi-cut and slide edge tools allow more complex shapes to be created from simple primitives.
Locking loops are used to create proper edge flow for smoothing and to avoid and fix illegal polygons (N-Gons) for rendering.

Frequently Asked Questions

What modeling tools does this course cover in Maya 2022?

It covers the basic modeling tools for creating and manipulating primitive shapes, Maya's marking menus for editing vertices, edges, and faces, and the modeling toolbar for combining, booleans, and bridging objects. It also covers the multi-cut and slide edge tools, edge and face extrude, insert edge loops, bridge and bevel, the retopologize tool, locking loops, and sweep mesh.

What will I be able to do with sub-object editing after this course?

Using marking menus you will modify vertices, edges, and faces, switch between sub-object modes, grow and shrink selections, and add and remove selection loops and rings.

How does this course address rendering issues with polygons?

You will learn how to avoid and fix illegal polygons (N-Gons) for rendering and how to create proper edge flow in a logical sequence, including generating locking loops for proper smoothing.

What skills are associated with this course?

The course relates to 3D Modeling, Surface Modeling, Visual Modeling, Autodesk Maya, Actimize Visual Modeler, and Autodesk Maya Certified User skills.