10 Ways to Improve Your Modeling in Maya

Let's go ahead and start off by talking about what is, in many cases, a big roadblock for students who are just beginning to model. And that is, kind of, how to break down our projects into manageable chunks and to think about the best way to create our models before we start. So I'm just going to jump into Photoshop, and we're going to look at some images here to begin with. And so we'll look at this motorcycle example. And so if you're just starting modeling, you may have some exposure to many of the tools that you've used and maybe you have some experience using those tools, but it just is daunting coming up and try to figure out how to create complex models like this motorcycle. And so one of the important things to think about if we're using this as a reference is to realize that all of these models can be broken down into individual pieces and shapes. So this is not, obviously, all going to be one piece, so we're going to have a number of different types of pieces that are going to go together. So if we just break those down into smaller sections that'll help us a little bit. So, for instance, if we take this section up here, you can see that there's a lot of detail going on here. But if we take a closer look, we can see the tire is, basically, a torus, OK? The fender is, basically, a section of a torus. So thinking about that we can use a torus shape to create that. If we look at these spokes, they're basically very thin cylinders. There's just a lot of them. OK? If we look at this piece inside here, it's a cylinder with some cut outs. So just thinking about the large over all shapes and then not really looking at the detail. Just trying to figure out what type of geometry or what type of shapes I can use to build this. You can see we've got some pipes coming down here. And they're, basically, just a cylinder shape the flows along a particular line or curve. So if we know anything about NURBS, we know that maybe that would be a good option for this. Also thinking about the type of geometry that we can use. If we come along an object that maybe has some pieces coming off of it, like maybe some parts of this engine, maybe those are good candidates for polygon objects. So really just think about the individual sections and start to break those down into the individual shapes. So you can build the tire and the wheel and all that by itself, and then bring that in and start to build up some of these other pieces. And as you just, kind of, methodically go through this, you'll eventually end up with what is a very complex model at the end. OK? And let's go ahead and look at this guy right here. So building characters is the same sort of thing here. I'm just going to add a new layer here to use as an example. So we can do is if we have some artwork like this we're going to be using, what we can do is to come in and figure out what objects we can make as what. So we've got these legs here, which the legs could probably be built as NURBS because they're just going to be these, sort of, cylinder shapes. So maybe we want to just kind of color that in and say green is going to be our NURBS color just for our reference. That's going to be NURBS. And you can even maybe note that. OK And sometimes artists will do this as well if they're getting files back and forth and some is going to be modeling something for someone. If you have an idea of what you want a specific piece to be they'll paint over and do a little notation on that maybe. We've got the head, obviously, that's going to be maybe a polygon or a SubD. You can color that poly and just start to break these models down into the different pieces. So we know that this is going to be actually one piece here. We need the neck to be connected to the head. But we don't need to build the entire body as one piece, because we have a shirt, we have pants, we have a jacket. So don't try to do too much as far as you might think about building the head and then combining that with the rest of the body and then modeling clothes over the top of that. It's not really necessary. You just need to have that geometry where you can see it. So we could build it down into the neck until it goes into maybe we have a shirt here. And then we build the coat over the top of that. The pants are a separate piece. So maybe this is a polygon in here and maybe just the legs are NURBS. So really start to think about the type of geometry that we need. The coat has a lot of detail as far as we've the collar and a lot of these things. So maybe that would be better as a polygon as well. But maybe these bands on the side those are just kind of a torus. So maybe those would work well as NURBS geometry. So just going through the process and it's the same process we did with the motorcycle. Just thinking about how we can break these sort of things down into shapes. So we've got a cylinder shape. We've got cylinder shape, cylinder shape. This is probably the most complex shape, but we can look at how to break that down a second. Again, we've got what starts out as probably a cylinder shape and then connect up some more cylinders to that. So as you start to break these things down, it will get a little bit easier when you're looking at reference to be able to break that down and decide how exactly you're going to build that. So when we're working on let's say a character or even another type of a model, I'll go ahead and create new layer here, we can also define the topology before we get started. So let's say if we want to come in here and start to block in this topology. Just as an idea, we want to make sure that we get the right topology in here to follow along with these lines that we have. We want to maybe have a line up the middle. We want to get a nice loop around the eye. We can start to draw that out. I want to come in here on the corner. And we know we want to maintain quad so we can start to draw this out a little bit. Maybe this comes up here. And this comes up here. And so we can start to plan out our topology just here in Photoshop or just with whatever application you're going to be using. And just think about how we want those edges to flow and that'll give us a little bit better idea as we go into our modeling application how we want that to actually work. So here we probably want some edges to come out of the mouth. We want to have a nice loop around the mouth. And maybe we want that edge to come down there. So we can start to just plan out some of our edges. And it's real easy. We haven't done any modeling or anything like. It's real easy to come in here and just change those. But one way that we can use to preplan our modeling, I think it'll help as we come in and create our model to have as much information as possible before we actually start doing any sort of modeling. So I think that's something important to think about, the fact that you can create models that are complex even if you don't have a lot of experience if you just break them down into the small little pieces as much as you can. So this looks like it has a lot of detail, and it does have a lot of detail. But things like this you can break down and really build, just go one little bit at a time basically. So I guess I just want to also encourage you and also tell you that you can do this sort of modeling. And that's something that really seems to trip up a lot of students. When they get going they get frustrated, because they have trouble visualizing how to build something that is complex. And they get kind of frustrated, and they want to stop. So just keep going. If you get frustrated take a break. And just go back and start to break down your model and what you want to do into smaller pieces. And eventually you'll get there, for sure. All right? So let's jump in in the next lesson and start to look at some specific tools and techniques that we can use to kind of get over those humps and just make our workflow be a little bit better. So we'll go ahead and in the next lesson look at the types of geometry in faces that we're going to be dealing with.