10 Ways to Improve Your Modeling in Maya

In this lesson, we'll take a look at a few ways that we can add sharp detail to contoured surfaces. And this is an issue that arises mainly when we're working with a smoothing type of workflow that as we're building kind of low res geometry and we're going in and smoothing it afterwards. And so let's say we want to add kind of a sharp-edged detail with some sharpness to it onto a smooth surface so part of the same model. So we go in and extrude this geometry up. We start to add some edge loops to get that nice and sharp for when we smooth it. But unfortunately, it affects the rest of the model. So as we add those edge loops here, they flow across the model. And they create these sort of seams. You can see here we've got this sort of crease in the model. And it just affects the overall shape when we've got something that is nice and curved and we start to go in and add edge loops to get this nice sharp look. So there are a few different ways that we can tackle this. Now, we'll use this hood as an example. If you're working with something that's really high res and you're not going to be smoothing it, there's not much of an issue. So if we were to go ahead and convert this smooth mesh preview to polygons, you can see we have all of these polygons here. And so we can go ahead and let's just select some of these polygons. And we'll just grow this selection a bit just to use as an example and go ahead and kind of extrude that up. And let's kind of rotate this around. So as we start to get in here and work this up, if we don't have to add any additional edge loops, then it's not really an issue. So if we come in and kind of extrude this in, repeat that, and push it in here, we can get that really sharp edge with this smooth surface because we haven't changed anything. We haven't added any resolution across the surface. So that's one way to go about it. You can come in and bevel those edges if you wanted to. Another way to do this would be to use a subdivision surface. So if we were to go ahead and take this polygon hood here, and let's go ahead and just convert this polygon to subdivision surface. So now it's a subdivision surface. So if we now want to use our polygon modeling tools on this, we'll go to our Surfaces tool set. Under Subdivision Surfaces, I'm going to turn on Polygon Proxy mode. Now we can go ahead and select let's say these particular polygons here and go back to polygons. Let's go ahead and extrude those up. So we can extrude that up. We can go ahead and rotate that selection something like that. Go ahead and select those front faces. Again, do some extruding here just kind of pulling those in. Do that again and push it in a bit. And so we're able to get some resolution in here. Now, the edges aren't really sharp. And so instead of adding additional edge loops in here to sharpen this up, what we can do is actually crease the edges. So let's go back to our Surfaces. And we'll turn on Standard mode here, select our sub-D. And so now what we can do is let's say we want this edge to be nice and sharp. So let's go ahead and select all of these edges on this corner where we want the sharpness to be. And now we can go up to sub-D Surfaces. And we can add partial creases or a full crease. If we want it to be completely sharp, we can add a full crease. So you get something like that. If we want to kind of gradually take this up, we can do a partial crease and another partial crease and increase it that way. We can also come in and sharpened things up by creasing the edges over here so creasing those edges. And that will allow us to get, you can see the contrast from this side to this side, get some nice sharp edges without affecting the rest of the geometry. And it blends kind of in with the smoothness back here. So that's another nice way of getting sharp edges with your geometry. Now, if you're going to be converting back and forth between different types of geometry, in some cases, you may not be able to carry that creasing throughout the pipeline. So in those cases, you'll need to bake that into the geometry. Let's look at one more option for creasing. We can now use polygon creasing as well. So if we're working with our smooth mesh preview and we go ahead and select a similar face selection here, and let's go ahead and extrude those polygons. And let's kind of rotate those around. And let's select some polygons up here at the front. Now again, we'll go ahead and scale those down a bit and then push those in. And we smooth that out. This is what we get, right? So here again we want to have those nice sharp edges. So instead of going in and again adding resolution there, we can come in and select those particular edges just like we did with the sub-D only now we're working with a smooth polygon, basically a polygon with just that smooth mesh preview turned on. We select those edges. And now what we want to do is go ahead and go to Edit Mesh and all the way down to the Crease tool. And we open that up. You can see we've got Absolute and Relative. We'll just leave that the way it is. And then when we middle mouse drag, we can increase the amount. So you can see as I increase that, it gets sharper and sharper. And we can do the same thing here. And we'll go ahead and select these as well. And we go ahead and use the Crease tool to sharpen that up. And so you can see, again, the contrast one side to the other side. You can see that is sharper versus the side that isn't. And if we were to go ahead and convert this smooth mesh preview, it maintains that sharpness there on the side. Now, if you want to have this sort of geometry or this sharpness baked into the geometry so it's completely portable, you don't have to worry about saving any creasing values or anything like that, there are ways to do that. Now, the first one, you remember the first one we looked at had those edge loops added that you typically do when you're kind of adding hardness to edges when you're smoothing it. Let's go ahead and extrude this. But the edges were really causing an issue as they went around the sides of the contoured object. And so we want to try to avoid that. So let's go ahead again and create the same basic shape here. And let me just push that in a bit and one more time. And so again, as we smooth this, you can see, well, this gets really soft. And we want to have a nice sharp edge there. So one of the ways that we could do this would be to add edges for instance along this side. But if we were to go ahead and do that just by inserting an edge loop here, you can see that this creates an issue for us. Because as it comes down here, this smoothing isn't going to be interrupted because these are so close together. So what we can do is insert an edge loop in different locations here. So let's say for instance that we want it to be kind of right along this center here until it gets up here. And then we want to be right along the edge. So I'm just going to go ahead and add an edge loop right along the middle. Now here I want to take this edge, go ahead and delete it, this edge, go ahead and delete it. And then I'll simply select this edge. And I'm just going to go ahead and delete the edge. There's also an option here for sliding the edge. Or if you wanted to slide this over with the middle mouse, you could just slide that over. And that will take into account the geometry. So you could use a Slide Edge tool. You can also delete that edge and just add a new one in here just like that. So you've still got the same resolution. And now you take your Split Polygon tool and just connect those up and then connect this up in the back. So either way works. If you want to just leave, if you're going to use your Slide Edge tool, you don't really even have to delete that initial line there. You can go ahead and just leave that and slide only the selected edges across. So now as we smooth this, you can see that we're not really getting that creasing that we had before on the first example. But we are able to get something that looks a little bit closer to what we want here. And we can go in and start to add edge loops as we normally would kind of right along here to kind of sharpen things up. If we wanted to sharpen this up, we'd do kind of a similar thing. So I come in and add this along here. Now, if I want to take, for instance, these edges here, I'll just go ahead and select those particular edges. And let's go ahead and use our Slide Edge tool. And you can see I can slide that up. And it takes those edges with it. So that's another great option. So the edges are close where they need to be. And they're spaced out where they need to be. And that allows you to get a little bit more of this sharp edge. So again, something that trips people up a little bit but there are a number of different options to be able to get this sort of a look. Depending on whether you're smoothing your objects or not, any of these different techniques could be useful for you. So just try them out and see what works best for you, what works best for the specific application that you're talking about. So the next thing that we're going to talk about is using irregularity to our advantage so messing things up a little bit to take away that CG look, which is important any time you're modeling. So let's go ahead and take a look at that in the next lesson.