10 Ways to Improve Your Modeling in Maya

In this lesson, we'll talk a little bit about the importance of adding kind of irregularity, kind of messing things up, when we're doing our modeling. And that may sound a little bit odd. But it's a recurring theme in a lot of our training. And it's going to be an important aspect of creating realistic models. And that is the fact that, when we build models in the computer, the computer is going to try to make them completely perfect as far as straight lines. Everything's going to be straight. And so it's our job to go in and mess things up a little bit. Because, in reality, things don't have that kind of sharpness where everything is nice and perfect. So to kind of mimic the real world, we'd want to in different ways kind of mess things up a little bit not only in kind of the creation of our individual models but also in the placement as we go in and start to build some sets. So we'll use this kind of living room as an example. And you can already see a couple of ways that we've done this already. And that is kind of all of these sort of CDs are pulled out. But they're not pulled out all the same distance. It's kind of randomly pulled out. And you can see that we've also here taken these sort of DVDs and just taken some out and kind of messed them up a little bit. So taking some and some of them are laying down. It's not a perfect configuration where they're all stacked neatly. You can see some are further back than the others. Some are on their sides. So it just makes it look a little bit more real. Now, on something like this cabinet here, it's also a good idea, in many cases, to kind of roughen up some of these edges. So everything right now is nice and completely straight and sharp. But if we want to go ahead and kind of roughen these up, we want to add a little bit more resolution to this. So I'm going to go ahead and add some divisions to this. And so we can maybe add one or two, depending on what works best for us. And so what I want to do now is just kind of rough up some of the edges of the surface. And one of the ways that we can do this is to use our Sculpt Geometry tool. Go ahead and bring that in. And I'm just going to go ahead and turn on Smooth. And then I'm just going to come in and start to knock off some of these edges a little bit. So I can come in here and start to just maybe soften these up a bit. You can also move them slightly. And now we're not going to get too detailed here. Because we don't have a lot of resolution. But we can just start to break up that bevel a little bit so that we get a little bit of irregularity in there. And it's a little bit maybe it's a little bit hard to see. But it can be important when you're starting to kind of break some of these up. And I've done this to kind of break up curb geometry as well. So it will work for that, too. And it just kind of helps to break things up a little bit. And that's kind of an add on, kind of a bonus to add to your models to just break those lines up if you've got some straight lines. Now, this wood's probably going to be pretty straight but if you want to take some of these edges, some of these points, and just, just pull those off just a little bit to give us a little bit of a warped feeling. A lot of times it's going to be subtle. But kind of subconsciously you'll see that sort of imperfection there. And it will make it look a little bit more realistic. So it all depends on how much time you have, how much time you want to spend on it, whether it's worth adding the resolution to this. It all depends on a lot of different things. But it is important to try to think about. And some other applications, we've got things like, let's take this pillow for instance. And so we've got this pillow that we've modeled up. And it's completely smooth. And so that may be not really the look that we're going for. So one of the other tools that we can use to add this sort of regularity is going to be our Transform Components. So what I want to do is go to a vertex selection, select all the verts. And let's go to Edit Mesh. And we'll go to Transform Component. Let's open up the options. And this gives us a random input here, which we can change. And we'll go ahead and say, transform vertex. And this will give us the option to kind of pull this out. And so we'll take the, for instance, the z-axis and just kind of pull everything out. We can do this with the y. And you can see all those vertices move. We can also do it with the x. Let's go ahead and take off our smoothing. Now, you can see that, instead of having a completely smooth surface now, all of these points have been moved a different amount. If we go into our polyMoveVertex, we can change this random amount. So you can see, as I dial that random amount up to one, you can see we get something really a lot of change there with the position of our vertices. And you can see that it's been randomized. So we've just moved it out in one axis or two axes. And all of these have been moved a different amount, which is a really quick way to get some nice variation in there. So we can go ahead and take this up or down to add that. We can go ahead and smooth it. And obviously, it needs a little bit of work. But you can see here in the surface we've really been able to add a lot of subtle variation here within the pillow that gives us a little bit more realism maybe on some of these surfaces that really would take a lot more time to do if we were to go in and move each individual vertex to create this kind of effect. We could also go in and use our Sculpt tool, Sculpt geometry. But that also would take a little bit more time rather than just selecting the vertices, clicking on the tool, and then pulling those out, setting that random value. So you could use the same sort of thing on something like the rug. The chair probably you don't want to add too much in the way of variants here on the surface. But again, you could come in and start to kind of dial things in by just selecting some of these points and kind of moving those around a little bit, kind of tweaking things, this is a sub-D, and just kind of playing with the edges there so they're not completely straight. And you could do the same sort of thing that we had over here as far as kind of smoothing that out a little bit. It all depends on the type of material that you have. Obviously, if we've got something that is more like cloth-like, the rug, you're going to have more irregularities built into that versus something that's a little bit more hard-edged. Those irregularities are going to be mainly just on those kind of edges. Now, you may have a little bit of warping. So really think about the type of material that you're trying to recreate. And that'll help you kind of decide what kind of irregularity that you need to add to that type of material. And so any of those things that you can add, look at a lot of reference, those are going to help you get a more realistic looking result from any of your models and your sets. So it's just something to keep in mind. So the next thing that we're going to look at are image planes. And some people have an issue with bringing in image planes and getting those working and also maybe adding another camera to bring in another image plane. So we're going to go over that process in the next lesson.