I'm James Taylor, back with part 2 of modeling this gun in Maya. This time we focus on starting to add detail.
I'll start really easy with the trigger here. I'll begin with a cube, and I'll Connect Components across the center, to add some subdivisions.
I'll extrude to inset some faces, and I'll get rid of most of those faces, I really only want the outside shape for the trigger.
Now, I'm going to start using Bevel a lot here, and Bevel is going to show up more and more often as we add detail to our object.
For example, I Connect Components across here, and then I Bevel to split those into two edges,
so that I can extrude out, connect across, and now I can create that loop without a lot of extra on additions to create the extrusions.
This is really all we need for the side view, I'll go into the perspective camera and extrude out, to create some depth to this shape.
And now I'll grab all the outside edges, and bevel them.
Bevel creates a sharp edges that are so characteristic of high res surfaces (and mechanical shapes)
(I'll just delete out the back here quickly) and when I smooth, even though I had my beveled edges Creased, we see that it
doesn't give me the shape that I want. We have to remember that I might have to Crease in more than one direction to get the shape that I need.
And now I apply the Mesh Smooth.
to just add subdivisions. We see that the edges there are not smooth, however. In the channel box, for the smooth node, I need to turn off
Keep Selection Border, and Keep Border Edges, and we'll see that that fixes the problem, now it's smoothed around the edges.
and we want to remember this, because this will pop up again and again when we smooth things. So I'll raise my Divisions up to 2 ,and
now I'm getting rid of the edges that I don't need. So we did this earlier when we smoothed, and I'm just
going over it again. The edges that I'm deleting aren't adding anything to the shape of my object.
they're not changing the silhouette, they're not adding any curvature, so I select them and then using Delete Edges.
As a last touch, I'll grab the beveled edges, and use Normals > Harden Edge, on the edges of those, and that will create a
nice sharp border. OK, now we're going to do a rivet, another good example of easy high detail.
I start with a cylinder, and I cut in a lot of subdivisions on the cap, using Connect Components tool with the edges selected.
With all these different subdivisions in there, I'll start extruding them back, and extruding them around,
to create the shape that I need. Basically, we're creating a lot of insets.
I can select the edges of each of those, and Bevel them to create some sharp edges,
and then go in and Harden those edges again, to get me a nice mechanical shape. Now let's do something a little bit more complicated,
which is the pad at the end of the stock. I'll start by selecting the cap of the cylinders that are there,
I'll use Duplicate Face to separate it from the original, and just push it out a little bit,
then I'll go to face mode and delete the bottom half. I'll duplicate the object, and spin it around,
and then I will Combine them together, and just basically Bridge across the center.
Next I extrude the whole shape to start create the depth of the object. I do want I remember to get rid of the faces on the inside that are left
when I extrude. Then I'll do another extrusion - if we look at the reference, we'll see that it tapers on both ends,
so I want to have a row for each of those tapers. After that, I'll add a few horizontal rows using the Connect tool or the Insert Edge Loop tool,
so that I can control the shape, to create a little bit of that curvature. And now I'm just reshaping my object to match the reference a little bit better,
here I'm using the Soft Modification tool / the Soft Selection tool to move my verts into position.
I see that when I use my Smooth Proxy by hitting the '3' key, I get a shape that does agree
pretty well of my reference. I'll grab the edge ring around the end here, and I'll use my Bevel tool,
and I can always adjust the Bevel after the fact in the channel box, which can be a lot easier than setting it ahead of time.
Let's start to do something a little bit more interesting. I'll do a few more bevels,
I add some creases, and I Mesh Smooth my object to make it fairly high res. I'll use quite a few subdivisions,
because I want to create these grooves on the end of the object next. I'll start by building a cube and just intersecting it with my object.
I make sure it extends beyond the extents of the object, and I'll Bevel the edges, I want to get as final as shape as I can.
Then I'll start duplicating it to create the right number, and then I Combine, Next, we'll use an animation tool. I'll change my drop down in
the top left to Animation, and go to Create Deformers > Nonlinear. With the object selected, let's create a Bend Deformer.
And over in our channel box, we can edit the angle of the bend so that we get something that
matches the reference. We use this new object as a Boolean, and Boolean works best with solid objects.
So I duplicate the stock across the axis, I'll Combine it together, I'll Merge Verts, and now I'm ready to Boolean.
I'll select the stock first, and the boxes second. and I'll use a Boolean > Difference to subtract the boxes from the stock.
The order that we select them in is important. Remember that!
Ok, I'm going to go to the other end of the gun, to the barrel, and do something interesting.
I select the faces on the barrel and I want to create a ridged effect. So in the Edit Mesh menu, I can turn off Keep Faces Together,
and when I extrude, I see that the faces are extruded separately, I can scale each independently, this gives me a nice ridged effect.
Now in Maya 2015, Keep Faces Together is not in the Edit Mesh menu, its in your Channel Box, under the Extrude.
Keep that in mind, it's in a different place once you move to Maya 2015.
Ok, back to the body. I'll grab the bottom faces of the body, and use my Mesh > Extract
to break those faces apart. Then we can grab the edges along that seam, and just move them manually to create that gap between the top
and the bottom part of the body. This is an important feature of the gun, so I adjust this manually to get the shape I need.
I know the shape will be important later, so we're focused on getting it right now, before I start smoothing or subdividing.
Ok - let's do these grooves on the side of the body. I start with a cylinder, and I'll use just the cap, I'll extrude down down,
This is pretty much the same thing we did on the stock. I'll move and scale this thing into place, but we see that when I scale it narrower,
the cap becomes distorted. So here's a trick - I'll select some verts, and then I hold down the 'd' key
'd' key, and I can change the pivot point of that selection, and then I can scale it to fit.
Now I'll extrude the outer ring of edges. And I'm doing this instead of extruding the faces.
You'll see that the one edge has been extruded improperly. If I go to my Move tool settings, I'll set my Move Axis to Normals Average,
and then I can push that edge into place, it'll move normally. So the next thing I'll do is extrude outside,
to create a little bit of a border. And I can duplicate that object to create that arch on the lower portion - I'll just rescale it to fit.
Now I need to integrate these objects into the side of my gun. What I'll do is use that border I just created, to fit these together.
So I'll push those points out, I'll use them to basically spread out around the object, to create the flat surface this will be around these.
Basically, the side of the gun's body. I'll use my Scale tool on the outer ring of edges to ensure that it's flattened,
and then Combine those two objects together, and then start Merging the verts together,
and then I optimize the edge flow, to make it easier to deal with. I'll use my Split Polygon or my Multi Cut tool to cut faces around those shapes,
and delete those from the main body, creating the hole that those pieces will fit into.
Then I can combine those two shapes together.
NowI have to start to Merge Verts and connect the two pieces together. So I can use my Bridge tools to connect edges,
I can use my Merge Verts Tool to just snap verts together. I can extrude from some of these edges and then Merge the Verts together,
so it varies based on what part of the object we look at. We're trying to close up all of these holes, so that we have a nice solid mesh.
You'll see I'm spreading these verts around, I'm not just connecting things to corners. This is because I want to
avoid having any triangles that are way too sharp. So this video has focused on mid level detail, and with the next video we
step up another level, and start adding very fine resolution detail.
All right! I'm James Taylor, thanks for watching.