I'm James Taylor - let's model this gun in Maya!
So this is a hard surface object, meaning we want to end up with a lot of modeled detail.
But we want to start out simple, with just a basic block-out.
So I've created a cube, and now I want to try and capture the overall basic shape of my object, before I start trying to add any detail.
I'll extrude back from the existing face to capture that handle shape.
You'll see that overall, my subdivisions are angled to match the general angle of the gun.
So the front grip, the back grip, all the angles flow along the same direction.
That's what I've geared my subdivisions towards. Now I want to start cutting in that division between the top and the bottom body.
So I'll use my split polygon or my multi-cut tool, and I'll just cut in and try to match that division between the top and the bottom.
So the stuff that I'm cutting now, for example, I'm using the cut faces tool to cut in a subdivision at the top,
I know that these are going to be important features that will shape the whole model.
That's why I'm working on them now, otherwise I want to still stick with broad strokes.
I'm just pulling up some verts to create the bottom of the barrel area and you'll see that I delete verts when I don't need them,
so that I can make things easy to work with. Now I'm cutting in to define that same line again,
and I cut straight across; and then I've cut down diagonally
and I'm just going to add a point to that diagonal line, to create curvature that I'm going to need there.
I'm also adding subdivisions to create that ejection port area - so I'm basically outlining it,
to capture the overall shape, and I'm making sure that my geometry
lines up cleanly in those areas. I move my verts around, I squash them into flat lines, and merge them together;
the goal is to keep my geometry nice and clean so that it's very simple to work with.
Keeping our mesh organized is absolutely critical for hard surface, high resolution modeling.
Now my Cut Faces and my Multi Cut tools aren't the only ways to add geometry. I've used my Extrude tool here,
to inset a face, so that I can begin to define that empty area between the body and the handle.
Now I'll move the back edge backwards, so that it sits on the handle, to give myself a little space to create the curvature for the grip.
Before I delete the face that I inset, I'll connect two of the edges using my multi-cut tool, to define that angle at the bottom of the grip.
Then I can grab the face, extrude it backwards, and I've got the area for the handle there.
You'll see I moved those points around, I'm just thinking ahead to when I need to smooth.
I'll use my cut faces again to create the curvature of the handle. We'll see that if I select some faces, and then use the cut faces tool,
the tool will only affect the selected area. This is a good way of focusing and cutting in an area,
when we need more detail without affecting the rest of the mesh.
So we've been focused entirely on the low res now, using the multi-cut and cut faces and extrude. Now let's look at smoothing the mesh.
I'll start by using the smooth proxy by hitting the '3' key, this let's us preview the smooth without actually smoothing it.
Now, I need to use the Crease Tool. The Crease Tool is used by selecting edges,
and the Crease Tool allows us to keep parts of our smooth model basically un-smoothed.
So the areas where I need to have sharp, hard corners, those are the edges that I crease.
You'll see that I'm grabbing edges and using the crease tool by just middle mouse dragging.
And as I select edges and crease them, we see they take on shapes that we recognize from before we smoothed.
We're starting to get more curvature, but at the same time, keeping the definition that we created on the low res mesh.
Smoothing definitely changes the shape of our object - we have to move verts around to capture the shape again -
but creasing is really a critical aspect that's not easy to understand. For example, I have to crease this edge here, to create a flat surface
along the bottom of the gun. And in general, anywhere that we want a flat surface, or we need
a sharp corner, we're going to have to crease in more than one direction.
You'll see here (I'll merge this vert downwards), and then I'll play around with creasing all the edges in this area to get the effect that I want.
The point is, if you're creasing to try to get a shape, and can't get it to work right, try creasing the edges
around it, to see if you can get the right, flat shape, with the curvature you need.
In this example, I actually had to cut in new geometry, to get the shape I needed.
Ok, onto the stock - I'll start with some cylinders, and use my cut faces tool to shape them.
That will be much quicker than trying to, say, rotate the cap into place. Then I'll just duplicate downwards,
and extrude from the top one downwards to create the crossbar between the two.
Now the crossbar isn't the right shape. So I'll use my cut faces or connect components tool that cut across, and I'll do that a few times
to end up with that curved shape that I need. This is a really simple shape, we just want to remember that because machined objects
are manufactured out of pieces, we want toconstruct our objects based on those same pieces, that makes the job a lot easier.
Here's a little trick I like to use to mirror my object - go to Edit, Duplicate Special, use the Options box,
make sure that 'instance' is turned on and set the scale to -1, on the axis I want to flip over.
In this case, it's the Z axis to flip it across. I'll get a mirrored version of my object, that will update whenever
my original object is changed. This makes it very handy to see the entire object at one time, and to make corrections for volume and stuff like that.
Ok: up to this point, I've been using smooth proxy and just turning smoothing on and off.
At a certain point, we have to permanently smooth. So: Mesh > Smooth
And we smooth so we can use the extra geometry that's created (extra rows and verts)
to create finer level detail.
But we'll have a lot of extra geometry in there, and in a lot of cases, we don't need it. So I can select edges that
I don't need and use the Delete Edge tool to erase these extra rows.
These extra rows get in the way, make it harder to work with my mesh, so I'm going to optimize my object as much as possible by getting rid of
rows I don't need, and keeping only the rows that I do need. I'll use Collapse or Delete Edge or Delete Vert to get rid of that geometry.
Again, the goal is a simple mesh that is easy to work with.
Now even after I've mesh smoothed, I'll still use smooth proxy, because my mesh is still relatively low res.
I'll use that extra geometry that's been built in to start to sharply define shapes, like the area around this ejection port.
As we smooth, we'll note that concentrating verts in certain areas
creates sharper detail for us. For example, by stacking verts up in this area,
I can control the curvature in this region, more effectively than I could otherwise. One problem that smoothing can cause, is weird overlapping
edges like the one. In this case, we need to twist the edge around, by using the Flip/Spin Edge tool,
so that we're connecting to a different point,so we get much smoother flowing geometry.
So this has been the block-in step, and our general goal here is just to represent the overall shape of our object.
Our next step is to start to add more and more fine level detail.
That's what the next video will cover. I'm James Taylor, thanks for watching!