hi there and welcome to gamedev academy
i'm shane and in this detailed tutorial series
you'll learn how to use maya this tutorial is designed to gradually
take you from a complete beginner through to being able to create your own
3d art in this tutorial you'll cover important settings the maya
interface modeling tools and techniques creating materials and using textures
and finally lighting and rendering and when you've completed the tutorial
you'll have created something that looks like the sce
ne you can see here
before we get started though there are a few things i want to tell you about how
this tutorial works the first is that there are two versions
of this tutorial there's this one which is one long video
which contains over 50 steps back to back
the time code for each step is in the video description and the video is split
into sections using the feature in the youtube player
if this is the version that you want to complete then just hang on for a sec and
we'll get started but if
you prefer to cover each step of
the tutorial in a standalone video then you should try the playlist version
of the tutorial which can be accessed through the link in the video
description below or by clicking the card which is on
screen now the next thing you need to know is that
this tutorial is designed to have a gradual learning curve that will help
you to remember the skills you're learning
and to become more confident the first time something new is introduced i'll
hold your hand through
the whole process but when the same skills come up again
the amount of support i give you will decrease
giving you the chance to reinforce your learning if you get stuck at any point
though you can ask for help in the comments or check the link to the
frequently asked questions which is linked in the video description
there are also five challenges which i'll set you
over the course of the tutorial which allow you to show off your newly
acquired skills and to be creative in making the scene
your
own the final thing i want to tell you
is that there are some supporting assets available to help you to complete the
tutorial these are mostly textures and you are
welcome to create or find your own textures if you would prefer not to use
mine if you would like to use my assets
though you can find the link in the video description
as well as the textures you will also get access to the maya project that i
will be working on during this tutorial which can be helpful to look at if
you're stuck o
r unsure of anything okay that's the introduction done with
now let's move on to part one of the tutorial
which covers some really important settings in maya
welcome to my new my for beginners tutorial
and the first thing i want to do where i want to start is making sure that you
can never lose your work maya has been known to
crash especially if your computer is a bit on the weaker side
so we want to make sure that that can't happen to you
and we're going to do that by setting up undo's auto sa
ve
and also incremental saving so this is the default maya workspace you
can see i've just opened up it's brand new i've got this little prompt here
telling me what's new if you want to you can turn this off um
i don't want to show it at startup but i do like to see what's highlighted
for no particular reason so we'll click on ok to get rid of that
and the first thing i'm going to do is show you where the settings are
and how to turn on infinite undos so we're going to go to windows
and then wit
hin that menu you can go to settings preferences
and then preferences that opens up the settings window
and there are a lot of settings in maya they're separated into categories down
the left-hand side and we can choose the ones that we need to see
so the first one we'll do is undo you can see there's an undo section on the
left-hand side and you can see that undo is turned on
and by default in a lot of versions it's set to finite
and with only 50. if that's the case for you
make sure you have i
t on infinite which means that you can go to edit
undo which is there or you can press ctrl
and z as many times as you want from when you opened maya
and you'll always be able to go back that's the first thing we want to do
next what i want to do is turn auto save on
which means that we can set a period of time let's say every 10 minutes which is
the default and maya will just save our work which
means if something happens like a crash we will only ever lose 9 minutes and 59
seconds worth of wor
k which is good so in order to do that we
need to stay in the preferences window we're going to go to
files and projects and there's an auto save section here and what we need to do
is just click on enable and that's it you can change the interval if you want
so i'm just going to leave it at 10 minutes i find that to be really good
and that's the first half of the autosave strategy that i want you to
implement so we'll click on save for that
now what we're going to do is turn on incremental savi
ng
which will increment your save so instead of just saving the same file
so if we had something called scene it wouldn't just keep saving scene
over the top of scene every time we save it would save scene
then scene one scene two scene three scene four which is really good
because it means that you're not at risk of losing that file
if maya crashes when it's rewriting when it's resaving
it will only ever lose that the newest one
which again it's about just protecting you from losing any work
so
in order to set that up we need to go to file
save scene we'll click on this little box here in maya in the menus
a lot of options in the menu have these little boxes
and that means there's some additional settings we can get to so if we click on
that you'll see that we get this save scene
options and we just need to tick the box for incremental save
if you want to you can limit the number i never do i like to have the whole
sort of history of something i've worked on and then what i will do is
just click
on save scene and that will just make sure that that
setting is saved i've already saved this one since i've been warming up this it
might ask you to just give the scene a name
which you just need to do and then click on save
okay that's it then for this first step the real
super important thing i always show everybody to do first of all
now we've got that under our belt in the next step we're going to move on to a
bit of a tour of the my interface i will see you there
welcome to ste
p two in this step what i want to do is just take a look
at the interface in maya as you can see just
by default there's a lot going on i just want to quickly tell you what each part
of this interface is for and what it does and then we'll be able
to move on to a bit more of the nitty gritty
so let's start with right here up at the top
this is just your standard windows menu bar
so we've got your usual kind of file edit
create select modified display windows and these have all got sort of
consis
tent things in the menu but after that you've got things like mesh
edit mesh mesh tools and these are related to the modeling menu set the
thing about maya is it has so many different options
they don't all fit across the top so it sorted them into categories using
this drop down box just here so you can see that by default we're on
modeling which is where i want us to be but there are others so there is rigging
and you'll see that the options over here change we've got animation
effect renderin
g and you can also customize your own menu set as well
for now we'll just go back to modeling we've got
across the top some fairly common options
so things like new save undo redo we've got some different snapping
options and then these are related to rendering
materials we'll get into them all later below that we've got this area here
which is called the shelf and it's just a tabbed way of
arranging shortcuts to our tools that you'll use
for certain things so by default we've started in the pol
y
modeling one and this shows us some of the primitive shapes we can create
and some of the ways that we can modify them there's also the similar sort of
thing for curves which is another way of modeling
sculpting which is another way of modeling them we've got rigging
animation and again for this if you want to you
can set up your own custom shelves so just put that back on poly modeling
for now this big space here in the middle is called the viewport
and this is where you view what you're work
ing on
so there are some things that we can do for it the viewport's got its own menu
and we can do things like turn display options on and off
we can change the type of camera we're using there's a lot going on
in here we'll get into that as we go further through the tutorial
down the left-hand side you've got really common tools so you've got a
couple of selection methods here so you've got normal
selection tool you've got your lasso tool which is you can just draw a
lasso around what you want
to select you've also got your paint selection
tool which allows you to paint components so things like vertices
or edges or faces and select them that way i
though in the years i've been using it i've hardly ever used these bottom two
i've got all the ways that i like to work
and then the next three are fairly important ones you've got your
move tool which is used to move things around your rotate tool
and your scale tool again we'll cover these more as we start to use them
you've also got som
e default views and i think there are fewer here than they
used to be so this is the one that we're currently
on now which is the one pane which has a perspective view in it there's also
what's called the four view which we'll come back to later you've
got a side-by-side view which we'll call the two of you
is that what they call it in mine i don't know and then
we've got um the same sort of view but it has an outliner
as well we'll go back to this view here let's just hide that over on the
righ
t hand side this is called the channel box and will probably be what
you're seeing by default if you've just opened maya and this
gives you settings and options for things that you
have selected we also have some tabs down here so
there's a modeling toolkit which has a lot of tools that are used
within modeling which kind of makes sense and
there's the attribute editor which also gives you ways of selecting
and changing the properties of certain things
sometimes you need the attribute editor som
etimes you need the channel box
and again we'll touch on these later as they become relevant
down at the bottom this is your timeline and this is used for animation
so you can see this is just counting the frames we've got some controls for it
here some further controls this is all to do
with animation on the timeline this is your time slider this tells you
how many frames you've got in total we've currently got
200 and how many frames you're displaying from 1
to 120 and then down here this just
displays
important information so that's pretty much
the interface but you can change it depending on what you're doing
so up at the top you've got the workspace drop down
and by default you'll probably start in maya classic
which is the one that i learned to use way way in the past
but now they have different options and i'm going to suggest that moving forward
we switch to modeling standard and what this does
is just streamlines the interface a little bit
we've lost all the animation stuff be
cause we don't need that we've also
got the modeling toolkit open for us and the attribute editors open here as well
we can also get the outliner when we need it which we will at some point
going forward right i think that brings us to the end
of this step well then for sitting through it didn't really give you much
to do but hopefully you've got a better idea
of what all the different elements of the workspace are because we will be
using a lot of them moving forward okay next we're going to
pr
epare to start making things by creating a project
and saving a scene two really important steps and these are the first things
that you should do when starting any 3d modelling work in
maya so let's take a look at that next
welcome back nice to see that you haven't been scared off
that must mean that you want to know how to create projects
and save scenes in maya as that's what we're going to be doing in this step
first thing we need to do is think about what projects are
in maya maya doesn't s
ave everything in just one
file it saves them into a directory into a folder
and within that folder it has some subfolders
where we should save different elements of a 3d project
such as the geometry the textures things like that first thing we'll do is
go into the file and
project window this is where we create new projects so click
on that and it opens up this so by default if you try and click and
type in here that won't work because you need
to click on new first to tell maya that you want a
new
project so i'm going to call it saw servers
desk and i'm choosing to save mine onto the desktop but by default it will
probably offer you in your documents folder in
maya there's a projects folder there you can choose to use the default if you
want i'm just putting mine on the desktop so it's easier for me to get to
but if you do want to change location just click on this folder choose
wherever you want next you'll see that you've got lots of
names of different things here this is what the
folders are going to be called
you can if you want to change the names of these
and maybe that suits some workflows but i've never found a reason to change any
of those so i won't be doing that all i want to do is click on accept
and that then should have created our project
so now let's just minimize mine and have a look so you can see it created me a
new folder and it's put it where i told it to
and then we'll open that up and you can see that within that folder
it's created all of these subfo
lders so we've got the scenes folder which
will save the maya scene file we've also got source images which is
where the textures that we're going to use
need to go there's an images folder which
is when we start a rendering and that's where it puts the rendered images
and we've also got an auto save folder there which is where
the auto saved files when we set it up in the first step
that's where they're going to end up so as long as you can see all those folders
you did it right well done give
yourself a pat on the back we can close that
and now mosey over back into maya and then while we're here while we're
covering this sort of thing we'll just cover creating a new scene and then
saving it so let's create a new scene it's nice
and easy file new c you can also press ctrl n
it'll ask you if you want to save i haven't made any changes to this so i
don't need to save it so now i've got my new scene it's
currently called untitled uh i don't want it to be called that so
i'm going to go to
file save scene as and you'll see that by
default it's in that sorceress desk project in the scenes folder and now
i need to give it a name so i'm going to call it
sorcerers desk that seems like a pretty good name and
then i'll just choose save as and that's it
the scene has been saved we're now ready to move on the reason that we saved this
even before we've done any work on it is because now
auto save will kick in until you save a scene for the first time
auto save can't do anything but now t
hat we've saved it
every change that we make will be saved every 10 minutes
in line with what we set up so we are now ready to start making some stuff
in the next step so we're going to create our first
3d shape in maya which is going to be a floor so i will see you in the next step
for all that excitement okay part four time to make our first
shape in maya and this is going to be
something that will represent a floor in our little room so
first thing i want to do is make sure that we are on the
modeling
menu set so that's this one here make sure you're on modeling
and also make sure you're on the modeling shelf the poly modeling shelf
so that we're on the same page moving forward in maya there are lots of
different ways to do everything there are at least three ways i think to
do anything so i'm going to try and show you different ways
i'm not aiming to show you necessarily the best or fastest
i'm just trying to introduce you to lots of different things so you've got a good
understand
ing and then you can make your own decisions
with that said the first thing we're going to do is create a polygon plane
which is just like a flat 2d square i'm going to do that from the
create menu so if we go to create up here you'll see
that you've got polygon primitives and we want to create a plane and you
will see that that is created on the grid in the center of the grid in
your viewport the next tool i would like to introduce
you to is the resize tool which is
this one here the scale tool
so you can click on that
or you can press r on your keyboard the reason it's r
is because these first four tools one two three
four are the top four keys on the top rov keyboard
so it's q w e and r and that's why
the scale tool is set to r okay so when you turn that tool on you will
see that you get all these different manipulators and
they all do something different so they're color color-coded and that
should show you using this thing in the bottom corner here
it will tell you what they relat
e to in terms of which axis
so if i drag on this red one that's going to scale it
on the x-axis and then i'll press ctrl and z to undo that
i can scale it on the z-axis and i could try scaling it on the y-axis but it
won't do anything because this is just a 2d shape
what we can also do is we can scale it on two axes now in this case if i scale
it on the green one that means that it will scale on the
other two axes so we'll keep y the same but scale on x and z so
if we do that there we go and the
same for these but
again because this is only a 2d shape it doesn't work the same
and then the last one is this one in the middle is
all axes at once so if we click and drag on that
that's what it will do so you can see that that now
is going up to about the size of the grid is what we're going to go for just
as a rough guide so that is the
scale tool but i also want to show you that you can resize
by typing numbers in as well if you want to do that so what we need to do is get
the channel box
open so because we open the modeling
workspace that's now disappeared to get it back what we're going to do is press
control and a on the keyboard and press it a couple of times and it
will pop up and what i'm going to choose to do
is just drag it over here in fact let's put it there i'm going to drag it so
that we get a tab here so i've now got attribute editor
modeling toolkit and channel box all placed over here
we can see that it's called p plane one this is its name here
and it's got some a
ttributes so it's currently
size to 24.004 units on mine and what i would like it to be is 25
exactly just because that seems to be the size that the grid is set to so
we'll set it to 25 by 25 by 25
that is actually a little bit bigger than the grid maybe the grid set to 24
24 by 24 by 24 yeah that's better so that's now the
same size as the grid lovely the last thing i want to do then
now that we've resized it in a couple of different ways
is just show you how to rename it you should rename
eve
rything as soon as you create it in maya because you can quickly
get hundreds of shape but you don't know what they're called
so try and get into the habit of renaming things as
quickly as you can every time you create something
so what i'm going to do is just click here
and it's called pplaner1 i'm going to rename that to
floor which seems a good name for it because it is in fact a
floor and just while i'm here i'll show you one more thing we've got this
input section clicking on inputs does no
thing but if you click on poly plane 1
it brings up some settings so again you can resize it here to
the width and height and you can also set how many subdivisions it's got
that's these lines that divide it into smaller squares
and for this because it's just going to be a flat floor to save on geometry i'm
going to set it to one and one and you can see there
are now no subdivisions on there that then is our floor we're done with
that i'm happy with it it's the best goddamn floor i have made all
day and i
have made tons of flaws so yeah we've done well we are really
really motoring through this well done right next one we're going to be getting
to grips with navigating in maya so how we move around
the scene so rotating zooming panning dollying
all that good stuff so if you're excited about controlling a camera in 3d space
i know i'm going to see you in the next video
you're back that means you want to know how to move around
in maya so let's do that in maya you need a three button mou
se to
be able to navigate properly that means that you have a clickable
left right and middle mouse button you're also going to need a keyboard
since all the camera controls in maya require you to
press alt on the keyboard the first one we're going to do then
make sure you've got your mouse in the viewport
hold alt on your keyboard and we're going to
left click this rotates the camera tumbles the camera around so the object
is not moving you're actually moving the camera around the object so
we
can see that that allows us to rotate at the same distance
and because we're currently just focused on the center of the grid
it takes us just around it so that's alt and left click if you want
to zoom in and out you can do that with alt and
right click and drag so i'm going left and right you can see
that's moving the camera in and out so that's physically moving the
position of the camera closer and further away to that plane
that we created the final one is alt and middle mouse
button and thi
s will move side to side so this
is called panning i believe panned side to side
and up and down is tracking i think so those are your three main ways of
moving around in maya so you've got alt and left click alt and
middle click alt and right click if you're lazy which
most of my students are you can also scroll in and out with your
middle mouse if you've got one a scroll wheel
but you can see that does it kind of fixed increments which can be useful
uh but it's not as smooth as doing alt and r
ight mouse button which is much
smoother so smooth when you are new to moving
around in 3d space it's entirely possible that you'll zoom out too far
move stuff off to the side and be all like oh my god
i've lost all my stuff where's my stuff the way that we get it back
is by making sure you've got it selected you can see i see i've got start because
floors here and then you press f which means
frame selected and then that's kind of how you do it so that
will make sure that it centers whatever yo
u wanted and if you
you're getting kind of out of control of the camera so let's say you do this and
you're just trying to move around you're like oh my
right why can't i focus on my plate it's all over the place
then just press f and then when you do that it stays centered
what you can also do so let's say we lose ourselves again let's just oh no
i've lost my work where can it be and we don't have it selected well first
of all f still works because it will just show you what you've got in your
scene it'll show you the grid one or the other
or you can also press a which will frame all so everything in your scene so f and
a are really good in case you get lost so
that is an introduction to moving around in
3d space my advice now is to spend a minute or two just moving
around and getting used to it because it can get really frustrating if
you keep pressing the wrong button um and ending up where you don't want to
be so before moving on to the next step where we're going to create the wal
ls
make sure you're confident with moving around because i won't be covering it
again i'm going to leave that to you now and then once you're confident we'll go
and make some more stuff so i will see you in step six we're
going to make some wars for our room see you there
welcome back so as promised we're now going to put
some walls up for our room we're only going to do
the back walls so that we can see into the room which will make it a little bit
easier for navigation and we're going to creat
e the wall from
a cube so the last time we created a polygon
primitive we did it from the create menu but we've got this poly modeling shelf
open and we can see that there are some shapes there waiting for us just saying
hey would you like to create one of me and
my answer is yes yes mr cube i would like to create one
of you so we're going to do that by just
clicking on the cube icon from the shelf and what this does is creates us a new
cube at the origin which is 0 0 0 on your grid
as i've alre
ady stated i would like you to get into the habit of naming things
as quickly as possible so now that we've created this and we know it's going to
be the wall we're going to name it wall
there we go next what we'll do is just put on
our scale tool and we're going to resize it so it's going
to be this wall here that we're putting in and so if we
resize it on the x-axis which is what i'm doing here
we're just going to decide on what we want the thickness
of our wall to be so i think that thickness
should be plenty it might even
be a bit too much let's bring it in a bit
okay then what i'm going to do is just scale it on the z-axis to get it roughly
where i want it for the length of the wall but to get it
to the exact size that we want we're going to cheat a
little bit and we'll do that by moving into vertex
mode and moving the vertices into place so we're going to make sure
that these vertices line up perfectly with this vertex here
so to do that i'm just going to right click on my shape
this brings up what's
called the marking menu and it gives us some options related to
what we have selected and i would like to put this into vertex
mode so i've still got my right mouse button
held and when i release on one of these options it will do that and then you can
see that as i mouse over it show me that i can
select vertices so what i'll do is just do a marquee
selection click and drag and that's going to select the ones on
the top the ones on the bottom everything on this side
now i'
m going to switch to our move tool which is this one here or w
on the keyboard and just like with this scale tool
we can work in different axes so we've got the y axis going up and down
z is going backwards and forwards and x is going side to side
and what we can do here is just move these vertices so you can see this
side's being left alone and we can move these and try and get
them in line but the real super duper trick that we're going to do
to get this to make sure it perfectly lines up with
the edge of this
is something called snapping you've got some snapping options up here you can
snap to the grid points you can snap to curves you can snap to vertices
and i want to do a vertex snap so to do that
i'm going to press and hold v on my keyboard and you will see that that
highlights up here which kind of snapping i'm going to use
and then just move it on the axis that i want it to
move on so you can see as soon as i do that it
will only snap to where there are already vertices
so it'
s snapped to that one there and then i'll repeat that process
on this side so select all of the verts hold v
and then just move it so that it moves out to where it should be
that wall is now perfectly sized now that we've finished our first foray
into component mode in this case the component was vertices
we're going to just right click on the shape again and go back
into object mode and now with the move tool on
we're going to move it towards the back of the room
and the final thing that we'll
do is just try with the scale tool to get some
height on our wall yeah that looks pretty nice so that then
is our first wall constructed from a polygon
cube we have created it we've resized it we've made sure that it perfectly lines
up with our floor using vertex mode and then we've put it in place and given
it a bit of height the next step is going to be all about
duplicating this wall so that we've got the other back wall
duplicating is good we don't need to make and resize one of these cubes
again
so we'll take the lazy way or the the more efficient way to create our second
wall so i will see you in the next step for that
here we are in part seven then and that means it's time to
show you duplicating and also introduce you to the rotate tool
so we have our original wall here we need to make sure it's selected
and we're going to duplicate this so the way to do this from the menus is if we
go to edit up here and then we just go about just
over halfway down you'll see that duplicate th
ere
is listed and it shows you the keyboard shortcut for this is control
and d which is what i'll be using moving forward because control and d is much
quicker than going into the menus and when we
duplicate you actually in the viewport won't see that the
duplicate is there what you will see is that the name here
changes so when it duplicates something you'll have the duplicate
selected so let's click on duplicate them
so you see the viewport doesn't really look any different but now instead of
wall we have wall one selected which is good
so to separate these two because they're currently sitting right on top of each
other i'm going to put my move tool on and i'll just bring this in
to the center of the room so that i can now see that i've got my two copies
i'm happy to keep the name at wall one because i know it's a wall
and it's a copy of the original so that's fine
but the direction this wall is facing is not particularly useful we need it to
rotate by 90 degrees the appropriate too
l for this
is of course the rotate tool which is the final of the three main tools over
here so we'll turn that on from here you can of course press the e
key which is the keyboard shortcut and now that i've clicked on each of
these i will probably be sticking to the keyboard shortcuts from now on
so here's what we need to do we're going to rotate this round
either 90 degrees this way or you can go minus 90. it doesn't really matter
and if you have a look over here as you're rotating you'll see
when you're
getting close so we can go there but the problem is
it's going to be almost impossible to get it to exactly
90 degrees so you can just type that number in
and press enter and that will mean that that is now rotated
exactly 90 degrees but i want to undo that and show you another way
what you can also do whilst rotating is hold the j
key on the keyboard and if i rotate now you'll see that it snaps to 15 degree
increments this can be really useful when you're just kind of working
in a f
reeform way in the viewport so i'm just going to rotate that round
and that's 90 degrees exactly the final thing to do in this step
is just to get it lined up so this time what i'm going to do
is just hold x on my keyboard and you'll see that that shows that this
snapping up here grid snapping is going to happen
and if i move side to side what i'm doing is i'm snapping it to the center
of the grid and because this is now lined up here
i'm happy that that position is in the center of the grid and
you can
see that that makes sense and then i'll just kind of freehand move
this back to about there so those walls intersect
a little bit and that there's no gap between the
floor and the wall so let's just select everything and we
can see how that's coming together so that will do it for this step in the
next step i'm going to be setting you your first
challenge of this tutorial so i hope you're feeling ready to be challenged
see you in the next step welcome to part eight and challenge
number
one so now that you've learned how to create cubes and shapes how to
resize how to move things i want you to use that to create a new
part of the architecture of the room and i will show
you what that is if i just unhide them i've already created them
here they are so i'll just select them so that you can see them
because it's not that easy to see i've created some
beams just to make the walls look a little bit more interesting i'm not
going to guide you through this you need to create a cube yo
u need to
make sure you name it you need to resize it
and you need to position them you can see that i've gone for
five in total what's important is that you just leave enough space kind of here
because it's part of this exercise i intend to put a window there
other than that you can put them wherever you want that then
is your challenge and i will see you in the next step
when that challenge will be complete good luck
i know you can do it how did you find the challenge let me
know in the commen
ts how you got on with it i'm sure you did fine
and now we've got the sort of basic structure of our room set up
we need to start preparing the scene to add things to it
and the way that we're going to do that is we're going to add everything we've
created so far to a layer and that means that we'll be
able to turn that layer off or hide the layer so that when we're
creating the next piece of geometry which is going to be a table
this won't get in the way and distract us so
by default you should
have your layers window
open down here if you don't just switching to the modeling standard
workspace should put that there you can see that
we have lots of options here but there are
currently no layers set up so what we will do is use a marquee
selection to select everything in our scene so far and then
from the layers menu so we're just going to click here the first option is create
empty layer which we can do but what that will mean is that we will then
have to add all of this geometry to t
he layer afterwards
but because we've got this geometry selected we can create a layer that
includes it with create layer from selected
so we'll give that a click and we can see that that's now created a layer down
here and it's called layer 1. if you haven't already noticed i really
like to rename things as quickly as i can
so i'll double click on this layer and we'll give this a name
for this layer i'm just going to call it something like
room that that kind of says what i need it to say
one t
hing to keep in mind about giving your layers names is it will not
let you have any spaces in your naming and it will also not let you name your
layers the same as any piece of geometry that's in your
scene so room save then we have some options here
this v is visibility and we can toggle that on and off
shortly we will toggle that off so that we're ready for the next step
but we've also got this p here and what that means is whether or not the
geometry can be seen during playback so if you're d
oing
animation you can have certain things turn off when you
play so that you can improve the performance of playback get a better
frame rate and then the final one here is that you
can have these letters so there is t and that
means that the objects in that layer are templated
which just puts them into a wireframe mode that can't be selected
which is good for sort of lining things up
you can also cycle that through to an r this means referenced
so you can see them as normal but you're unable to
select them so you can't make
any unwanted changes in that way and then you can toggle that back around
to nothing so the last thing for us to do on this step then is just to hit
the v so that that removes the room for now and that will make the scene
ready for the next step in which we'll create
the first piece of our tabletop so i will see you in the next step for
that okay then let's get to work on this
table and we'll start with the table top this
step is just going to be about creating one
of the planks that make up the
tabletop it'll be short but i'm going to
introduce you to the bevel tool which is kind of the focus of this step
really we need to create our shape which is going to be a cube
again and i'm going to call this table top
like so and i want to get this into kind of a plank
shape so i'll just do this by eye so i want the wood to be fairly thin
and it's going to need some length in it yeah so i'm kind of happy with that if
you really want to get it exactly the same as
mine you can see my values here
in the channel box so you can copy those if you want
uh but i'm gonna go with that i'm fairly happy with it to make this geometry look
a little bit more interesting what we're going to do is
add a bevel to the edges which kind of smooth
them out the thing about polygon shapes by default is that the
edges are unbelievably sharp which if we were dealing with a wooden
table even if the woodworker tried to get them shot
there would still be a little bend if you got in
close enough
and we want this to look fairly kind of old and rustic so we're going to add a
bevel we'll do this first of all i think from
the edit mesh menu and you can see at the top is bevel it
also tells you that if you want it you can use control
and b to get that command so if we just give that a click with the shape
selected it's going to do it on every edge and
hopefully you can see what effect that has had it should also open this
poly bevel menu here a little sub menu that will allow y
ou to make changes and
we've also got some further options here in the channel
box just by clicking and dragging on these
words you can change the properties so you can change the fraction so i'm going
to just drop this down quite low 0.2 is quite nice it's going to be a
subtle effect that i'm going for you can also if you want to add more or
fewer segments often you will want more segments than
just the one but because this is just aimed at
absolute beginners i'm going to recommend keeping it t
o one
it will make it easier to uv map this later which is to do with how we
add our textures so in the interest of keeping this
fairly straightforward i will recommend that you set it to one if you
want to give yourself a challenge by all means go for two or three
but my advice go for one okay we can now just click somewhere else that'll turn
that option off if you want it to um and that is the end of this step so
we've named it we've sized it roughly how we want it and
we've put a bevel on in
the next step we're going to use
duplicate special to create multiple copies of this one piece all in
one go so i'll see you in the next step for
that in this step we're going to use
something called duplicate special to turn this one piece of table top into
many pieces of table top and complete our tabletop so
what we need to do first of all is make sure that we have it selected
and then what i'm going to do is just duplicate it
the kind of standard way because i want to get a measurement for h
ow far i want
to move it and on which axis so i'll be looking up here
so i'm just going to hit control and d to just do a quick duplicate and i'm
just going to move it so that it's basically touching let's
have a look yeah that looks okay and that is
in my case 1.011 i'm actually just going to copy that value
so i'm going to hit ctrl and c to do that
and then i'm going to delete the duplicate next thing we're going to do
is use this duplicate special command so if we go to our edit menu and
down
to duplicate special what i want to do is just go to
this here which is the options box and there's lots of things you can do here
but the thing that we are interested in is just creating a number of copies of
having them move so translate by a certain amount
so i think i'm going to want five pieces in total
so i'm going to have four copies and i need to translate them on the
z-axis so i'll just paste that value in and what it will do now is every time it
creates a copy it will move it by this
amount
so if we now just hit duplicate special you'll see that that creates our
tabletop for us and what's kind of nice is that we get tabletop and then it
renames the additional ones so we get tabletop one
two three and four that's it then for the tabletop nice
short step but it's important to know about
tools like duplicate special they can save a lot of time
in the next step it's going to be another setting up and explaining step
we're going to be bringing in a reference image which we'll the
n use
to model a more complex shape which is going to be the table leg
so i will see you in the next step for that
in this step we're going to take a look at the orthographic views in maya
and then we're going to import an image plane that we can use as a reference
for the next shape that we're going to create
so what i'm going to do is i'll stick an explanation of what the orthographic
views are on screen so that i don't have to bore you with that
and i'm going to show you how you can access it
so the toolbar way is to click on this area here so you can see
you've got a four view and by default the four views it gives you will be your
perspective view here and then three orthographic views so
you've got a top view which looks straight down
a front view and a side view you can also
if i just go back to my perspective view you can quickly access them
by tapping the space bar so if i try that now
you can see that that will then jump into the four view
then if you want to make any of thes
e views full screen if you just put your
cursor in it so for instance if i choose this side view
and tap spacebar again that will then full screen
that view and you can nip in and out of your views
just like that the view that i'm interested in
is the side view because we're going to put the side of the table
underneath here and we're going to import
and image plane i have an image plane reference already prepared
which you can access by using the link in the description below
or feel free to ma
ke and use your own so the way that we're going to
import this image plane is to click on view in the panel menu
and then near the bottom there's an image plane section and from that we can
choose import image if you have your project set up
correctly you should be taken straight to the
source images folder of that project but if not you'll just need to navigate
to it if you're using my images then you'll just need to make
sure that you've dropped them in the source
images folder of your project
there will probably be a lot more
images to choose from in the project you've downloaded from me
because i'll just keep adding things as i go and this is where all the textures
will be but for now we just need this table leg
reference so if we click on open you can see that gives us this which
provides us an outline that we can follow whilst it's still
new we can use the scale and move tools to put it into
place so what i'm going to do is just roughly get this set
up it doesn't need to be perfe
ct it's just a guide and i can move it when i'm
done there we go so as i said it doesn't need
to be perfect but this is just going to provide us
with an outline of the shape that we can follow
in the next step when we are going to be modeling this
table leg so now that you have used the orthographic views
and imported an image plane you're now ready to move on to the next step
i'll see you there we're now going to move on to some
slightly more complicated 3d modeling to get this table like shape
what i want to do first of all though is just make one more adjustment to this
image plane because currently um the lines are going to be following
are kind of flickering in and out and that's because this is currently
unfiltered this image so what we'll do is just make sure we select it
we're going to go to the attribute editor which for me
isn't showing up so i'm going to press ctrl and a to make it pop
up and make sure that you can see image plane shape one this will show you the
image and y
ou can see there's a texture filter
here and basically what you need to do is just
swap to a different one of these whichever one works best for you i've
tested and i quite like the mipmap tri-linear
so it makes the lines not quite as bright
but i can now see them all all of the time which is much easier to work with
what we need to do first then to create this shape is we're going to start as we
have done so far with a cube so we're going to create a
cube in one more different way that we haven
't
done yet to create our cube then what we're going to do is press and hold
spacebar and that's going to bring up this menu
here which is known as the hot box and if you're a maya pro this will give
you access to the entire maya user interface without having to have it up
here and all around which can give you more working space
if you want to be a pro this is the way that you need to get comfortable working
so from this menu i'm going to click and hold on create if i don't hold i won't
be able
to navigate the menus so click and hold i'm going to go to
polygon primitives and create a new cube you'll see that that's created up here
because that's where the origin is and what i'm going to do first of all
is just move this into place as close as i can get it
now what i want to do is just give this some subdivisions so you can see that
these lines running up here are what allow us to change the
silhouette of the shape and we need to add those to this cube
and we do that by going into inpu
ts clicking on polycube polycube4 is what
mine's called and we're going to change the
subdivision's height to 15 and you can see that now we have
subdivisions running the height of the cube whilst i'm in the
channel box i'm also going to rename it so we're going to call it table leg
there we go and now i'm going to use my resize tool
just to get the basic shape of this so i'll just try and get it
pretty much so that it's high enough this does not have to be perfect it's
just to get us close we c
an refine it later and then i'll
probably just take it to about the thinnest point
and we'll bring the rest out what i want to do now is get
into vertex mode there are multitude of ways of doing things such as this
and this time i'm going to do it from the modeling toolkit
so it's open there in a tab or i can just click on this
icon here to open the modeling toolkit there it is
and across the top we have these icons that allow us to change between
different modes this is object mode here we've a
lso got
vertex edge and face mode this is uv selection
mode which is more to do with texturing so for now we're just going to
click on here that will take us into vertex mode you can now
see the purple vertices and we need to be able to select these
in rows and this is a really important thing i'm about to show you pay
attention if i was to just click on this one at
the bottom here and then used shift and click i would have them both
and it would look like i had the whole row selected
but if i g
o into this view here you can see that i've got these two at the front
but not these two at the back if however i do a marquee selection like that
you can now see that i've got the front and the back and for this to work
we must do that on each row as we work our way up
otherwise you're gonna have a bad time and have to redo it
so we're in vertex mode we have our bottom row of vertices selected
what i'm also going to recommend is that you use number four on your keyboard
and number five on your
keyboard to switch between
wireframe and shaded mode just so you can see what you're doing
so now that i've got wireframe mode on i'm going to use a combination of my
move tool so i'm just going to move that down a
little bit and my scale tool i'm only going to scale out on this
axis like that that then is going to help us
create our shape so then i'll move up to the next row get
a marquee selection and i just want to show you why i'm only
scaling on the one axis so you can see that that has gon
e out evenly
and if i scale on the one axis it stays even
you can see that that's nice and even if however i scale from the middle to scale
on all axes it's also going to scale outwards which
we don't want so in this view it would still look
right but in this view it looks oh so wrong so it's kind of important
that we don't do that by mistake let's now go into
each of these rows and we're just going to create our shape
so we'll do move tool first get the row in place
and then scale tool to get i
t to line up with our guide
so i'm just going to speed this up let you guys follow and i'll meet up with
you at the end just here you can see that i'm about to
get an overlap so if i want to move this next row up
to here i'm going to overlap them that's a bad idea
so what i'll do is just get a few more rows and i'm just going to move them up
together so that means that i can avoid this
overlap because i don't want this topology to start overlapping and
getting messy so that is our table leg comp
lete we can
go back into shaded mode i'm also going to just drop this back
into object mode and we'll see how it looks
in perspective view so the silhouette is looking good
the width of this or the thickness is far too high for my liking so i'm just
going to change this as an overall shape
something like that looks nice and then what i'll do is just use my
move tool to move it over to one side of the table
that looks nice i am now done with this reference piece
so i can just select it hit delete
and that will do it for this step in the
next step we're just going to finish this piece off with a
bevel and we'll add these pieces to a layer so we can hide them whilst we
continue to build our skills we're not quite done with these table legs yet we
need to put a little bit of embellishment on them before we
duplicate it over but the next step is going to be about
setting up for that so i will see you for that
welcome back as promised we're now going to finish off this table leg
by adding a
little bevel to it so first thing i'm going to do just to make
life a little bit easier is to just move this out of the way of
the table so we can see everything and the trick to this the reason that
this step exists at all is because i want to show you how to
select edge loops which is really important
so we're going to go into edge mode so i just right click on my shape
and select edge like so and you can see that whilst i'm doing that i can click
and select on any edge and that will select it
what i can also do is if i hold shift on my keyboard and left click
it will allow me to select multiple edges
that can take a long time though so what i'm going to do instead is use a couple
of methods to select all the edges that i want
so to select an edge loop what you need to do is find any edge that's facing the
direction you want and double click it and you can see that's now all gone kind
of pinky orange whatever that color is and that means that that entire edge
loop is selected then wh
at i'll do is just swing around to the other side i'm
going to hold shift on my keyboard while i do this and double click again
we've now got both those edge loops and i'm just going to double click there to
get that one and double click there to get that one
i've now got all four corners just to keep this even and make the
topology make sense i'm also going to keep holding shift and set the two top
edges and the two bottom edges that means that
i've now got the front ring selected all the way a
round
and also the one at the back so this double clicking to select edge loops can
save you a lot of time so remember that okay what
we'll now do is just add a bevel to this and this time i'm going to do that by
using control and b on my keyboard so control b there is my
bevel beautiful little bevel and i'm going to drop the fraction on
this to 0.2 i think will look nice yep that's nice enough so we'll go back
into object mode on our table leg and i'm just going to drop it back into
place for n
ow or roughly where i think it's going to be that's
pretty nice so we've now got our table leg done and it's beveled the
last thing for us to do really is to add this to a layer so that we can
hide it while we're working on other things so we'll do that by getting a
marquee selection of everything that we're looking at
down into our display panel down here where we can get layers
create layer from selected give it a name
so i'm going to call it furniture i think
and save and that means that i no
w have the ability to toggle that
on and off okay the next step we're just going to have a real quick
look at what extrusion is before we go on to do some for ourself
so i'll see you in the next step for that
in this step then we're going to take a quick look at what extrusion
is in maya it's mostly an information dump really
but feel free to follow along so that you've got a good idea of what it is and
how it works so the first thing i'll do just so that
it's out of the way is turn off the furn
iture layer
find center of my grid and i'm just going to throw a cube down
and then i'm going to duplicate it i don't need to rename these because
they're not staying there just for example purposes
okay so what i'm going to do with these two cubes this one here
i'm going to put into face mode select this face here
bring it forward and i'm also going to scale it up a little bit
okay so that's what happens when we bring a face forward
and scale it up what if we do the same but this time with an e
xtrusion so i'll
set the face and extrusion the icon here we're going
to use for this is like that and then what i'll do is
bring it forward and scale it up
and hopefully if i just select them both you can see the difference between these
two cubes when i did an extrusion on this one it
added in an edge loop so what it's doing is creating extra
geometry from that extrusion point and that's what extrusion is all around
and you can do some really cool things with it this is how you can create
thin
gs like curves you can extrude a long curve as well so
if you want to create like a wire or something
without having to do it painstakingly one at a time and there's a lot of
really cool shapes to be made through extrusion that is the demo of
what extrusion is hopefully you've seen the explanation
that i put on screen as well and that will do it for this
very short step in the next step we're going to be
using extrusion to model our window so i will see you
in the next step for that i'll just ge
t rid of these cubes we don't need them
see on the next step welcome back to part 16. wow we've
already been through so much together i feel like we're probably best friends
now so we've got a bond that will transcend the generations anyway as
promised in this step we are going to create our window using extrusion which
we touched on in the previous step so we're going to need to turn on our
room layer for this so i'm just going to put a v
there and we can see this is apparently the angle that i
'm looking at my room so
i'll just spin that around lovely and i want to put my window in
over here so in order to do that the first thing i
want to do is put my room into or this wall specifically into face
mode so i'm going to do that by holding the right mouse button and choosing face
and then releasing the mouse button you can see
now that each face is highlighted in red to indicate that i can select it so what
i'll do is i'll select this face here on the inside and i also want
to just swing
around and holding shift and left clicking i'm
going to select the one on the back side as well this is so the window will go
all the way through we need to do this extrusion on both
sides so you can see i've now got both sides selected you can also if you
want to just do a marquee selection like that
through and that will select what's on the front
and back of that selection okay so with those both selected the
next thing we're going to do is extrude them
so i'm going to get extrusion here fro
m edit mesh
and just click on extrude you can see the keyboard shortcut is controlling e
and that's how i normally do it so there is extrusion
so you get this little box over here this gives you some things that you can
change and you also get this universal
manipulator tool here you can see this has got a rotate scale
and move all built in to the extrusion tool
after you've done it which can be really useful
so i'm going to use this tool here so i'll click on one of the squares for
scale and th
en if i just bring that scale in
you can see that that brings it in like that and it should be
doing that so that it's flat and it's happening on both sides so i
want this window to be fairly square so i'm just going to make it square and
i'm just going to use the move tool on this
manipulator as well to move it into place so i want to
sometimes the the move tools can be inverted on this one
and it might be that yeah so you can see there the move
moves it up on one side but down on the other so
i'm just going to undo that
because i want them to be at the same height
that's okay and i'll switch to the normal move tool to move that up
so now we're going to change tools here to the move tool
and then move it up and you can see that that now happens together
and then i'm just going to scale it up so this window kind of fills this area
yeah that's nice and what's good about this is that the geometry all still
makes sense so i had one quad which is a four-sided
shape here and i've now split
that into more quads
so i've got a four-sided shape here one here one here one here and one here
so the geometry still makes sense and still flows now that that's done
i just want to delete both of the faces so i'm just going to hit my delete key
and that now creates us our hole in the wall so that's our first
extrusion done well done i am really proud of you in
the next step we're going to patch this up so you see what that's
done is created holes inside we've got this hollow
area and we don't
want that we want some geometry to fill that
so the next step will be all about filling holes
naughty as promised in this step we're going to
set about filling these holes that we created here
and i want to show you a couple of options of how you can do this and then
you can just choose your favorite the first way that i'll show you is with
a tool called bridge and in order to use that we need to
right click on our geometry and go into edge mode
and now edges will be highlighted show that we can
select them and we need to
click on one edge and then i'm going to shift click on one
of the parallel edges so i've now got those on both sides i'll
just turn that move tool off and with those selected
the first method that i'm going to show you
is in edit mesh and it's something called bridge
so you can just click on it and it will work
you can see that that's now bridged that gap and this gives you
some extra settings so if you want to not that we do for this but you could
add some divisions
to it i don't think tapering will work without
divisions or taping won't work on the shape at all actually
you can also in some cases twist what you've done and there are different
types of curves so sometimes you can bridge um
i've used the bridge tool before to create like a handle on a cup and curve
type can help for that so that's one way of doing it the other
way which is actually the way that i tend to use more often
is in mesh tools it's called the append to polygon tool
and when you turn
this on you can see that border edges these ones on the edge
go a little bit thicker and that's to show you that you can click on them so
you click on one and then click on the other side that
you want to fill it in and press enter to complete that shape
like so and then a little tricky maya that i'm going to
tell you now because i feel like we're close
is if you press g on your keyboard that will bring back the last tool used so
i'm going to use the penta polygon tool again
to fill that hole t
here and then one final one here press
g for last two used click click and enter and that
has filled that little window hole beautiful okay
that then we'll do it for this step in the next step we're going to
put a little bit of a frame in the window so that it's not just a gaping
hole so i will see you in that step for some
frame making this step is going to be all about
completing this window by adding the extra detail pieces
and we'll start with the frame we could create this
out of different
cubes or we could go through extrusion but i thought i'd take
this opportunity to introduce you to a different primitive shape
and also show you a way that you can edit the primitives initial values
to give different results so we're going to start with a polygon
pipe which wouldn't appear to be the ideal shape for a window frame but see
what i do to it you're going to be amazed so we'll go to create
pipe isn't on this quick shape shelf so if we go to create
polygon primitives and there's pipe t
here
and that will create it at the origin so i'm just going to bring it out of the
ground and i'll just frame up a little bit and
then the first thing i'll do because i'm remembering at the moment is
just call this frame lovely and then under inputs polypipe
one here's where all the magic happens to get this to look more like a window
frame it's the subdivisions axis that we need to make a change to
so i'm going to click in there and instead of 20 i'm going to change it to
four and then it goes
a little bit square
yeah nice then i'll just need to bring the
thickness down a little bit let's try 0.2
maybe 0.3 let's have it chunky awesome and now what i also need to do
is at the moment it's in a diamond sort of configuration
and i want it to be more in a square configuration so i need to rotate it
in order to do that i'm going to turn my rotate tool on
i'm going to bring it round 90 degrees on this axis so i'll hold down my
keyboard just so that i get rotation snapping on there's 90 degr
ees
there and then what i'll do is i need to
rotate 45 degrees again i'll hold j like that and that then you can see is
going to be something we can work with to create
as our window shape at this stage though i just want to make
a change this is now how i want the default orientation of this shape to be
but you can see if i put something like the scale tool
on it still thinks the orientation's like a
diamond and we can do something to sort of reset
the way that maya sees the shape and it's call
ed freezing transformation
so what it will do is zero everything out
and maya will kind of see it as a new shape with this default
configuration so if we go to modify and freeze transformations you'll see
that's reset my scale tool everything here is zeroed out but these
changes here have remained and now what i can do with this bad boy
is stick it in the window hole so let's throw it over here somewhere
where am i about there and i'm just mostly going to place this
by eye so i will of course ne
ed to scale it up
that's pretty nice make sure it fills the hole
and then of course we need to just get the thickness under control we do want
it to protrude from the window so the back side of the wall doesn't matter too
much we won't see that but we will see the inside that's
the important part yeah so that's pretty nice i think now
that i've scaled it up though i do want it to be a little thinner so
i'm going to do 0.2 on the thickness yeah so that's pretty
nice for the main kind of window fr
ame the next
thing i want to do is to get something that will work as
dividers for like four panes of of glass and i'm going to do that with a
cube so here's a new cube i don't actually
know what these are called um in window terms if there are any
glazers watching the tutorial feel free to let me know i think i'm just going to
call it divider and again i just need to get this pretty
much in place
placement doesn't have to be perfect because we can always change it later
but getting it somewhere
close does help and i just want to bring the size down
like that yeah that'll do to get me started i think
and then the trick to this there is a trick
is we need to select the faces so right click hold go into face mode
and i want the faces around the outside just like that i do not want the
front and back just those ones and what we're going to
do is use extrude to bring faces out in each direction to
create a four-way divided shape so this time i'm going to hit control
and e for extrude this
is going to bring this little chap
up here and we need this keep faces together option
so if i do local translate you can see that it
brings it out in all directions at once and just kind of fills the hole which is
not what i'm going for if however i change keep faces together
to off so i'm just sliding it there and do the same thing look at that it
gives us a four-way divider just as i had hoped so now we can go
back into object mode on that shape make sure it's central enough perfect
and i'll
probably just bring it forward a little bit
like so so that then is now getting there that's starting to look like a
window the next thing i want to create is a bit
of a kind of feature piece at the bottom to make it look like a chunkier window
sill i think they're called so that's just going to be a cube and
we'll call it sill is that how you spell it again in
the comments if that's not how you spell windowsill
or if that's not what it's called let me know i can learn from this experience
too s
o that's what i'm calling it for now
let's kind of get it in place
okay and when i'm happy with the position of it
i'm going to size it up and i want this to overlap the window
frame that i've already got so that we can't see it oh so we can't
see the original we want this to look bigger and chunkier than that
so then we'll just scale it out so it goes all the way through
that's pretty nice and then just to make it look a little more interesting
i'm going to select this face here and i'm going t
o just scale it up a
little bit so that it's not too even
there we go nice oh it's nice one last step to complete the window
then we're going to put a cube in that will represent
the glass so one more cube we'll call it window glass
good name i'm pretty sure i've got the name of that right
and again i'm just gonna pop it in place this one obviously needs to be quite
thin and then we need to kind of get the
depth so that it's in the middle of that that looks good
try and get it central it doesn't
really matter if it's perfectly central because
we're just going to hide the the joins
like that back into object mode okay what have i done there oh i think i
scaled it too much let's just bring the thickness back in
yeah looks nice okay at this stage things are starting to look a little too
gray and difficult to see you've got a couple of options to make
it easier to look at so in your panel menu up here you can
turn on this which is wireframe unshaded which is one
way of doing it or one way
that i kind of like to do is
this here which is screen space ambient occlusion
it's like contact shadows so when you turn it on it just adds
shadows to corners and makes things stand out a little bit more
if you've got a weak computer though then
i wouldn't use that because it does take a little bit more processing to turn it
on but i think i'm just going to leave that
on for now so i can see where all my joins are that's the window complete
then and that will do it for this step the
main purpos
e of this step was to introduce you to another way of
extrusion really that's what the dividers in the window were all about
and about keeping faces together on or off the next step
we're done with the window we're going back to the table
i'm going to use extrusion again to create a detail piece for the table leg
so i will see you in the next step for that
this step is going to be the final step in our trilogy of extrusion steps
and we're going to be using it to create a detailed piece for the t
able leg
to remove some distractions we're just going to turn off
the room geometry oh and this tells me that i've got to do something
so we're going to select our window piece like that
we are going to right click on our room layer
and add selected objects and that will just make those be hidden with the room
as well then what we'll do is create a new
cylinder and we're going to name this one table
detail then what i want to do is take the
subdivision axis down to 16.
that helps with symmetry f
or this one next i want to just rotate it around
so we're going to rotate it 90 degrees that way
and we don't want it to be too fat something like that should be good to
get us started okay then that's the beginnings of our
shape now what we need to do is go into face mode and i want to
select the two faces that are kind of at each
quarter of it so the top two these two on the right hand side these two on the
left hand side and the two on the bottom
that will get us started then what we're going
to do is do
an extrusion so i'll hit ctrl e for that and i'm going to use the options in here
exclusively for this part of the exercise just to prove that we can
so i'm going to bring up the thickness like that so i'm bringing those
those are the three that i'm interested in
and then the bottom two faces i'm just going to select separately and i'm going
to bring those down on their own so we'll do that and then
i'll just bring the thickness out a little bit
that's kind of nice oh lovely sure we
're still in face mode and we're
going to select the four pieces that kind of make up
each part here one two three four one two three four
one two three four like that and we're gonna use that to add a little bit of
extra detailing so ctrl and e to extrude again and this
time we're gonna use an offset whoa crazy so i just want to bring it in
a little bit so 0.2 i think it's too much let's try
0.1 nice right so we've brought those out
that's lovely and now what we're going to do is these
shapes h
ere that we've created kind of like outlines
i want to select these and these are going to be extruded as well
remember you just hold shift and left click to select
more than one of any components so in this case we did faces
once you've got them all selected we're going to extrude again so i'm just going
to come around this side so i can see how far my
extrusion is going to go so we'll extrude and then we're going to
change the thickness so i think in my case 0.1 looks nice
yours might be um a
different thickness depending on
what scale you're working to and what looks good to you
but i'm pretty happy with that so i'm gonna pop it back into object mode
and have a look at my handiwork yeah that's kind of nice okay so we need to
put that in place so i'm going to bring back my furniture
layer there it is you can see that things aren't making perfect sense at
the moment so i'm going to need to rotate this 180 degrees
perfect and then i want to scale it and just put it so it sits here
so w
e're going to bring it that way bring the size down
make sure that it looks like it's protruding from the table leg
that looks kind of nice and then just try and get it in place
that's going to do it for that step then what i'm just going to do
just to make it a little bit easier to see for a second is turn my grid off
and now we've got some really harsh edges showing up
in this shape here and again just like we did with making easy to see with the
ambient occlusion we can just make these harshe
r edges a
little nicer to look at by clicking on this icon here which
turns on your multi-sample anti-aliasing which
just kind of hides the jaggies so if i give that a click
that'll just make the edges look a little bit nicer
not much nicer it turns out but a little bit
okay that will do it for this step then in the next step we're just going to
finish the table off make sure it's got two
legs put um maybe another detail piece on
so i'll see you in the next step for that
let's get this table fin
ished then what we'll do here is
mostly just duplication there's not much new here apart from learning how to
mirror things uh using the scale essentially
so we'll start with this piece here table leg this doesn't need to be
mirrored it's the same on the front and back so we can
just duplicate that as we would anything else with control and d
and drop it into place so to try and get this
fairly symmetrical i'm just going to use my orthographic view
that's about right it doesn't need to be perfec
t it's an old-fashioned table
there would have been imperfections wouldn't they so
now what we need to do is duplicate the detail piece so i'm going to duplicate
this like so move it over here
and then you can see the scale on x is what i'm going to change
because the detailing is only on this side it's not on the back side
so what i'll do is scale x which is here it's currently set to
0.306 but if i change it to minus 3.06 it will not do what i expect
and that's because i should have chosen a d
ifferent axis
so let's try scale z nope let's try scale y so we'll do
minus on scale y that's got it so that has now inverted it
the reason it didn't work is because i was trying to figure it out in world
space which is this but in object space
that was originally the y-axis that was pointing up when we started
so i just confused myself anyway let's now pop this detail piece into place
like so and now we have detailing on both sides of our table wonderful
two legs as well so just to finish i'm g
oing to do
one final thing because the table looks a little bit odd to me at a moment i'm
going to add like a cross piece here to sort of hold
it together so that's just going to be a cube
luckily this is mostly centered for me so
what i'll do is bring the cube into the center piece here i'm going to
make it thinner then i'll drop it down
and then i'm going to make it longer like so and then scale it down a little
bit and i think that looks grand maybe a
touch thinner on this axis that looks pre
tty nice let's rename this
cross piece is what i'll call it and just because
i don't like it looking so harsh i'm going to go into edge mode and i'm going
to use a marquee selection to get the four long edges it's not
getting the edges that are now buried inside the table legs
we're going to bevel that so control and b will do that and i'm probably going to
put a couple of sections in this just to round it off a little bit
and i will leave the fraction as it is because i think that was quite nic
e so
back into object mode that'll do it okay then that
is our table complete in the next step we're going to put it into a group so
i'll tell you what groups are why they're used and then we'll put it into
a group which will make it easier to position it into our room as a
whole so i'll see you in the next step where
we'll make a group in this step we're going to take all the
different pieces of the table and then we're going to put
them into a group in maya groups are ridiculously useful
becau
se it means that we can take a number of pieces of separate geometry
and then work with them as if they were one single unit
so we can take all the pieces of the table and then we'll be able to move
scale and rotate it as if it's just one piece but we're not
actually combining the geometry together to be one piece which means that we can
still work with individual pieces which is going to come in handy later
for putting the textures on in order to put this into a group the first thing we
need to
do is select all of the pieces and i'm going to do that with a marquee
selection so just drag a marquee around there and we can see
that that's now selected all of my different pieces of geometry
that make up the table brilliant to put them into a group the
command for that is in the edit menu and you can see it's just here
called group but what does pros usually do is just hit control and g
but because it's our first time we'll get it from the menu so let's give that
a click there we go and we
can see that that is
now in a group and it's called group one i'm going to call it table group
like so and what's really good about this if i now put my move tool on
you can see that i can move all parts of the table as one piece
which is good i can also rotate them all and they all rotate as if the table's
one piece and again i can scale and that works again
all as one piece the one last thing that i do want to show you before we move on
is if we go to the outliner which we get by going to win
dows
and outliner and it'll just pop it on the left hand side of the screen
all the other pieces of geometry in the scene are just separate
entities in the outliner but the table now belongs to this group so at any
point i can just click on this table group here
and it will select the whole group and you can see that if i just expand that
it's created a little bit of a hierarchy all the separate pieces are within that
group which makes it really easy to work with
there is just one other trick th
at i want to make aware of while we're
looking at the hierarchy if i click on any piece of the geometry
that makes up the table you can see that it shows it's selected
here and then press up on my keyboard that moves up one
level in my hierarchy which actually will select the whole
group so at any point i want to select the whole table
but i don't want to open my outliner i can click on any piece of it
press up and then do whatever it is that i want to do
okay we're all grouped but i don't like
the position
of the pivot which is where it is scaled and rotated from
so in the next step we'll have a look at how we go about moving that to a more
favorable position so i will see you there for that
in this part we're going to take a look at what pivot points are and how we
adjust the position of them so the pivot is this little chappy here
you can see i've got it for this table group
and it's the point around which an object will rotate
and it's also where it will scale from so you can see i
f i scale it's all going
towards that point and it can be really useful to be able
to move that pivot point one of the most common ways that you
will want to do this is just to get it into the center of the object you have
selected so because we've grouped this it's
currently taking its pivot from this table top which is probably
the first piece of geometry i created and you can see that when i click on the
group the pivot stays in the same place it's not in the center of the table as a
whole to
do that there is a nice quick menu
command for it if we go to modify there is something here called
center pivot we give that a click and now that pivot
is bang in the center of all of this geometry
which as i said can be very useful in this case though it's not where i want
it i want to be able to use snapping to get
this table to line up perfectly with the floor of the room we've created
so i'm going to move the pivot down to being right at the bottom of the table
what i'll also do just becau
se i think it's good practice is i'm going to move
it to one of the bottom corners which is often very good for lining
things up to get into the mode where you edit the
pivot you press and hold d on your keyboard like so you can see it
gives you this mode here and then what you can do is move this
around in a kind of free hand way so if i move it over here and
then put my rotate tool on you can see the table is rotating around that point
of course that's not where i want the pivot so i'll just u
ndo that
there we go what i'm going to do is use vertex snapping when i'm in that pivot
edit mode and that's going to help me put the pivot exactly where i want it
so i'm going to hold d again but i'm also going to hold
v at the same time you can see the icon here changes to show you that we're
going to snap to something and then i'll choose one direction at a
time so i'll start with my y-axis and this now as with previous snapping
will only snap to places where there is a vertex and the vertex
i'm aiming for
is that one there so i'll just put my mouse on it
and maya will get the picture then i'll do the same on the other two axes so
hold d and v i'm now going to do my x axis and
aim for that pivot there and finally the z axis there we go and
you can now see that that pivot is exactly where i said i wanted it to
be so now when i rotate it rotates around that point when i
scale it it will scale and this is one of the
cool things about putting it on the ground
now if i scale it if i put
it in the ground first but decide that i want
a smaller table i can make it smaller but it will stay on the ground
instead of the feet of the table rising up so that can be really useful
so now that we've got that in position we will turn the geometry for the room
back on zoom out a little bit make sure i'm
facing the right direction and now you can see that it's probably a
good idea to get this table into the place that we want it to be
first thing we need to do is just move it so that it's abo
ve the ground
and now we can use that snapping to make sure it sits perfectly on the ground so
i'm going to hold v for vertex snapping i'm going to grab
the y axis and now as long as i aim for one of
these pivots that will sit perfectly on the ground and then all i need to do
is use my move tool to decide where i want it so i'm going to place it
somewhere so that the light from the window can hit it something like that
and i'm actually quite happy with the size
so i'm not going to scale it up or
down but you might choose to do so
if you think that yours is a little bit too big or too little
that is this step done then in the next step we're going to set about
creating some things to put on the table beginning with
kind of a potion looking flask so i'll see you in the next step
for that this step is going to focus on using
smooth mesh preview and then smoothing but in order to do
that we're going to create a glass flask with a cork in the top
kind of like you get um potion flasks in fan
tasy games
so we create like a little mana flask i'm going to do that
by starting with a cylinder but just to make things a little easier to work with
we will start by just hiding the geometry that is
currently in there so we'll hide the room geometry
and hide the furniture geometry we can see that i haven't yet added these to
the furniture layer so i'll just select them
go to my furniture layer and then we'll right click on it and add the selected
objects and that will hide them because they're
now in a hidden layer right let's make a start on this flask
then so we'll create a new cylinder and what i want to do is actually reduce
this geometry very very low as low as we can get away with
so under inputs for poly cylinder 2 we'll set the subdivision's axis
to 6 which is not particularly round but you'll see how this works
in a little while and then what we'll do rather than adding extra geometry
because we're going to need some subdivisions on the height
we'll do this a bit more freeha
nd using something called the multi-cut tool
which can be used to add additional edge loops so i'm going to
start with sort of getting the neck of the flask and at the moment i just don't
have enough edge loops so in order to add one i'm going to click
here on my modeling shelf which is the multi-cut tool and
you can see that as you move your tool around it'll kind
of give you hints as to what it can do but
what we want to get a complete edge loop is we need to hold control on the
keyboard whils
t we're mousing over and that will
then show you where it wants to put the edge loop and we want an edge loop that
goes like this you can see i'm doing it on one of the
lines that runs in an opposite direction to
the edge loop that i want so i'm going to put it about there nice
right i'll now just switch back to my scale tool i think
and i'm going to right click on the shape and i'm going to go
into edge mode and then i will double click on this edge to select the whole
loop and then hold shift
and double click on
the edge loop above it so that i get both and then what i want
to do is scale them in to make them thinner
if i do that that's going to shorten the gap between them i don't want to
scale from the center i'm going to use this manipulator here which will
scale on the x and y so i'm just going to bring that together to make sort of a
neck of a flask like that so now at this stage i want to
introduce you to something called smooth mesh preview which we can get to
by pressing 3 on
the keyboard this gives us a preview
of what our shapes going to look like once we have smoothed it as we're
currently working on the neck i can see that at the moment it's not
really defined enough and the way that we get more definition
is by having more edges closer together so i'll now press number one to get back
into non-smooth preview mode like so and then what i'm going to do is
get my multi-cut tool i'm just going to zoom in on here
hold control and i need to put some edge loops quite
close together
and you'll see why in a second so i'll put one there and then one at the other
side so these are just what i call holding edges which will
allow it to hold its shapes if i now press three again for smooth mesh
preview you'll see that the top of the flask is
now much more defined we're getting a better change in the shape what i want
to do next is get a rounder sort of body to the
flask and in order to do that i'm going to
need another edge loop so what i'm going to do this time is
just press number two and this shows me both the proper shape
so that's the one on the outside and the smooth mesh preview
so with my multi-cut tool on i'm going to hold ctrl
and aim for somewhere in the middle like that then i'm going to double click
on that edge to select the whole edge loop and with my scale tool
i'm going to bring it out and you should be able to see that that starts to round
it off and then with my bottom edge loop just
here i'm going to bring that one in and
you'll see th
at that now gives me a rounder bottom it kind of bubbles out in
the middle and goes thinner at the top to give me an overall
blast-esque shape i think i'm just gonna bring out the middle a little bit more
like so and then i'll press one so this is the shape that we've created
it doesn't look very flask-like but when we smooth it
it will and we're going to do that next so you can see we've created what's
going to be quite detailed geometry out of very very simple geometry there are
only one two t
hree four five six edge loops
going up the height and only six going around
so working this way can mean that you can
create geometry much more quickly and then you just smooth it to get the
more rounded shape that you're looking for
so before we smooth then let's just go into face mode and i'm going to turn
off my multi-cut tool and i want to select
these faces on the top because i want this to be able to be open
it doesn't always matter so much this but because i want to add
what's going to be
a fairly detailed glass shader later
i want it to behave as i would expect glass to behave
so we could select these six edge loops just by holding
shift and selecting them one at a time but i want to show you another method
which can be really useful if you hold tab on your keyboard you'll see that you
get this little tool that pops up and if you just click and drag
it will allow you to select all of them really quickly and then you can just
press delete on your keyboard and they're gone right
into object mode
and we are going to do mesh and smooth so this is now going to smooth it
which will get in the preview of when we press
three so let's press that and you can see this now
smooths out you can see that the top is working out quite well
and the silhouette around here is fairly round
but it could be rounder so what i'm going to do is instead of having just
one division i'm going to subdivide it again and we'll have two
and that now makes everything much rounder much more smooth and
something
i'm happy with so that creates our first bit of the
flask so we're going to go into object mode
jobs are gooden now we need to name this so we're going to call this
flask glass and now i've got an optional step mine because i created it at the
origin is already zeroed out so i don't need to freeze transformations but let's
just say i create it slightly off center for some
reason it's going to be important before we do
the next step to make sure that we freeze the transformations everyt
hing
needs to be zeroed out so we'll do modify
free transformations and you'll see why in a second because we're going to
duplicate this move it out make a change and move it
back in and we need it to go exactly back
in the middle because we're going to create the liquid that goes inside we
will first of all duplicate this flask with control and d
and then move it out of the way i'll rename this now
to mana liquid i think so that i can differentiate that from if i do
let's say oh in fact no what
's maybe not mana i
want this one to be health it's going to be red
health liquid then going into the fore view by tapping spacebar and then into
the front view in this case i need to be able to see the shape side
on i'm going to right click to put it into
face mode and then you'll need to decide how full you want this flask to be so
i'm going to have this one be quite full so i'm selecting all the geometry to
delete now the rest is going to be how full the flask is going to be so
delete that lo
vely back into object mode and back into my perspective view
the problem with this liquid now is that there's a hole in the top and we want
the shaver to be applied everywhere so we need to fill this hole maya has a
lovely little tool for this it lives in mesh
and it's called fill hole so we give that a click and that just creates some
geometry to fill that hole at the top there
and now we put this back inside the flask by changing
translate x to zero you can see that is now inside or sort
of in
line with the flask we're going to
add some thickness to the flask to make sure the liquid appears inside
which we'll do now so select the flask we're going to do an extrusion so i'm
going to hit ctrl e and then we need to add some thickness
so if we just go out a little bit so i can
see that 0.2 is far too much i think 0.1 will be as well
yeah so we'll try 0.01 that's probably not quite thick enough
so we'll try 0.02 hey that'll do it so that now adds some
really nice thickness to this flask i
think what i'll want to do is just go
into object mode yeah i think i'm just going to add a
bevel to the top edge just to soften it a little
bit so we're going to go to edge mode double click on the outside
edge hold shift double click on the inside
edge control and b for bevel and that's just going to
smooth it out i'm not going to do any more to it
that will be fine the final piece of this particular puzzle is going to be
a cork stopper that sits in the top to stop all the magic getting
out s
o that's going to be a new cylinder ah i've created an issue for myself so
i'm going to have to put a little bit of thinking into getting this cork
in the center because i moved the flask over so i could show you why we were
breezing the transformations but it'll be fine i'll work with it
so first thing i'll do is just rename it to cork
i'm going to drop the subdivisions down because we don't really need any more
than 12. there we go so subdivision's axis
becomes 12. scale the whole thing down s
o that it's
roughly the right size and shape and then we will try and just get it so
that it lines up with the neck of the flask and then
we'll just raise it above a little bit and i want it to be thinner at the
bottom than it is at the top i'll do that by putting it into vertex mode
selecting them and then scale them into the center
not create that kind of slanted look and then into edge mode i'm going to
double click on the top edge hold shift and double click on the
bottom edge ctrl and b to
add a bevel i think i'm
going to put two segments on this one and just drop
the fraction down to 0.1 and now we probably go into the top view
to get this position so let's just zoom in on this
that actually is pretty central i think so i'm not going to worry about
that and we will just drop it in place in a side view
i think i'm going to have to scale up a little bit to make it look like it fits
oh too far we don't want it to come through the glass that's important
so i think somewhere it's not
very central is it
no it is not so let's just get that more into place
that should do it not quite
yeah okay so now we have our stopper in our little flask so we have three
pieces of geometry all of them should be named so i've got
my liquid my glass and my cork named what i want
to do now is just make sure that they all belong
to the same thing so i'm going to use a method now called
parenting instead of creating a group to act as the thing that ties them all
together one piece of geometry beco
mes the parent
for the rest so in this case i'm going to select
the liquid i'm doing it in my outliner because it's difficult to
select the liquid now that it's inside that geometry so
select the liquid shift select the glass so you select the child first and then
the parent i'm going to go to edit and parent
and you can see this creates a hierarchy for us so that when i select
the glass and move it the liquid isn't left behind that's also
gone with it and we now just need to do the same for the
cork
so select the cork i'm going to do control
and select to get the glass that's because i don't want to also select the
health i could if i did shift and select it would select all three so select the
cork control select glass and then i'm just
going to press p which is the same as the
menu item and now anytime i select the flask everything's going to go with
it and just to finish this step off we'll
get it put on the table so with it selected let's bring back our
furniture which is just goi
ng to be the table for now
and let's bring it up above the table and it's a bit too big so we'll scale it
down that was like a nice size and let's just
place it on the table somewhere i'm going to put it over there for now
beautiful that then is the end of this step the next step
is another challenge so i will see you in that next step
so that you can put your skills to the test
welcome to modeling challenge number two taking what you've learned so far we
have one flask and what i would like you
to
do at this stage is to create another flask so i will
show you my example this is the flask that i created so i've
gone for a slightly different more angular looking design i actually
started from a cube with this one and i used some bevels to keep the
detailing where i wanted it the cork is the same everything's
parented as it should be i've got another cork and there is a liquid
inside if i press 4 to go into wireframe you can see that
that's there the hole has been filled just like in
the
previous one so this is now your challenge come up
with a second flask design mine is a mana flask in this case so it'll have a
blue liquid in it when i'm done if you're not feeling ever so creative
you could just create something that's very similar
to the first flask you might do a bottle it's completely up to you
but make sure this shows off at least some of your own creativity
okay that's it when you're done pop it next to your other flask
and then after this step we will get back to making
something which will be a
candle to add to our table as well so i will see you in the next step
the new skill that i want to show you in this step
is actually using something called soft select but we won't get
to that until the end we're going to do a little bit of reinforcing of skills
first and we'll start with hiding everything
that's currently in the way so we'll turn the furniture off
we'll be reminded that these flasks aren't yet part of that layer so we will
select them we will right cl
ick on the furniture
layer and we'll add those objects they will then hide now we're going to
create a candle for our table we're going to start with a cylinder for
the shape and we'll just give it a name straight
away like so and we just need to scale it to a sort
of candle shape i'm also just going to
bring the subdivision's axis down to something like eight should
be plenty and we're going to use that to help us
to create a sort of random looking shape at the top of the
candle like it's been
burning for a little while
to begin that then we need to be in face mode and we select all the top faces
like so and then we're going to extrude them in and then down to get sort of
i think it's called tunneling when candles sort of burn in but leave a
little bit around the outside so we'll do ctrl e for extrude i'm going
to add a little offset what do we want yeah
we'll try 0.3 and then i'll extrude again
and just push the inside down that's going to create
the beginning of our sort of candle s
hape so then we're going to go
into object mode for a sec and we'll press 3 which is our smooth mesh preview
so the top of the candle is not looking too bad and that's something we can mess
with later but we need the bottom of the candle to
be flat and it's currently not and i'm going to show you how you can
make that more flat we'll go into edge mode
like so and double click this bottom edge
and we can give maya a little bit more information about
when we smooth our shapes how much we want them
to be smoothed and we do that
with something called the crease tool which is extremely handy
that lives in our mesh tool so if we just select mesh tools and go to crease
tool and your mouse pointer changes to this funny little
triangular arrow thing it looks like the ship from asteroids
and what we're going to do is with the middle mouse button just press and hold
it and then drag left and right and you'll see that goes from smooth as
far as it'll go through to don't smooth at all and in
this c
ase we don't want it to be smooth so we're just going to
leave it there and that's how we're going to tackle the bottom of the candle
now the top i'm fairly happy with so i'm going to leave that alone but we do now
need to go into i think vertex mode and we're just
going to drag some vertices down so i'm going to select let's say
these two put my move tool on and drag them down
no i don't like that we're not going to do it in vertex mode
let's try edge mode so we'll get this edge and drag that
d
own yeah that's nice that is more favorable
so i'm going to drag that down see this is now going to give it the
impression that this candle has been burning down so i'm going to select
the front and back of these edges and pull those down
yeah that's making it look all kinds of gnarly
same with this one but i'm now going to do a couple
and i'll probably take these center pieces as well so i'm just doing like a
bigger section of the candle here oh nice oh yeah
and uh we'll get this bit over here
i don't want it to be up too high
and just have some fun with this so try selecting different edges bringing them
down we just want it to look kind of random
like it's been all melty and stuff oh nice and bring that bit down yeah
bring this bit down yep oh it's so good and when you're happy with it that'll be
the time to stop i'm pretty happy with that so that's going to be
the top of my candle so i'm going to pop it back into object mode press number
one and see actually it's a bit of a mess
an
d there are things overlapping that's not an issue because i'm going to
smooth it so i'll do mesh smooth this will just
average out those horrible gnarly bits that are too crazy you see
now that makes a lot more sense you can see that the geometry flows
where it's supposed to kind of nice i like it
okay so that's my sort of basic candle shape that i'm happy enough with next i
need a wick so let's create a wick um the
subdivision's axis on this doesn't need to be any more than eight
really there
we go and we're going to put this into place
scale it down make it nice and tall so this is just something for our flame to
sit on it's going to be nice and thin if you
want to you can have some subdivisions and i'd like a little bit of a bend to
it i'm not going to do that because i can't
be bothered okay so there's our wick i'm going to select it and guess what
i'm going to call it but you can't guess that's right wick and now we're going to
create the last shape and this is going to be where
we're
going to use this soft select which is kind of the point of this step
we're going to then create a flame using this so let's create a sphere for our
flame and we'll just drag it up to roughly the
right place name it
and under the inputs we're going to drop the subdivisions down to
something like 8x8 nice we're just going to scale it down a
little bit more and just make it a bit taller that should work nicely so we are
going to make this smaller when it's done i just want to be able to see
it
quite clearly okay what i would like you to do is go
into vertex mode and select the vertex on the very top
now we're going to be moving this up in a minute you can see that at the moment
that is not giving us the desired result we want this to look like the top of the
flame it's just making it kind of spiky what we're going to do is
turn on soft solid which will influence the vertices around it
and there'll be a fall off to that so all the closest ones will be influenced
more the ones furthe
r will be influenced less there are two ways of getting soft
select turned on the menu way is double click on your move tool it'll
bring up your tool settings and there's a soft selection option here
and you can just turn it on you'll see that your mesh goes yellow i
never really use that way the way i use is to press b and that will toggle soft
select on and off okay so this turns it on but the problem
is it's influencing the shape too much we need to be able to control the area
of influence to
do that you hold b and you left click
and drag to the left and then you can see that
that's making you can see the circle indicating the area of influence so i'm
just going to let it go to about there i think so yellow influences a lot
all the way through to black which is hardly influencing at all and then if
it's still in blue it's not being influenced even a little bit and then
we're just going to drag that up and that will give it a more flamy shape
overall then i'll press b to toggle that
off
i'll go into object mode and i'm just going to scale and position
this flame so that it makes a bit more sense
happy days let's drop that down a touch more
lovely right it's now up to you what you do i'm going to pop these into a group i
think you can parent them if you want so
everything's selected ctrl g and i'm going to call it candle
group i will then just get my pivot so that
it's down at the bottom so i'm going to do d
and v on my keyboard and then move the pivot all the way down
and t
hat's ready to go in the next step according to my notes we're going to be
creating a candle holder so i will see you in the next
step for that in this step and the next step we're
going to be creating some more objects to go on the table but
we're going to be looking at a slightly different approach to modeling and that
will be through using nurbs curves and surfaces
and we'll get on to what those are all about
shortly first of all though i just want to do something with the candle so it's
not
in the way whilst we build our candle holder so
let's just turn back on the furniture i'm going to click on a piece of my
candle and press up on my keyboard to select the whole thing and just for
now i'm going to pop it out of the way i'll scale it down a
little bit as well because why wouldn't you
and we'll just leave that there for now and we'll just add it to the furniture
layer so i'll right click on my finisher layer and add selected objects
so that i can hide it okay let's have a look at h
ow we're gonna
model our candlestick holder so i want to be in either my front or side view
for this going to go for front and let's find
the center of my grid here and what i'm going to do this is a really clever
little trick it's called revolve so i just need to kind of draw
one half of the silhouette and then maya's magic is going to do the
rest so i'll give you an example of what i mean so let's just
go to create and we can see here there are curve tools
and i'm going to be using the cv curv
e tool for this and for this we're
going to create kind of a candle stick holder i think that's what they're
called i don't know but i'll start down at the bottom
so i'm just going to do something like this and i'm going to keep my clicks
quite close together and this will look like a messy curve by the time i'm done
but you'll be surprised at how forgiving the results are
so i'm going to do something like that and then go up to that shape there
and then we'll come out a little bit and back in
a
little bit more then we'll go up like that
we'll come out again a little bit and then
out for the top something like that and then when you're done press
enter and this gives us a curve and you can see that i've got a bit of an
outline and this you have to imagine this is
going to be mirrored on the other side and then the revolve tool is going to
fill it in for us and again it looks very messy
but generally this technique is quite forgiving of the messier curves
in order to get this to work th
en what we're going to do next is go to
surfaces so we're still in our modeling menu we'll go to surfaces
and there is this little thing here called revolve first thing i'd recommend
doing is just try clicking on it and seeing if it works
and in my case it does but if it doesn't just go to surfaces
revolve click on the little options and you might just need to change the axis
preset if it's doing it in the wrong direction
but as i've already shown in my case y is the correct direction so i'll ju
st
click on revolve and if i deselect that to have a look at
the overall shape you can see that it's all those
unneat imperfections that make this look like quite a detailed shape
so now you just imagine our little candle sitting atop this it's gonna look
pretty cool right with a nice sort of brassy coppery goldy sort of metallic
texture on here it's going to be the bomb but this is not finished i
generally work with polygon modeling because i might
want to take it into a game engine which don't
really accept
nurbs models so i'm going to convert this to
a polygon model first of all so i'll come back into my perspective
view just click on the nurbs shape i don't need to rename
it yet because i'll be deleting this in a sec this is just like
a starting point so with it selected i'm now going to go to
modify near the bottom is convert and you can convert
any nurbs shape to a polygon shape and it will just do this automatically
we don't really need to worry about the settings for it
so i've
clicked that and then what i will do is just with my move tool
move it to the side so this is now our candle holder shape
this was just what we used to get started so i can delete the curve
and the nurbs shape they have served their purpose now i want to do is just
put this back to center so i'll just zero those out and
at this stage the mesh is quite difficult to work with
because it's mostly triangulated and it's quite uneven what we really
want is something that is a bit more even
and quadra
ngulated so back into the square sort of mesh that we've been
using and luckily since about maya 2019
actually it might be new in this version it might be my 2020.
there is this new tool which will just do that automatically
it lives in mesh and it's called retopologize and you can
go into the settings and try and tweak them but i think the default settings
should be fine for this so we'll just click on read
apologize it will take a couple of seconds but then you can see
that it has created the
same shape for us
but using quads we might have lost a little bit of detail
but i'm fairly happy with that result so at this stage then there are only really
two more things that we need to do to finish this off and that is to fill
the hole in the top and the bottom we've had a look at the
fill hole tool previously you could use that again
but in this case i'm going to show you a different way which gives you better
topology because your edge flow keeps going so we're
going to put this into edge
mode i'm going to oh it looks like i've still
got my soft select tool turned on so i'll hit b on my keyboard to turn that
off and then double click on the top edge
that will select all the way around then what i want to
do is extrude that so i'll do control and e
and that has just highlighted an issue for me every time i do something it's
going to re-topologize it which i don't want so i'm going to undo that
it'll re-topologize again but before i do anything else to this shape i want to
delete
the history to stop it from doing that because this
poly re topo in the inputs there is going to make it take ages every time we
make a change so we're just going to go to edit
delete by type history that removes that and it means that when we make any
further changes that won't be an issue so let's now go
back into edge mode double click the top edge and we'll do
extrude there we go i now want to bring these in
together so trying to use these tools such as the
offset is not going to work becaus
e of the direction that the
normals are facing so we need to switch to our
general scale tool and we'll just scale it into the middle you can see that if
we go all the way to the center that will seal the hole
but i don't want to go all the way to the center i want to leave a space to
show you how i'm going to seal this properly
this is going to be completely watertight so with that edge row there
still selected i'm going to convert to that selection
to vertices and we can do that by going into
select
you can then go to convert selection to vertices
and it'll change that edge selection into a vertex selection
which is half the job done then what we will do is go
into edit mesh and there's an option to merge to center
and that now has taken all those vertices and merged them into one
which is the same sort of setup that you would get on top of a cylinder
so that then is perfect and then we just repeat that on the bottom
so edge mode double click extrude scale tool scale in a bit
select
convert selection to vertices edit mesh and merge to center
and that is our candlestick holder thing created i think actually this edge on
the top is too sharp i'm not a fan of that so i'll
click on that edge and we'll just put a little bevel on it
so i'll give it a few sections and we'll just knock the fraction down to about
0.2 yeah that's better okay let's rename it
and then we'll make it part of the overall table layer
so we just need to bring that layer back we're obviously going to need to
scale
this holder down a little bit so let's bring the size down we'll drop
it somewhere near our table we can position
this all a little bit better later so i still think that's too
big let's bring that down a little bit that's better
then we will get our little candle press up on the group to make it all move
together and then we need to just put that on top
so just to get this lined up a little bit i'm going to use my top view
there we go and to get the height correct i'll use
side or front
view so we can see that's a little bit above
so we'll just drop it down lovely job
okay i'm not ever so happy with the proportions the candle looks too
fat for the holder so i'm going to bring that down
to something like that i think that looks nice and now i want
the candlestick to be part of the candle group so in order to do that i will open
my outliner windows outliner there's my candle
holder and what i'm going to do to add it to the group is with my middle mouse
button i'm going to click a
nd drag onto the
candle group and release and that's now all part of the same
group so at any point i select that whole group
it will all move together and we will just place this to one corner of
the table i want to get the height right now
there we go and then i'm going to duplicate that so that we've got two
candles in our scene so ctrl d and we'll put the other one over here
and i'm just going to bring it this way a bit so
it doesn't look too perfect there we go this is starting to come toge
ther
that's this step complete then in the next step we're going to be using
curves and nurbs again to create a opened out scroll that our sorcerer
might be reading from or writing on so i will see you in the next step for
that in this step
we're going to be using nurbs again to create
a fantasy looking scroll to be laid out across the table
so in order to set up for that we'll first of all get the furniture out of
the way i'm going to then go into the front view
for this find my origin there it
is and i'm going to need my
curve tools again so we're going to go to create
curve tools and we'll do cv curve and i'll just show you how i'm going to put
this together so i'm going to start over here
and i'm just going to do lots of clicks around in a circle
like so get a nice spiral oh um yeah that'll work actually unless
if you put any points in that you don't want you
can hit backspace to get rid of them so i wasn't a fan of some of those ones
and then i want to just get down onto the
sort
of level area like that you can if you choose to if you want it
to be perfectly flat you can choose to press x when you click
and that will snap it to grid points so i'm just doing that now so we're
going to go over here and go about that far and then i'm gonna
bring it up like that and just quickly get my spiral on okay and that's gonna
create that not symmetrical wasn't aiming for
symmetry um might look a little bit strange we'll
see but that gives us our curve to start from
now we need to go
back into our perspective view find the curve
there it is and we need to duplicate it we need to have two sides to this
so it's going to represent kind of the top and bottom edges so i'll duplicate
it and we'll move it up to about there that
looks like a good distance and that's going to create the
information that maya needs in order to do what's called a loft
between these two curves so i'll first make sure that i select them both
then i'll go into surfaces and just simply click
on loft and wh
at that then does is creates some geometry between those two
curves you can see that works out pretty nice
as i did with the candle holder what i want to do now
is just convert this to polygons so that lives in
modify convert nerves to polygons and then we're just going to move that
up there then i can get rid of the nurbs surface
and the curves that i used to construct the polygons get rid of
that i'll just drop that back at my origin for now
and what i want to do at this stage is quadrangulate
this so i want this to be
back into quads and i'm going to do that like it
in the previous step with re-topologize because that's going
to give me nice evenly spaced out quads and it should keep the shape as i've
already got it so we'll click on re-to apologize see what we get
yeah and i think that looks pretty nice the next thing i'm going to do
because i actually want a little bit more geometry on this especially across
here is i think i'm going to put some
additional edge loops in just in ce
rtain places you'll see why in a second
so i'm going to go into my multi-cut tool for this hold ctrl
so that it's going to let me put edge loops in and i'm going to put edge loops
in near some pre-existing ones you can see
i've made a mistake there because it's doing the re-topologize
just like it did with the candlestick holder so that means that i need to
delete the history on this before moving on so
i'm just going to put it into object mode and then go to edit
delete by type and history now
i can go back to my multi-cut tool
and put some of these in so either side of pre-existing
edges i'm going to put in some new ones that should do it and i will show you
why i made that change if i just now go into vertex mode
i want to make this look a little bit tatty around the edges so i'm just going
to bring in some edges so bring that one in there
and then probably on the scrolly bits here as well just to
make it look a bit aged we don't want this to be too perfect do
we no siri so let's ju
st crud this up a bit
and you can spend as much time on this as you want
but we just don't want this to look too perfect perfect is bad
so let's go into object mode and see what we've got yeah now at this stage i
want to explain something to you you might be
being bothered by the fact that this side here is showing up as
nice sort of gray as we would expect it to be but the other side is coming up as
this awful black color this is maya's way of showing us which
is the back side of the face polyg
ons are actually one-sided and if
we were to import this into a game engine this area that's black
actually wouldn't be rendered at all so maya's kind of given us a warning
there are two solutions to that you can either extrude the shape
and add some thickness to it so you get a front and back polygon
i don't want to do that in this case the other solution
is to render both sides of the polygon so in order to do that we're going to go
into lighting and we're going to turn on two-sided
lighting a
nd that will now render both sides of
this scroll as we would expect it to i think that's
looking pretty nice we threw that together quite quickly let's give it a
name scroll
and let's bring back our furniture and pop it on the table so we're going to
need to shrink it a little bit it's a bit too
big at the moment and we need to just do our best to get
it in place so let's just go into the top view for this so i'm going to put it
here i'm also going to rotate it a little bit
because there's noth
ing worse than things looking too perfect so we'll go
for yeah let's drop it over here and put a
bit of a rotation on it and then we're going to go into this
view here and we need to be careful about this
because we don't want this to clip through the table we need it to be
just above it so there's actually going to be a little bit of air between it
like that okay that then i think is starting to
come together pretty nicely the last thing i'll do in
this step then is i'm just going to add our ne
w scroll
to the furniture layer so let's go add selected objects which
means that i can turn those all off and that's going to get us ready for the
last thing that we're going to add to our table together which is going to be
a book so i will see you in the next step for that
in this step we're going to add one final thing to our table together
which is going to be a book and to be perfectly honest you won't really learn
much new in this step specifically but it does set us up
for more variety w
hen we're covering things like materials down the line
so it does serve a purpose anyway let's jump into it so i'm just going to turn
off the furniture and also the room and what i'm going to
do is create a cube this is going to form what our
book will be so i'll just rename it book straight away
and i would like to have some subdivisions on the height so just
two i want the center line and you'll see why a little later
then what we need to do is just using our scale tool we want to get this int
o
a pretty bookish shape that's pretty
bookish that gets us started now what i want to
do is work on the spine of the book so we'll do that by going into edge mode
and selecting the top and bottom long edge and then we're
going to bevel them i'm going to add a couple of segments
like that that's pretty nice so that's the spine done next we'll
create the pages so for that we need to go into face mode
and we'll select all of these faces around the side apart
from the spine we're going to leave the
spine alone
and then we need to do an extrusion we're going to add a little offset 0.1
should do it yep and you can see that's created a bit
of a border added some thickness to our cover then we need to
make sure that there's less thickness on these pages so that they're in set a
little bit so i'm going to do that with another extrusion
extrude again and we're going to go in on the thickness a little bit so
minus 0.3 actually looks quite nice there
yep so i'm happy with that and now you're goin
g to see what this center
line was for so back into edge mode we want the pages
to look like they're a bit curved as well we'll do that by moving this center
line in a little bit something like that
that's obviously too jagged so we also need to bevel it
so let's bevel that and we're going to add
some segments to it and get the fraction to somewhere that we like
so that's pretty nice and that then is a quickly created but very handsome
book it's all as one object and what we need to do now
is ge
t this onto our table somewhere so let's turn back on the furniture
we'll pop the book somewhere resembling the right place
what i'll do for this one just make my life a little easier
is i'm going to move the pivot point down to the bottom of the book
and that should mean that snapping it to the table
is also easier and then we can just scale it down
and put it into place what i want you to do is create an arrangement of a couple
of books two three four books on the table just
to make it look li
ke there are a number of books so i'll put
one there i'll duplicate it and then let's move it over this way a
little bit i'm going to rotate it around and this
one i want to look like it's leaning on the other book let's see is that
going to work perhaps so we'll move it up a little bit
that's good and we'll move it across how does that look
not happy with it so now i'm going to rotate it just in my
top view just something like that
that looks kind of nice uh let's just try and get it in place
t
hat looks good and i think i'll try and add one more
yeah that looks pretty nice so we can leave that there for now
and i will see you in the next step for your final modeling challenge before
we move on to creating some materials so see you in the next step
[Music] welcome back to your final modeling
challenge challenge number three and the challenge this time is to add
something to the table so this time it's your
chance to be creative maybe you could create an add something
like a mysterious
looking key uh some weighing scales maybe for potion
making uh maybe like uh an hourglass do you know the
ones where the sand falls through you might do a quill with
an ink bottle or something like a pestle and mortar
for like grinding up herbs i've gone with the pestle and mortar
i'll just show you what mine looks like there we go so i've added that in there
fairly simple shape it was mostly just a sphere that i edited and did some
extrusions on and also the the mortar
is just a cylinder with b
evels on the top and bottom edges nice and straight
forward but it adds a little bit more character
to the table so over to you add something cool
looking to your table make it your own and i will see you in the next step
where we'll start thinking about getting some materials
see you there for that one welcome back how did you get on with the
last challenge hopefully you created something that just
looks sick i'm sure you did i believe in you
let me know in the comments how exactly did it go
an
yway we're now moving on from modeling and we're going to get on to
creating materials first of all and as we step up in complexity with that we'll
also get onto uv mapping but in this step it's going to be all
about creating and applying our first material and also just getting
to grips with a new part of the workspace which is
known as the hypershade to be able to create new materials then
we need to get into the hypershade there are two ways of doing that that i know
of although i'm sure ther
e are lots more you can go into windows rendering
editors and you've got the option for the hypershade there
or the way i always get it is i just go to this icon here
and give it a click this then opens up your hypershade i'm going to make it
full screen just so that what you have to look at isn't too confusing
and this is the central working area of maya
where you can build shading networks which are basically materials
by creating editing and connecting different nodes
such as textures materia
ls lights etc you can see that it's split up into
different sections known as panels and i'll just give you a brief overview
of what each panel is so currently across the top here
this is known as the browser and this just
lists the materials textures lights that you have in your scene and there are
tabs up here so that you can move between the different types
over the top right you have your material viewer and if you click on a
material for instance lambert's one it will preview what that mate
rial looks
like on a shape by default it will be this handsome thing here
called the shader ball although you can change it to something else
over on the left here we have the create tab this
lists all the different nodes that you can create and use
to build your materials this big space here
is the work area and this is where you can see
all the nodes how they're connected make new connections it all
is represented visually here and in the bottom right you've also got
a property editor and this
allows you to change the properties
of whatever you currently have selected in the hypershade
there's also one other little thing down here in the bottom left of your screen
which is bins and all that does is allows you to
organize and track the shading nodes in your scenes you can sort them into
different bins although it's not something i use so
that's the basic overview i because i'm working on one screen
rather than working over two as i would normally do i'm also going to open and
add one
more panel to this to make it a
little bit easier to work in and that's going to be a copy of our
viewport to do that i'm going to go up to window and i can create a viewport
also if you ever lose any of your panels you can just reopen
it by selecting on the option in here anyway i want a viewport so i'll click
on that you'll see that it opens it as a floating window
and if you drag it around you will see the interface move around
showing you where you can dock this and you can dock it wherever
you choose
but i find that i don't need quite as much space for my browser so i tend to
put it to this side of the browser and then i just resize it so i get a bit
more of a rectangular view that matches what i
would have in my main view like that and that's just lovely so i
would recommend adding your own viewport and then just put your mouse in here and
press five and you'll get the same shaded view as you get in your main
maya workspace what we'll do now then is create
our first very simple m
aterial we're just going to add
what's called a lambert you can see we have lambert one here
this is that default gray material that's applied to everything
and we're going to create a new lambert that we can just change the color of
my advice to you is never change lambert one any changes you make to lambert one
as you can see here happen to everything generally that's
not something you want to do so what we'll do is create new materials
and apply them so over in our create panel over here
you
can see that there's the option to create
a lambert so i'm going to click on that just the once
a new lambda is created up here it's lambert2 we can see the nodes that make
up this lambert here in our workspace and over here we can adjust the
properties for it the first thing i will adjust
is name so i'm going to call it m underscore and then give it a name so in
this case i'll call it floor and then i will press enter to make sure
that that name is saved now i can change the properties of it
th
ere aren't many properties for this it's pretty much the most simple type of
material in maya all i want to change is the color so you
can change the color to black or white using this slider
or if you want something a bit more extravagant than something between
black or white you can click on the swatch here
and choose whichever color you want so i'm going to go for something that's
kind of brown brownie colored so i'm going to go for
red and then i'm going to take this round
into sort of the o
range orangey spectrum and then from here i'm
going to drop this down towards black and that'll give me a dark brown which
is what i'm going for that's it you've created your first material
the last thing i'll show you is how to apply it
and you must make sure that you press the right button for this to work
so over here this is our complete material and i'm going to click and drag
that onto the floor over here and i'm going
to do that using the middle mouse button if you use the left mouse butt
on or the
right mouse button it won't work it has to be the middle mouse button
so click with the middle mouse button drag over here release on the floor
there we go we now have added a little bit of color
into our scene and that will wrap up this first step so we've created
our first material we actually replace it later i just wanted to start with
lambert's so that you know they exist going forward into the next step we're
going to create our first arnold material and explain what that
means i
n the next step so i'll see you there
it's now time to start creating some of our more
photorealistic materials that's going to make our rendering look
real nice and we're going to do that by using arnold materials
arnold is the default photorealistic renderer that's built
into maya it creates photorealistic representations
of lighting and material and you have to use
arnold's own materials to get the best results with that
so that's what we'll do now we're going to create an arnold material and
it's
going to be for the candlesticks i think before we
create a new material then we need to clear our work area here what
happens is every time you create a new material it just stacks the nodes up
here and never clears it so it can get confusing quickly so what
we need to do is always clear our workspace before we create a new
material and we do that by clicking on this icon
just here which is a white box with three little
blue stars in it we'll give that a click and we now have a nice clean
workspace
again we now need to go back over to our create
panel and we're going to create a material type called an
ai standard surface and it's one of the arnold ones so if we just click on
arnold here that will filter so that we're only
getting arnold materials and we can filter further by going into
something like shaders and that will only show arnold shaders
so as i said in this case we want ai standard surface so i'm going to give
that a click and you can see that this has a lot more
opti
ons also in our property editor there are
more options for it as well first thing i want to do with this as
always is i'm going to call it m underscore brass
and in case you hadn't already figured it out the m
underscore is for materials so that i can tell what our materials and what
are not materials one of the good things about these arnold materials is they
come with presets which are really good starting points for a lot of material
types so i'm going to click on presets here
and we get a bi
g long list of different types of presets
in this case i think i'm going to go for either a brushed metal
or a gold we'll try gold out so we just need to click on
replace and that will replace the current properties with the ones
from gold and instantly we'll get a preview
of how that's going to look in our material viewer here you can see it
looks much nicer than that dull gray we had a second ago
you might now want to make some changes to make it look a little bit more
brass like so i might ch
ange the color to be something a little
more orangey and maybe a touch darker that was nice and so that's changed the
color you can also change things like how rough it is so
the moment it's got a roughness value of 0.150 which means
it's not very rough you can drag this over to the right you
can see that it starts to blur it gets rougher so i don't want this to
be too shiny i'll take a little bit of shine off it
something like that just blur it ever so slightly
and then before we apply this to
our candlesticks i just want to show you
one more thing with the material viewer so we're currently viewing this
in hardware preview which is happening quite quickly this is happening in a
real-time way but if you want to know exactly how this
material looks when it's rendered using arnold the photorealistic renderer
we can change the hardware to arnold and then what you'll see happen is this
it's now rendering this and it renders out from the center and goes around in
spirals and it takes a whi
le and the fan on my
pc is really kicked into gear now because this makes your
computer do a lot of thinking but this is the material you're actually creating
and this is what it will look like when we render at the end of the project
the downside to this is that it takes a lot of computation so if you every time
you make a little change so let's say i take this roughness back
down a touch it has to render again and if you're on
a slow pc this can get really painful so it's your choice as to
whe
ther or not you use this arnold preview
but as you're going in for your final materials you will probably want to
okay what i'm going to do now is assign this material to one of my candlesticks
so i'm going to click on a candlestick here to select it
i'll press f just to frame it so i can see what i'm looking at
and then with this selected over here i'm going to right click
on my brass material and choose assign material to
selection and you will now see that that has done something but it doesn
't quite
look the way we would expect it to and i'm just going to apply the same
material to this one as well so that will basically do it for this
step and we've got our candle stick holders
looking pretty in the next step we're just going to cover how you can
duplicate and then make changes to a material and then we'll have a look
at how we start previewing it in this window over here
so that we've got a good idea of how this is starting to come together
so i will see you in the next step in t
his step we'll take a look at how
you can duplicate a completed material and then
make some tweaks to it if you want to so in this case we could also just
create a new material but if you've spent a lot of time getting a material
just the way you want it and you want a copy of it to just make
some small changes to this would be the way to go
so we're going to create another metallic style material for our
detailing on the pieces of table here so we'll see
how this turns out and we're going to us
e
our brass material as a starting point for it
so what i'm going to do is just select it so just left click on it
over here in the browser and then to copy it i'm going to go to edit you'll
see that there's duplicate here and we need to do the whole shading network
but i'm going to hang on for a second because
i haven't yet cleared my workspace and it would get messy if i forgot to do
that so let's just click on that to clear the workspace
select our brass material edit duplicate and we'll also
copy the shading network
there we go so here we are then with our duplicated
material we're not going to call it m underscore brass we'll call it m
underscore i don't know what would you have end
table piece let's call it copper so we could at this
stage now make changes to the color roughness whatever we want
but because i'm a lazy little chuff what i'm going to do instead is go back to my
presets find the copper material and replace it
this will now create our copper at any point you can now
go in so you
can see the roughness has changed the colors changed
you can change this further should you choose so you can make the color
darker light or whatever i'm just going to stick with the defaults for now
and add it to my end pieces so i'll click on one there
i'll swing around over here shift select the other piece so i can
add materials to multiple pieces at once i'm going to right click and hold on my
copper and assign material to selection and now
you can see they've gone black as wel
l because they also now have
materials assigned to them whilst we're here we're just going to
quickly create some wax materials for the candles as well
before we worry about why we can't see these particularly well we'll put in a
basic light as well just so we can see how these should look
so let's clear our workspace we're going to create a new
ai standard surface we'll call it m underscore wax
and then into our presets and i think there is a wax in here somewhere there
it is at the bottom repl
ace so for some reason
it goes with pink wax we're not going for scented candles though so we're
going to change that color to something that's just off white like
a creamy white so we'll change that to there
and get a bit of sort of yellowy in it but despite making that change you can
still see that there's some pink coming from
somewhere now at this stage you need to start really digging into material to
find out what needs changing and what changes you want to make to it
and by opening this t
ransmission area you can see that you've got some colors
in here and what this deals with is how light passes through it light can kind
of get into wax a little bit so we're going to make some changes to
this as well and we're just going to choose the same waxy color
and we'll also do that for the scatter as well although i might yeah we'll
leave that so we now have this color here and i've
discovered that i'm not a fan of it so we might just take it a little bit
closer to white on all counts
ye
ah that's looking much nicer so once you've got
a wax color that you are happy with bang it on the candles
so i'm going to select that candle there shift select the other one and then
right click and hold assign material to selection right so that we can actually
see how this should look because at the moment we're kind of
flying blind with these coming up as black
or gray this is not really helpful to us so we're going to add in
just a placeholder light the thing that these materials are lackin
g to be able
to work at the moment is a light and then we can render them
properly so we're just going to minimize our hypershade for a second
we're going to go into our make sure in your modeling menu although i don't
think it matters yeah it doesn't matter so we'll go into
our modeling menu there's arnold here because we're
dealing with arnold stuff arnold rendering
so we'll open that there's a light section and we're just going to throw in
a physical sky it won't do much it'll put a big black
dome outside your scene now that we've added
our light to the scene we should now be able to render it
the way that i would do this is just by changing our renderer here
to arnold when you do that this window here
should pop up and then you can just click on play to start the rendering
at this stage you'll get an idea of how your materials
are starting to come together so we can see that we've got some metallicness
going on here we've also got metallic happening on our
candlestick holders and t
he wax material is showing up as well
if for some reason this method of rendering doesn't work for you this is
called arnold ipr rendering we'll get on to
what that is a little bit more later but if that doesn't work for you just go
to arnold and click on render and that will open a
separate window and you'll get an idea of how it's
looking we will be coming back to rendering
later in the tutorial though so don't worry about it too much for now
what we are going to worry about is creating a glas
s material which we'll do
in the next step so let's go and do that welcome back it's time to make some
glass so let's get back into our hyper shade
i've just minimized mine here it is and what we need to do is clear our
workspace we're then going to go into our arnold shaders section again
create a new ai standard surface material
give it a name so this one's going to be m underscore glass
and then we'll go into the presets and see what we've got so we've got frosted
glass we've just got glass a
nd i think in this case i'm just going to go for a
basic glass because i want to make sure that this can be seen through
quite easily so just click on replace there
you'll see that our material viewer gives us an idea of how this is going to
look you can switch to arnold if you want to
get a better idea of how it's going to render
so that's the glass basically ready to go
some really cool things here though as you have an ior setting
which is an index of refraction that's how the light is going
to bend through
it which is one of the cool things about these photorealistic renderers
in that light will behave in a believable way that's why you can see
the light being bent in this preview and there are some settings that you can
use such as like transmission or subsurface to try and get some color
into this glass so if you wanted to to be like a stained green bottle or
something i want to really be able to see my
liquids inside the bottle so i'm going to make sure i just keep it fairly cle
an
this glass so with that ready to go then what i'll
do is just apply it to my two bottles so i'm just going to use my drag and drop
method for this one pop it on there and
pop it on there and what i don't want to forget at this point
is that i also have a glass window over here so i'll also throw it on there
and that's now gone see-through you can see that the hardware renderer doesn't
do a great job of showing where it is but as long as
you've got this screen space ambient inclusion turned on
you can at least see an outline of where they should be which can be really
useful because they just go completely invisible otherwise
but again if you want to get an idea of how this is looking you can change your
renderer to arnold and click on play to get the ipr render
going and this is now going to give you an example
of how the glass is looking because of the way i set this up earlier using
parenting it appears to have also added the glass material
to the liquid inside and to the corks wh
ich is not the end of the world
because we're going to change those materials later
but you can see that this is starting to come together now and we've got a good
idea of how sexy these materials are going to
become when we're finished in the next stage then we are going to
start worrying about the liquid material that's going to go
inside these two flasks so let's move over to the next step and make a start
on that in this step i'm going to show you how
to create a liquid material using arnold
and we're
going to put some color in it as well so it's going to be a colored liquid
what we need to do then make sure you're in your hypershade and we are going to
clear our workspace and create another new ai standard
surface nice and easy i'm going to call this one
m underscore health liquid
and the preset i'm going to go for for this one is
clear water and we'll just replace that this has now given us an idea of how
that clear water looks i want a better idea though so we're going to swap
t
o the arnold renderer this is how the health liquid is coming together so far
then i want this to be your typical
red kind of potion so what i'll do is go into
my settings and i'm looking for transmission
and i want to give this a color so i'll start by just clicking on the swatch and
just choose the standard red color and that looks pretty nice now you might
choose to experiment with how red this is by
changing the saturation slider so you might only want it to be
a faint sort of red or you mig
ht want it to be a much deeper red
i'm going to go for something like that i think and then that's that material
ready to go for now we might make it glow a little bit later
as we get on to lighting and rendering but for now
this will serve its purpose the issue we've got now is selecting
the liquid inside the bottle without selecting the bottle itself
and for that what we're going to need to do is just go back into maya
and open our outliner so we get that by going windows
outliner and that wil
l probably pop up on the side of your screen over here or
it could be a floating window and then you can see that now i've got
my flask here and i can select just the health liquid and once i've got
that selected i'll nip back into my hypershade and with my
health liquid material i'm going to right click on it
and assign material to selection we can see that now because this has some color
to it it's not completely transparent which makes it easier to see
and we'll get an idea of how this is goi
ng to come together
so let's just have a quick look at this press play
and you can see that now inside this glass container
we have a liquid and as lights passing through it it's also creating a red
highlight on the table so this is all good so far before moving
on what i would like you to do is duplicate that health material for a
mana material make it blue or whichever color you
choose and assign that to the other liquid
just like i'm going to show you now here it is
so assuming you've done it
correctly you will now see that you have a red liquid
in one of your flasks and a blue or whichever color you chose in
the other that's going to do it for the basic
preset section of creating materials we're going to
move on to creating a texture based material next which is going to give us
a little bit more control over how it looks
it'll also mean that we need to start thinking about uv mapping
as well but we'll get onto that in the upcoming steps
so i will see you in the next step where we'
re going to create our
new floor material as promised we are now going to create a
new material for our floor and this is going to be a much
more detailed one because we're going to use
textures as the inputs rather than just colors
we'll need to go into our hypershade then if we're not already there
make sure your work space is clear and we're going to start with a new
arnold ai standard surface there we go
i'm going to call this m underscore floor 2
and before i bring my inputs in what i want
to do
is to get a preset that's close because it will set up
most of this to be near what i want it to be and then i can just make changes
so the preset i'm going to start with for this one is going to be just clay
because that's going to be a fairly sort of
matte naturalistic looking material so that gets us
as far as that now what we're going to do is change some of these things
so we're going to be using textures if you
haven't done it already and you want to use my textures then in the link
below you'll find a link to it go into the source
images folder of my project get the textures and copy them into the source
images folder of your project and you'll be good to go
and i'll show you again why you need to have them in your source images folder
so when i go to color then this is what we'll change
instead of changing the color here we're going to go to this little button here
which i call the checker button so we'll click that this is going to
create a render node and connect it to
our shader and the node we want is a
file because that's what our texture is so we'll click on file in the property
editor it now gives us the properties for that
file and we just need to load it in first of all so i'll click on the little
folder here and i'm using the floor textures and i'm
going to start with t underscore floor underscore d the d
denotes that it is a diffuse texture and t means that it's a texture
and there we go you can see it's a sort of sandstoney kind of flaw that i'm
goin
g for so i'll open that and you will then
notice that the preview here changes what i'm also
going to do is just change the preview from shader
ball to sphere because i think that makes it a little
bit easier to see now what i want to do is just click
over here on the main part of my material to get back to
all the standard settings and then what i want to do is change the roughness
which is on the specular i'll go to roughness and we're going to
click on the checker button again tell it that we
would like to connect a
file and then click on the folder and then this time we're going to choose
t underscore float and score r the r means that it's roughness so we'll
give that a click you can see that's now made a change to
the way that that looks and we're going to load in one more
texture which is going to add the illusion of some depth to this
material so we'll click back on the main node
we're then going to just scroll down a little bit to geometry and expand that
and we're going to ad
d a bump map so we're going to click on the checker
button next to that add a file now before we do that we've
got a few extra settings we need to tell it
what we want to use it as and we need to choose
tangent space normals that's important for this step
and then you can see that our bump value here
this has got a connection made and the connection is actually this file over
here so we'll click on that and now we can
load in our file so let's click on the folder t
underscore floor underscore n
normal maps are always kind of purply
looking so we'll click on open and you can see that now brings in some
really noticeable depth to it there is i have been reading apparently
a bug with maya that sometimes your normal map in here
won't update if you're using an arnold material if that's the case
just click on the pause up here and then click it again
and that will make it refresh and that should update it okay then
that is the material made so i'm just going to zoom out a little bit
in my pr
eview here and i'm going to assign that to the floor
now at this stage you might see a problem because we are currently showing
shaded view in maya but we are haven't yet turned on
textured view so as we're going through our buttons on the keyboard
we've seen number four which is wireframe view we've seen number five
which is shaded view we now need to press number six
which is texture maps and now you will see that texture
come in on the floor one thing to note is that we've only turned it on
f
or this window here if we minimize the hypershade and look in this window
it hasn't yet been turned on for this view as well so i'm also going to press
six here this now highlights a little problem
with the texture in that the blocks the slabs are just
too big so what we're going to cover in the next
step is using planar projection we're going to start
uv mapping i'm going to do that to make these blocks
a little bit smaller so see you in the next step
in this step we're going to have our first
go at uv mapping
and what uv mapping is is it's to do with how textures
are mapped onto our polygon shapes and you can change those depending on what
you're doing so flat surfaces like our floor are quite
easy but surfaces with lots of different
directions like the table take a little bit more thought
to get us started though we're going to do what's called a planar projection on
the floor so we're going to start by having the
floor selected you can see i'm not in my hypershade for this i've gon
e back to my
main myer perspective window and with the
floor selected up at the top of the screen you have a uv menu
and within that menu you've got some different ways that you can choose
to map so there's cylindrical planar and spherical and then there are some others
up here which we'll also look at at some point but we'll start with doing a
planar projection before i do that though i
would just like to show you the uv editor so let's open this up for now and
this will show us the way the uvs
are at the moment for the floor so
they've actually mapped fine already but i would like to just
show you how to do mapping anyway and i'm going to do it i think to change the
direction of the slabs just so that i feel like
we've accomplished something with this so for now i'm going to close the uv
editor and my uv toolkit make sure that i'm in object mode and i
have the floor selected we'll go uv and we're going to do planar
okay and that will make it look worse first of all probably because w
e've
mapped it across the x-axis which is causing lots
of stretching so what we will do is sort that out so
we're just going to go back into object mode and select our floor
then we'll go to uv and we're going to click on the little box this time next
to planar so that we can change the settings
now we're going to get it right so we're going to choose to project from the
y-axis and this is really important make sure
that you have keep image width and height ratio
selected it's very rare that i t
urn that off so make sure that you have that
selected and then click on project and you'll see
that now we have projected our uvs as we want to
whilst we currently have that projection done you can see that in my attribute
editor if yours isn't open press ctrl a we can change the rotation angle so
i'm just going to rotate that by 90 degrees
type that number in and press enter and that's flip the projection around
and now i want to do is just get this to tile a little bit so repeat the texture
an
d there are a number of ways that we can do this but for now i want to do
this in the hypershade so i'm just going to
go back into object mode here and then into my hypershade i'll just
bring this back make sure i can see the ground and what
i want to do is make sure that i have my
floor 2 material available so what i'm going to do just in case you
can't still see or so i can see all my material here but let's say for some
reason you can't what you do to bring that shading
network back is you ri
ght click and hold on the material
and choose to graph the network and that will show up everything within that
and what we want to do is tell each of these textures
to repeat and in order to do that we're going to use these place
2d texture nodes so if we select one you'll see that it brings up the
options for it and we're gonna change the repeat uv to
maybe three by three and you won't see much change yet
because we've got to change all of them so then we're going to do the roughness
and we'll
make that three by three as well
and it'll really come together when we change this depth one here the normal
map so let's make this three by three as
well three and three and now you'll see
that the tiles look much smaller this is a nicer preview everything's
good so we've now used uv placement to change
the appearance of our floor material if you want to you
can also have a quick render look at it now to see how it's coming out
but what i'm going to do is move over to the next step where we'r
e going to
create the material that we'll put on the walls so i'll see
you there in this step we're going to get the
material made for the wall so we've already made a material
like this with the floor so we can go through the first part of this quickly
and then we're just going to make it tile on the walls in a slightly
different way and create some uvs for this wall you'll
see what i mean by that very soon so let's start with creating our new
material then in the hypershade if you haven't done
it already make sure you
clear your work area then it'll be a new ai standard surface
we're going to give it a name so i'm going to call it m
underscore wall i'm going to choose the clay preset again
and then we need to load in the color so we'll click on the
checker button go to the file node and then under image name we need to
find that texture so we'll click on the folder icon
and then in the source images folder you should have the t
underscore wall textures and we'll start with d which is
the diffuse
there it is that's our wall texture so we'll click on open
and we will see that i made a mistake so instead of clicking on the checker
button next to color i did it on weight and
that's why i didn't get the result that i would expect so let's fix
that because that's wrong so i'm just going to right click here
and break connection that will return that to normal
and then because i've already got it set up over here
i can just take the out color and drop that into base color there
and
that's done the same effect next then we are going to load in our
roughness so let's see if i can click in the right place this time
so checker button next to roughness under specular there we go
and then choose file click on the folder icon and we're going to make sure that
we choose wall underscore r for our texture
that takes care of that and then finally we're going to go
down a little bit choose the bump mapping click on the checker button tell
it we want to file make sure we change users
to tangent
space normals and then for the bump value we'll click
on here and then image name let's select
wall underscore and for normal and there we go it looks a little bit
extreme in this view but that's just the way it's lit if we
were to change this to preview in arnold you can see that it
gives a much more subtle effect so let's just change that back to
hardware for now so with that material done what we're going to do
is drop it onto our two walls so i'll just do the middle mouse
method f
or that and you'll see if i drop it onto this one over here
the blocks are too big but it largely makes sense
on this wall over here though let's just drop it under there
oh my goodness what is that mess that is because we extruded to create
the window earlier so there's no uv information for this part of the shape
so maya's just kind of making up and it's not going well
okay we need some uv mapping to sort that out let's just minimize
our hypershade for a sec and then we need to sort it out we'
ll do the easy
one first so we're going to do another planar
projection because we need it to make sense on here
so what i'm going to do is have a look down here
and you can see that zed is the direction that's going
through that wall and that's which direction we need to choose for our
planar projection whichever axis goes through it is the one to choose so
we'll go to uv planar click on the little box and it's
going to be the z axis make sure keep image width and height ratio is
selected and t
hen project then don't do anything else maybe zoom
out a little bit you can see that it already looks better
but this manipulator is the thing that i really want now
because this allows us to tile it even further so if i click on the top corner
i can then make this smaller until i'm sort of happy with the size of the
blocks and i'm kind of happy with them at about
that size now if i put it into object mode we can zoom in and see that that's
looking good it's also looking good on the back
not tha
t we'll see that but i do want to share there's a place that it doesn't
look right and that is on the top and the sides and
that's because these have also been mapped
on the z-axis this one really needed the x-axis
because we're never going to see these sides though i'm not going to fix it
but just so that you know why that's a problem i thought i would point it out
and then we need to do the same with this wall but we need to project on a
different axis it's x that goes through this one
so let'
s go to uv planar click on the little box change it to the
x axis project there you go you can see that that gives us a better result and
then we're just going to scale this down so it's about the same size as our other
wall into object mode and now as we
sort of change the angle you can see that that looks kind of nice
it's coming together okay so again at this stage you might just want to flick
on a quick arnold render just to see how the wall looks
in the proper view in the next step then we'
re going to
create and assign our material for the corks
it's not going to be anything new in terms of material creation but we are
going to take a look at cylindrical uv mapping
to get it around the outside of the corks so i'll see you there well we'll
do a bit more uv mapping in this step then we will make a
material for our corks that are currently sitting in the flasks
on the table and we're going to use that as a way to introduce cylindrical
mapping for uving so we are going to go into our
hypershade first of all we'll clear the graph
and we'll make a new ai standard surface let's give it a name
and underscore cork should suffice because this is going to be
another matte material we will probably choose
clay because there's nothing else really close to what i want
and then i'm going to load in the color so as you can see now i'm starting to
put more of my textures into this folder and i'll just
repeat again if you want access to all of the textures that i'm using you can
get them
using the link in the description below
the video that will give you access to my project file and then all you need
to do is go into my source images folder copy all of the textures and then paste
them into your source images folder okay so i'm going to go for the diffuse
on the cork lovely then let's get the roughness
loaded in and that's going to be the r
lovely and then we just need the normal map
and that should add the bubbly look to it so
i'm just going to load this in again make sure we
choose tangent space
normals loading the file and cork normal
okay and now what we want to do is assign
this to our corks so you might find it a little bit easier
to see if you just go back into shaded mode for
this or maybe even wireframe mode and then
we're going to select both of our corks and just do shift select like that and
then what i'll do is for this one i'm going to do
right click on there and assign material to selection
and now i can press 6 back in here and i will see my corks
love
ly job okay let's uv map them so you can see they're not quite
spot on in the way that i would hope that they would be and i think what i'm
gonna do is just work on one cork at a time so
we'll select this one first and then i'm going to go to display
hide hide unselected objects and that will just
isolate this cork for me so that nothing else gets in the way so you can see the
top and bottom actually aren't bad but going around the
side not really what i'm looking for so what i want to do is jus
t
right click on this we're going to face mode and i'm going to use marquee
selection to select all of those faces going
around now what i also want to do is this ring here on the bottom and this
ring here i also want to select because i think they're part of the side
or they look like they are to me and i could just select them
manually or i could double click on the the loop but what i'm going to do
instead is hold shift on my keyboard and press full stop which is
greater than and that will ju
st add to the selection around my current
selection so that added that band there and that band there okay we're now ready
to uv map this so we're going to go to uv
and we will click on the little options box for cylindrical you will see that
there's actually not much there to choose click
on project and that straightaway is looking quite nice that's much closer
to what i'm going for so at this stage i can go into object
mode and have a look at it so that is actually passable as it is
but you ca
n see that there's a difference
in the size of the texture on the side and the top
in what we call the texel density it's a lot more dense
on the sides than it is on the top to remedy that then
we're going to go into our uv editor so we'll get it from that menu there
we are going to go to uv shelmo so i'm just going to right click in here go to
uv shell each one of these pieces so we've got
the top and the bottom and going around the side these are all
called uv shells i'm going to select all of
them by getting a marquee selection
so i've also got my uv toolkit here as well if you can't see this
don't worry you can just go to tools in your uv editor and you can click here so
currently for me it will hide it or i can show it
so with these shells selected we're going to go to arrange and layout
and we're going to click on layout and what this does
is keeps the texel density consistent so this will be our top because it's
slightly bigger than our bottom and here is the side so now
if i ju
st close these windows you should be able to see that now the
size looks really consistent with that done then i'm now going to
bring everything back with display show all in fact we can do display show
last hidden which will bring back everything and that cork is done
so i'm not going to repeat that process you can just rewind the video if you
need to but i want you to sort your uv mapping
out on your other cork and then we can get ready to move on to
the next step in that one we're going to be
creating
our material for the window frame and the window sill
and we'll also be using an automatic uv projection
to get the uvs on that one sorted out so i will see you
in the next step with sorted uvs on this cork don't forget it
see you in the next step where we'll do a bit more materials and uving
in this step we're going to take a look at how you properly do
automatic uv mapping which can be really useful to get your textures looking
right pretty quickly so assuming that you've got your co
rks
looking bang on from the previous step we're now ready to turn our attention to
the window so we need to get our texture looking good on here but before we do
that we need to make the material for it so we're going to go
into our hypershade for that make sure you've cleared your workspace
and we'll create ourselves a brand new ai standard surface we'll give it a name
so i'm just going to call this one wood i think so m underscore wood
because i think i'm going to use it on the
pillars as wel
l and then we need to start with a
clay preset and then we'll bring in our texture so we'll bring in the color
like so i'm going to use t underscore wood diffuse for that
and then we need to bring in our roughness
so that's going to be a file again and we're going to use t
underscore roughness for that one now we just need to attach our normal map
so we'll go to bump mapping click on the checker button tell it we want to attach
a file and then we're going to say we want
tangent space normals cli
ck on the bump value here choose a
file and that's going to be t underscore would
underscore n for normal there we go that's doing what we want it to
and now we'll apply that completed wood material to
all the pieces over here that are made of wood
so those are three pieces okay so we're done with
the harbor shade for now so we'll get it out of the way and now we need to sort
out the uv mapping so in my case lots of the wood grain is
at least running in the correct direction
but not all of it yo
u can see we've got problems on this one here with
some extreme stretching so we're going to sort this out hopefully with
some automatic uv unwrapping we're going to start with this
bottom piece here and before you do an automatic uv unwrap
you need to get rid of these transforms here i'll show you why if i do an
automatic uv unwrap now and i'll show what that
looks like in the uv editor everything's pretty much square
but if you look at our object it's much longer than that
so what we'll do is
we're going to click on that and we're going to go to
modify freeze transformations and that gets rid of all the transforms from it
and now we're going to do our automatic projection
just pop it into object mode to see how it came out so i can see that i've got
wood grain pretty much running in the wrong direction now
so that's something that i'm going to have to fix and i'm going to do that in
the uv editor so you can see that here's the main ones
i'm concerned with at the moment so i'm going t
o go into shell mode and
select one i'm going to press e on my keyboard to
turn on my rotate tool and then whilst holding j and that will
turn rotation snapping on i'm going to rotate
it 90 degrees like so what i'm going to do for the
next one is i'll select this one and instead of using the rotate tool
i can go into transform for this one and just choose to rotate it 90 degrees
there and i'll do the same for these two as
well so you can see you've got different
options at the moment they're ove
rlapping
which is not ideal but it will be fine when i'm done i just need to get them
oriented the right way for now so now let's have a look at how that's
coming out yeah so the wood grain is too big and
that's a scaling issue with my uv map which i'll fix
later but the wood grain is definitely running the right way i'm not too
worried about the end pieces next we'll do this piece in the middle
so let's get rid of these transforms so we'll do modify freeze
transformations and then we're going t
o put on our
automatic uv see how that's come out not bad
that might be something that i'll come back to later and we're going to end
with this piece here so let's get rid of our transforms so
modify freeze transformations i'm also going to
delete the history from this one delete by type history and then we'll do
our automatic uving on it
see how that came out not too bad you can see the main issue i'm having is
the text identities all off so we'll see if we can go about
sorting that out so what
i'm going to do is select all three pieces and go into
my uv editor not that that's working let's
try again so 1 one two
three so here are all my uv shells and i want to get these laid out
so what i'm gonna do for this is i'll just close my transform here
make sure that i'm in shell mode select all the shells that are there
and we'll lay them out this now keeps them
in scale relative to one another and what i'm going to do from here
is just turn my scale tool on and i'm going to make them much
bigger
and that's going to make the wood grain look smaller in turn
it's also going to tile them let's try that so if we go into object mode here
yeah that doesn't look too bad try and get the lighting from a nicer
angle that's better so that for me will do there are better
ways of uv mapping that but as i wanted you to get comfortable
with automatic uv mapping that's how i've decided to do it for
that piece if i was doing this for real i'd have used a combination
of probably automatic unwrappin
g and some planar projection as well
in the next step then we're going to just up the complexity of
uv mapping one more time and we're going to do that on some parts
of the table so that might end up being a slightly longer step
but we'll then save some time because after that we're going to look at how
you can duplicate uv maps so you don't have to do it for every piece of the
table okay then i will see you in the next
step for some more materials and uv mapping
in this step we're going to step
up the complexity of uv mapping a little bit
and we're going to concentrate primarily on two pieces of the table that piece
there and that piece there and this time we're
going to do the uv mapping first and then we'll add the material at the
end and make any changes if we need to
although we shouldn't need to so let's begin by mapping out one of
these planks it doesn't really matter which one you choose but we only need
one so select one and then we're going to hide
everything else so we'll go
to display hide hide unselected objects so
we've just kind of given ourselves this to work on what we're going to do first
of all is map the longer edges and that's
because these are the ones that we'll see the most of
the first thing we'll do is just pop this into face mode
and we're going to select the top face and i'll swing around to the bottom hold
shift and select the bottom face so we've got top and bottom selected
if you can cast your mind back far enough we also did a bevel on these
an
d we want to have these part of the first part of our projection
so i'm going to hold shift and full stop which is greater than and that will
select the beveled edges around the top and the
bottom and that's going to give us what we need
for our first projection so what we're going to do for this now
is go to uv in fact whilst we're doing some more
complex uv mapping what i'm going to suggest is that we're
moving to the uv mapping workspace so let's just go to the drop down here
we've been in mo
deling all this time let's now go to uv editing
so what this does is it gives us our perspective view over here
we've got our uv editor here and the uv tool kit so everything that we need
kind of at a glance which is nice so let's start by getting our first
faces uv map so we're going to go to uv we're going to choose
planar and we need to make sure that we're doing the y-axis
and that keep the image width and height ratio is turned on
and then we'll click on project that will give us our two
fa
ces done what i'll then do is just rotate those around
so let's go into transform and we'll rotate them 90 degrees it doesn't matter
which way around we do them and i'm just going to move these off to
the side for now perfect now what we need to do is select the
side pieces so that side there and that side there and these are going
to be seen the least so they're not as important but i still
want to get them right if i can so we're going to map these on the z
axis so let's go to uv planar and ch
ange the project from to
zed and project and we're just going to rotate these 90
degrees as well lovely and we'll move those off to the
side so i'm just pressing w to switch to my move tool
and that just leaves a few pieces so we need the end piece and the
two pieces to the side of the end there and then we'll just switch around and do
the same here so the end piece i'm holding shift to get all of them
that piece there and that piece there keep in mind that whilst we're in face
mode we also coul
d have just done this to select them all as well there you go
and these ones we're going to project on the x-axis
so let's go to uv planar and x project this gives us all of our
pieces now what i want to do is try and line
these up before i can do that i'm just going to
go into uv shell mode select them turn my move tool on and i'm
just going to move them like this and you can see
that we've got pieces on top of other pieces
that's fine and normal that should have happened
so now we should be lo
oking at one two three four five six uv
shells now that we've not got them overlapped
the next problem that we have to solve is that half of these are facing the
wrong way and we can check that by using this tool
here when i click that you'll notice that
some are blue and some are red red is telling us that the uv is
facing the wrong way so it's flipped over and we need to flip it back in
order to do that just click on one of your shells
and in the transform section of your uv tool kit
just clic
k on flip and that will flip it around and it'll go blue
at this stage you could be done it would be a bad idea to finish here though
because your textile density is going to be inconsistent these end pieces
are much bigger than they should be they should only be about as wide as that
before we can make the change though i just want to check something because we
don't want this to go wrong so i'm going to press ctrl
a a couple of times and that will open my channel box and i can see that i've
go
t some transforms on this shape and i want to get rid of those before i
attempt the layout otherwise i'll get results i don't really want
so let's just do modify free transformations there you go you can see
they're all gone i can close my channel box for now
and then into shell mode here get my uv toolkit back
and now if i click on layout which is just down at the bottom
under arrange and layout everything goes the right size and shape in relation to
one another i'm now going to suggest just on
e more change and it's called
stitching if you think of these as like fabric
to get the wood grain on these to look consistent as it wraps around
what i'm going to do is just go into edge mode
and if you see as i'm mousing around with my edges
often two edges you can see i've got two red edges there two edges there
this is my are telling us that these can be stitched together so what i'll do is
i'll start here and just click on that edge there
and then i'm gonna go into cut and sew and then i'm
just going to click on
stitch together you can see that that now has created
one shell out of those i'm going to go on to here as well and
we'll just stitch that together and then i'm going to go up at the top
there and stitch together and that's added
that i'll do the same here on the bottom
stitch together and one final piece to add on click on
there and stitch together and what i've done now
is created one uv shell out of all those pieces which
means the wood grain is going to wrap around and
make sense in most places
there will be some seams where it can't be joined up but i'll get fewer seams
because i've done it this way so i'll just do one last layout
to make sure that it fits in this square and that is perfectly uv'd one last
thing to check i'm just going to turn on this
here which is the checker map i'm going to go into object mode
and if i can see that everything on here is squares
and not rectangles that means i've got a good uv map
and that to me looks like a good uv map th
at looks like all squares
so i'll turn that checker map off there's one other thing you could do
if i just click on here if you see any red when you turn this
tool on that means you've got some uv distortion
you can see there's no red in there for me it's quite happy with it i'll turn
that off okay so that's our first piece uv mapped
i'm very very happy with that if yours looks like that you should be happy to
we'll just need to do the other piece of the table as well so let's go to
display show
and we'll just show last hidden
and now we're going to select on this piece
you can see this does not look as it should then we'll just hide everything
else display hide unselected objects okay the easiest
place to start with this one let's go into
face mode and we'll click on this bottom edge here
and then i'm going to hold shift and double click up at the top
and that will select all of this front edge then i'll swing around and do the
same on the back holding shift still click on the bottom
up to the top double click so now i've got front and
back selected we also have this bevel here which i
would like to be a part of this selection so i'll do the shift and full
stop trick to get that selected there we go and now
what i would like to do is get a planar projection and i can see
i'm looking through the x-axis so let's do that
planar x-axis project and that gives me that uv there so i'll
move that off to the side and now i've just got these edges to
work with now luckily i know that
i'm not going to
be able to see the top or the bottom so i don't need to worry
too much about those what i'll do instead is click on this
bottom edge here and double click on the top edge there
then i'll do the same shift click there and double click there
so you can see that i've got the two sides there selected
and i'm going to choose to just do a planar projection on the z-axis for
these so let's do planar
zed project that gives me two more pieces that i can move off to the side
and then i'm
just going to go into face mode here select these two
and i'll just do these on the y-axis so that they're done it doesn't really
matter because i won't be able to see them but
i might as well do them okay my next job is to make sure that i
don't have pieces overlapping anymore so we'll go
into shell mode i'll select them one shell at a time
and make sure that they're not overlapping
there we go that gives me now six pieces then i'll click up here to see which
ones are the wrong way around and i
'll flip them
flip flip and flip and now i want to show you
something you can see now where the distortion is
on these some of the distortions not too bad and makes sense like on these sides
because i know that they're all right but where i don't like the distortion as
much is here not a big fan of that at all so for
these two shells i'm going to select them let's just
minimize some of these sections a bit i'm going to go into unfold and click on
optimize here's the result that gives me so now
i
'll just click on them one at a time and click on straighten uvs
and that will get them nicely lined up again
and now this checkerboard pattern is going to be really important to me
because i can see that on here these are rectangles
so i'm going to select both the shell so that i get them symmetrical
change to my scale tool and then i'm going to just scale them up and i'm
watching here to make sure that these become mostly
squares and i won't get it exactly right but i'll get it close so i can
see now
that as i look at this most of that is now squares it's
certainly much closer than it was so everything else is squares i'm happy
with that so we need to get these to be laid out
to get the textile density consistent so i'm now going to go into shell mode
i need to check that i've got no transforms on this so let's get our
outliner open that doesn't really give anything away so i'm not going to risk
it i'll just pop it into object mode i'm going to do
free transformations and edit delete
by type
history now that i've done that i can see more distortion here so
let's just try and optimize this again see if it goes any better oh it has gone
better so yeah that optimization has worked
much better now so let's just now straighten our uvs
and let's lay it all out into shell mode select all of the shells
arrange and layout and click on layout i'm happy with that the wood grain is
going to up and down so that should work out okay
so let's go back into object mode i'm just going to tur
n off the
checkerboard pattern we're going to go to
bring everything else back display show last hidden and now with these two
pieces selected i'm going to do one more layout
to get the text identity to be consistent so let's just do a
layout so these one now if i turn on the checker pattern
the square should be the same size they absolutely are so that means that
the wood grain will look like it all came from the same type of wood
okay we can turn the checker pattern off so our uv mapping of th
ose two objects
is complete and it's bloody good let me tell you that is some good uv mapping
right there so let's build our material and add it
we'll do that nice and quickly so into we'll just go back into
our modeling workspace and now let's go into
our hypershade clear the graph and we will make
ourselves a new ai standard surface give it a name and
when the score table will do for me i'm going to use the clay preset and
then we'll load in the color so you can see i've got a table texture
al
ready named so we'll click on open for that
and then what we'll do is go to add the roughness
so let's go to file click on the type of file we want it's going to be
table roughness oh nice and finally let's add our beautiful
normal map into geometry click on the checker button for bump
mapping choose a file make sure we're on tangent space normals
click on the little arrow next to bump value
click on the folder and let's bring in our table normal map
yeah okay we're going to add that to that pie
ce there and that piece there
and let's have a closer look at it okay i think the table grain might be
showing up as too big i'm going to check it in arnold just to
make sure that it looks too big actually i take it back
that to me looks okay so i'm not going to make any more changes to those uv
maps i think that will work perfectly right
then that's going to do it for this step it was a bit of a long one
but you are now pretty good at uv mapping i promise you that
in the next step rather than u
v map all the other planks
and this piece over here what we're going to do instead
is we're going to duplicate the uv maps from the pieces we've already done
onto these new pieces which can be a really good time saver
so i will see you in the next step for some
uv map duplication in this step we are going to take the uv
maps that we created for this plank here and this table leg
and we're going to copy them over to duplicates of those objects that don't
have uv maps yet i'm going to do that with
something
called transfer attributes which is a useful little tool
so obviously what i could do if i wanted to just get
four more pieces of table that already had this texture on
and uv's i could just duplicate this so if i was just to do
control d and duplicate you'd see that i've got another one so i could do it
that way and that would be fine but because i've already got these copies
here and they're in place i'd like to just be able to duplicate
the uv positions over so that's what we'll do
in this step
so what we need to do is click on the one that we want to copy from
which is this one and then shift click on one that we want to copy
to then what i'm going to do is just open up the uv editor
so that i can turn on the checkerboard pattern
so that shows me that this one has the uvs i want this one does not yet have
those uvs so i'll know straight away if it's
worked and then we're going to go into mesh transfer attributes and click on
the options box so i'll just make sure that i'
ve got
this reset so that i've got the same settings as you
and you can see that uv sets is currently set to all so it will copy
over any uv sets that we currently have which is good and then if we were just
to try and do this straightaway so i'll just click on apply you can see that it
does something but it's not doing it right and that's
because we need to change it from world to component for it to work so now if i
click on apply you can see that these now have
identical uvs so now i can clic
k on this one and
should click on this one and click apply again
click shift click apply shift shift click oh not you
and apply and that now means that these all have
proper uvs all i need to do now is the same for
this table leg over to here so you can see that those two fees are all kinds
are wrong so let's apply that and we're good to go
before we finish this step off we will just
turn off that god awful checkerboard pattern there we go
and we will assign the wooden material to the remaining
pieces as we are
not currently in the hypershade i'll show you a way of doing this
so with these selected i'm going to right click i can choose
assign existing material and you'll see all my materials are listed here and i'm
going to choose m underscore table and that will make
everything else look as good as the first pieces did
next up then we're going to have a look at this scroll
and get the texture on that and we'll complete
the texturing and uving section by finishing off of the box
so i'l
l see you in the next step for the scroll
in this step we're going to set about creating a material for the scroll
and getting it placed precisely which is quite important for this particular
material the first thing we need to do then is to
make the material so let's get our hypershade open
make sure we have a clear workspace and then let's go
for an ai standard surface i'm going to use the clay preset again
and then we need to load in the textures for it
so remember if you want to use my textu
res then you can get them using the
link in the video description below that will give you access to my project
file if you go into my source images folder
you'll be able to see all these textures just copy them into your source images
folder and you'll be ready to go so i'm going
to load in scroll underscore diffuse which will give us the color
there you go let me just put that back on the sphere
so you see there is some white on the top and bottom of this which is why uv
placement matters so m
uch and then we're going to load in the
roughness for it it's going to be a file as well scroll
roughness and finally we will load in our normal
map that's a file don't forget to set it to
tangent space normals and then we're going to load in the bump value
which is going to be our normal map for the scroll
now that's complete then i'm going to drop it on the scroll
oh actually i don't think i've named it yet let's do that first
there we go m underscore scroll and then i'm going to drop it onto
my scroll but
it won't look like it's on there you see the color change slightly
what has happened is it's showing this part of the material not this part
so we're done with the hypershade for now we'll need to look at why this is
not showing our material so we'll drop back into our uv
editing workspace and when we click on our scroll you'll
see that nothing has actually come up here
and that's because the way we created this scroll which was using curves
and nurbs means that there are no uvs at
all
we need to create some from scratch to do that then we're just going to start
with an automatic projection which will give us that
that's just you can see that's given us loads of
pieces let me just shade that loads and loads of pieces that's not
useful so what we're going to do is go into edge mode
and we'll select every edge in there and then i'm just going to get it from my
cut and sew menu up here in my uv editor i'm going to click on
move and sew there we go and we can see that that ha
s
actually stitched it together and opened it out
like a big piece of paper what i'm going to do then is
just get hold of this uv shell and try and get it so that it's
the right size and for me i already know that it's not going to be
because i've rehearsed this step to see what my problems are going to be
and i'll just make sure that it all fits within the boundaries
which it does that's pretty good shane nice one
okay so i'll just go back into object mode over here
and let's have a look at how
this is coming out
so it's a little bit stretched that should really be circular
and the problem i've got is if i go into shell mode and i scale it
so this is going to be circular which is about there
the edges have come off which means i'm probably going to get let's just go into
object mode i'm probably going to get like a white
bit somewhere there it is which i don't want so i've got to do
this slightly differently so the way i'm going to go about it is
i'm going to go into face mode and i'm
just going to select this middle
strip of faces here oh let's try that again this middle
strip of faces and then i'm going to do shift and full
stop to get a larger selection than that which is this so this is what i want to
have the writing and the drawings on it to make sure that i get that then what
i'm going to do is just do a uv projection
do a plane i want on the y-axis make sure width and height ratio is turned on
and that now is going to create a new shell for me
which i'm going to have
to rotate i don't want to get this perfectly sure i
don't need to get it perfectly straight just close will do
and then i'm going to let me just turn this on so you can see it better i'm
going to scale this down
and get it to be the right height like so and then i'm just going to go
into shell mode these two shells here i'm going to move off to the side for
now they're fine i don't need to do anything
else with them but i've got to be happy with this one before i move on
which i think i'm about
to be yeah okay so that's good i'm happy with that what
i need to do now is bring this shell back in
and make it fit in the remaining space of the scroll so you can see it's too
fat so let's just scale it on this axis to make sure it fits within there
that's good now i'm just going to put it fairly close to the edge of my other
shell and then this shell here i'm going to
bring in as well i'm going to make that thinner like so and then to
avoid getting any issues i think if i go into object mode
and now
look i might actually be getting away with it already
but i want to avoid there being any seams here and the way i'll do that is
by going into edge mode and i'm going to double click on the top
edge and i'm doing it on my middle shell so double click on the not
click once sorry i'll click once on the top edge and then
go down to the bottom hold shift and double click on the bottom edge
and then i'm going to cut and sew of my uv tool kit and choose stitch together
and i'll do the same on
the other side stitch together
and that now is a completed uv map so let's go into object mode
and that's going to look terrific okay we can just turn that colored view off
so that now is our scroll with some very kind of
old-school wizardy looking writing on it and some
runic image and whatever this guy is that's ready to go
so we've got one more step in texturing and uv mapping which is going to be for
we'll do one of the books and i'll let you guys do the rest yourself
but that's going to be
how we can assign two different materials to one object
that's what we'll be looking at in that step so
i will see you in the next step for some book action
in this step we are going to uv map and create materials for
one of the books and we are going to assign two different materials to this
we don't technically have to but i've created the textures in such a
way that allow us to cover how to assign two different
materials to one polygon object so the first thing we'll do is get the
scene look
ing as clean as possible to work with so i'm
just going to work on the most easily accessible book which in my case is that
one i'll then hide everything else with
display hide hide on selected objects
and i'll then switch into my uving workspace
so let's go to uv editing here's the uv map we're starting with
let's see if we can get this to be something a little better this is as
complex as we're going to go with the uv mapping
in this tutorial so before we do anything
let's first make sure that
we have frozen transformations
and deleted the history delete by type history and then we're going to do an
automatic projection to get to started so uv automatic
that'll give us these pieces here not a bad start then i'm going to go into
shell mode and straighten some of these up so let's
select everything and then in my uv toolkit i'm going to
go into arrange and layout click on that and then i'm going to
click on orient shells and that will just straighten everything
up which is going to mak
e it a little bit easier to work with
then just to make sure that everything is working to the same scale to make it
easier to sew the parts together i'm going to click on layout everything
now should be the same sort of size and i've
got a particular way that i want to be able
to stitch this book back together i want it to be in three shells
and then they're going to line up with the textures we have for it so it's
important that you get as close to mine as possible for this
so we're going to s
tart with this shell here and i'll just move this
off to the side and see what i'm working with
so i've got that edge piece there that makes sense what i really want to do
is make sure that i join this edge here so i'm going to go into edge mode over
here click on that and then in cut and so i'm
just going to click on stitch together and that's going to mean that that is
now part if i go into face mode this face here you can see it's part of
that shell i don't want the underside since that's goi
ng to be in a different
place but i do want that edge there then we can go to edge mode again
and select this edge here i'm going to stitch this together that's going to
bring in part of the spine you see we've got some more spine here
so we're going to stitch that together and now that's starting to be almost one
complete cover let's just click here yeah and i can see
that i also just need to get this edge piece there so i'm going to grab that
with stitch together and then into shell mode
and j
ust move the whole shell over here that's good i'm happy with that
the next bit that i want to do is get hold of these two pieces
just move these over here so you can see them and these represent
this top and bottom of the book there they are and i would like them to
be part of this shell which is going to be a little bit weird
but you'll see how i'll do it and it should come together quite nicely so i'm
going to go back into edge mode and i'm going to select this edge here
not the little one st
art with the big one
hold shift and double click there and that's allowing me to get
all that top edge and then i'm going to click on stitch together
you'll see what that does is it adds that uv shell
over here it stitches it together but it's created a mess
so we're going to go into shell mode to correct this so
click on that and then we're going to do an unfold on it
so we'll go into the unfold section and just click on unfold
and you'll see that that goes pretty close to how it was
so then wh
at i'm going to do is just click on straighten uvs
and that will straighten it all back out again but with that top band connected
and then we'll just do the same on the bottom so back into edge mode
click there hold shift double click there
stitch together get the whole shell and do an unfold on it that gets us
pretty close and then we'll straighten the uvs and
that is one complete shell that's the outer side of the book cover
the next shell i'm going to try and put together is the
pages for th
e book so this should be kind of easy so all i need to do is go
into edge mode i can see this is the front side of the
book here and i'm gonna select this edge here hold
shift double click here to get the whole edge
and we'll do a stitch together and it's gone at a funny angle
but it has stitched it together in the way that i wanted it to so i'm also
gonna do that over here stitch together
and then we'll go into shell mode and see if we can
orient this shell so let's go orient shells
yeah that's
okay i actually didn't want it pointing that way so i'm just going
to put my rotate tool on hold j and rotate that around 90 degrees okay
that's two shells and the final thing i want to do is make
one shell out of the remaining pieces so to do that i'm going to go into edge
mode i'm going to click on that little edge there
and this little edge here and we'll do a stitch together
and you'll see that brings in those edge pieces that were previously down here
and then we'll click on the edge there
and the edge there and we'll stitch
together again pretty nice let's go into shell mode and
i'm just going to straighten the uvs because they were a bit wobbly
and that's it we've got three pretty damn nice shells there
so that is pretty much all of uv mapping in a nutshell
if you can do this you can uv map anything i promise okay so let's select
all of our shells we will do a layout to get them in
what's called our zero to one space and we can leave that alone for now
until we get the material
made and then we'll come back into the uv mode
and we'll get this placed properly so i'm going to go into my
modeling standard view for now and just pop this back into object mode
and i'll need my hypershade open to create my materials
so it's pretty much the same as we've done so far what i'm going to do
is clear my graph i'm going to make a new ai standard surface i'm going to
call this one m underscore book cover and
i'm not going to start with a preset this time just to show you that you
do
n't have to so i'm going to bring in my color click
on the checker pattern there choose file and then go to the folder
and i want the t book cover diffuse it looks like this this is one i made
especially for this project so let's click on open
and that's how it looks you can see that's got the front cover there and
then what i'm going to do just on this the weight is set to 0.8
for some reason and i want to push that up so you can
see it just kind of fades the color out a little bit let's push t
hat all the way
up to one to make sure that we get another color that we should
this material is slightly different to the ones we've built so far in that some
elements of this have a metallic property to it so we need to add a
metalness texture as well so let's click on the checker pattern
there go to file click on the image name i'm going to choose t book cover
underscore m which is the metallic one you can see
if it's in black it's saying don't be metallic if it's in white it's saying
that sh
ould be metallic so we'll open that
there we go next up we need our roughness
so let's click on the checker pattern there go to file
and choose our image which is going to be
book cover underscore r nice and last but by no means least we're
going to go into geometry click on the bump mapping checker button
choose a file make sure that it's tangent space
normals and then for the bump value we are going to add
our book cover n okay so it might look a little bit weird
in here but it should look fin
e once we get it on the book so let's
just press six in here because i've for some reason got my texture view turned
off and with this new material i'm just
going to drag it on to the book and i'm putting it on the whole book
here okay so that's that bit done what we'll do now is we'll sort the uv
mapping out for that bit and then we'll go back around and we'll do the pages
so let's just minimize our hypershade for now okay this here is the top of the
book but it's got the back cover on that's s
omething we need to be
aware of okay let's go into uv editing click on the book so you can
see that if your uv map went like mine lots of
this is going to already be close so i'm just going to go into shell mode
move the pages out of the way and then this is the book cover but
because this front cover is not here that tells me this shell is upside down
so i'm going to just rotate this around 90 degrees so i've put my rotate tool on
i'll hold j on my keyboard and rotate that around
and that now h
as put the front cover let's put it into
object mode so you can see the front cover is now at least
in the right place the next thing that we need to do is to just line up
this shell with the material so i'm just going to go into shell mode
and you can see that this here should be in the center of the spine
and then the whole shell needs to just come in a little bit
and be moved up a little bit as well so i'm using these metallic edges to
help me line it up needs to be a touch smaller i think ye
ah
so i think i've got that one set up right
let's just have a little look yeah okay now what we need to do is get
this inner section this is like the inner paper part so into shell mode and
this needs to be kind of placed in the same way so we've got these like
l shapes here and that's showing me where to line this up to
so let's just bring the size down a bit and maybe just make it a touch wider so
this is what you're looking for try to avoid getting these bits here
where it kind of goes in li
nes this is what's called dilation
and it came from the texturing program that i used you should
try to avoid that getting in to the material so i'm going to bring
that into about there and then i think i'm going to have to go into edge mode
just to straighten these up a little bit if i need to go into uv mode
this material wasn't made specifically for this exact book
so it will just take a little bit of moving it around to get it to fit
exactly how i want it to but as long as i select these gro
ups of uvs at the
corners you can see that it makes it much easier
to edit the placement of them i think that should do it that's the
cover sorted all we need to do now is the pages so let's go back into our
hypershade and make that material so we'll clear our graph we'll have a
new ai standard surface again i'm not going
to use a preset for this one but i am going to give it a name we'll call this
m underscore pages and let's load in our textures
so oh no wait wait wait wait wait wait wait
clic
ked on the wrong thing let's break that connection
color is what i wanted file and we're gonna go for what's this one
called t underscore pages diffuse
lovely and then we're going to do the roughness there's no metallic for this
one because the pages aren't metallic so we'll go for roughness next and
that's going to be t underscore pages are
and let's end with finding our geometry bump mapping
file tendon space go to the bump value and choose our file
pages underscore n okay
that material is now
ready to go now what we need to do
is only apply it to where we want the pages to be so i'm just going to
make this window a little bit bigger and here's what we're going to do we're
going to put the book into face mode and we're going to select all the faces
that make up the pages so there's two there and then three more
there and then i need to start click here and double click on the
bottom to get all of those come around to this side i'm holding
shift to make sure i'm adding to my selection
and then that has got
all of the pieces that are going to make up the pages
so now what we do is we find our m underscore pages material we right click
and hold and assign material to selection
so this book has now got two different materials on it
which is great okay let's come out of the hypershade for a second
get the book in object mode and you can see that it's currently showing us the
pages material which is helpful and you can change which material it
shows you by going into here so if y
ou wanted to
go back to book cover we could do that but we want to see the
pages and then into shell mode and we're going to move
this shell so this central piece here you should
see the pages running up and down that's what we're aiming for
so i'm going to move it over i can see that it's probably a bit too big
so let's just size it down a little bit that looks nice back into object mode
and check out the book here my textures are showing a little bit
lower resolution because i've changed the s
etting
let's just go back into general modeling let's hide the hypershade and i'll try
and show you what i've done with this setting as well
just while we're looking at it so as we're adding more and more
textures to this scene you can start to run out of video memory
it's possible that you've already had a warning about this
if not here's what i'm doing so if i go into renderer and
viewport 2.0 is what you should be using click on this box here
there's something called max texture resolution an
d i'm currently clamping it
at 512 to make sure that i don't run out of vram
you can however up that's let's go to 1024
and then reload all textures you can see that now my pages came in
higher quality so i'm just trying to save a little bit
of vram so that my pc doesn't die so we'll just have a quick look at how
this texture is coming out the thing about viewport 2.0 is it
doesn't show off normal maps very nicely you get all
these horrible black yakiness on it so if we just go to arnold and we
click
on play we'll get a better idea of how this is
going to render or we would if there was the light showing in the scene so let's
just bring everything back display show last hit him
and then we'll try that one more time there we go so as that renders
you can see that despite the fact that in the viewport
the normal map looks overly harsh once you get
into the rendered view which is what we're really aiming for everything looks
beautiful okay so that was a fairly complicated step but i think
you've come
through it well i believed in you all the way through
that what we'll do now is we will end this step and we'll move
on to the next step which is going to be your materials and uv mapping challenge
so i will see you in the next video where you can be challenged
welcome to challenge number four as you can see by what i've got on
screen i have gone on and textured everything else in my scene so if you
have a look if you're using my textures if you have
a look in the source images fold
you'll see that i created a couple of color
variations for the book which you can create and apply
it doesn't really look like it from here but i've added a stone
material to my additional model i've also
uv mapped and textured the pillars along the wall
and let's just um switch back to the viewport
i've also added a material to this so this is now completely
textured and ready to go so that now is your challenge
go through and uv map and texture everything else in your scene you might
need to
find or make some textures yourself or just use what you've got
and then when you are done i will see you in the next step where we're going
to make a start on lighting and rendering which is when
things are really going to start looking sexy
so i look forward to seeing you in the next step good luck with the rest of the
texturing welcome back hopefully you did okay with
the last challenge and you've got all the remaining parts of your scene
well uv mapped and beautifully textured if that's the
case then it means that
you're now ready to start adding lights to your scene and to start
thinking about our final render and how it's going to come together
in this step we're going to add our first light which is just going to be a
directional light and what that means is that you will get
light that just flows in one direction throughout your entire scene it's really
good for mimicking something like sunlight or
moonlight which is what i'm going to be going for
with my first attempt the firs
t thing i'm going to do then before i add any
light to the scene is i'm just going to click out
here because i've still got this sky dome light that i added a long time ago
just so that we could do some preview renders as we were putting things in i
want to get rid of that now because that's not going to be our main scene
light at least not whilst we're going through the different types of lights
let's create this directional light them so we're going to go up to create
into light and there you
can see there is a directional light
so the first thing i want to do is just click on that and you will see that we
get what looks like some arrows created at
the origin of our scene so i'm just going to move that up out of
the ground and you can see that at the moment
the arrows are pointing over here kind of out of the room
now that you've got a light in there we're going to need to turn that on so
that we can see what's happening so up here you can click on this icon
which will turn on your l
ights it's called use all
lights or you can just press seven on your keyboard so
six will turn your lights back off and seven will turn them on
and now with my rotate tool i'm going to rotate my light around i want it to look
like it's going to be shining through this window
and then we're going to have the angle come down a little bit yeah that's a
pretty nice angle so that gets us started what you can
also do with lights is change the color of them so over here
in my attribute editor if your a
ttribute editor is not open
just keep pressing ctrl a until it pops up there's a color swatch we'll give
that a click and because i'm looking to mimic
moonlight i'm going to choose something in the
blue spectrum to start you can see that this is
probably too blue so then what i'll do is over here in this little square i'm
going to walk that towards white so it's essentially white with a
tinge of blue in it something like that that's how i'm going
to get started something else that i want us to b
e able to preview in our
viewport is where the shadows are going to fall
and up here just next to where we turned lights on there's an icon for that which
is just called shadows if we give that a click you can now
see where the light is going to fall and so that tells me
whether it will be a good idea to rotate the light so i'm going to leave it
roughly where it was i think one cool thing about shadows is it
really does help to ground all of your objects in the scene they
now look more like they
belong there because there are shadows around them
one last thing that i want to do then before we move on to the next step is
just make sure that we've got shadows turned on
in the arnold settings here you just need to make sure
that cast shadows is turned on it should be anyway but just double check
and that's going to do it for this step then you've now added your first
light to your scene and i'm sure it's looking beautiful
in the next step then we're going to set up a proper test render
to
make sure that our light appears in the rendered image in the way that we
hope because the viewport doesn't really give
you a true reflection of how it's going to look so i will see
you in the next step for a bit of rendering
this step is going to be all about how we set up arnold to render the scene in
the way that we want our render settings in maya live here so
you've got this icon here just next to the hypershade
it's like a clapperboard with a little gear on it so we'll open that
and this
is our render settings there are a lot of things that you can change
on this and we'll just go through the ones that
are important for now so the first thing i want to change
because it's the first on the list is color space use output transform is what
it's set to and that's using this srgb gamma at the
moment if we turn that off this is actually more in line with what
our scene looks like if we were to take it into
something like photoshop premiere pro or final cut
to work with the image this
is what it would look like it doesn't have this
transform turned on so i'm now going to start leaving this
off and i'm also going to turn it off here by turning that to raw
the next thing we'll look at is renderable camera we're not going to
put any new cameras in for this tutorial so we'll leave that on purse
which is this camera here so we're just using the main perspective camera
the next important thing that you'll need to consider is what preset you want
to use or you can actually just type
in the
width and height yourself if you want but i tend to go with the presets
this is what resolution you'll be rendering your images at by default in
meyer it starts at hd 540 and that's not a bad starting point
because rendering especially with arnold can take
a long long time so i would be thinking maybe i want to up this to hd
1080 at some point but whilst i'm just getting everything
dialed in i'm going to keep that at a lower resolution
and it's really going to reduce my render times whil
st i'm making changes
to lights and materials to get it the way i want okay so that'll
do it for the common properties let's have a look in the
arnold renderer properties the main thing that i'm concerned with here is
the camera and the aaa so this number is to do with super
sampling control the higher the number the cleaner your render will look
because it takes more samples but it will also ridiculously
increase your render times the higher you make this number
for now because we're just doing
test runs i'm actually going to lower that
down to two but we are going to up that for our
final render later because that's not going to be very good
it will only give us an idea for now and that's all i want to change for now
so we'll close that and to do our first render we're going
to click on this icon here which is the clapperboard next to the
one with the eye render the current frame so let's click on this
so once you give that a click this window will pop up and you'll see the
image bei
ng rendered one tile at a time until you get the
whole image so you can see the one light is the one being rendered
which is the directional light and shadows are showing up so this is
quite a small image but it only took me 13 seconds to render
which is why i'm keeping it so small one downside though
is that because i'm using this way of rendering it is using this output
transform so we just turn that off to get an idea of how it looks
and it tells us that the light is probably not bright enoug
h so we're
going to up that and the shadows are actually quite hard
and i want them to be a little bit softer
so i'll have a look at that as well before we move on to make the light
brighter you increase the intensity there's a slider or you can just type a
number in i'll just try doubling it for now let's
try three times as strong that's better and
what we'll also do is just go back into our arnold settings
and we're just going to increase the angle which is going to make the shadows
look a lit
tle softer so let's just go somewhere kind of
towards five and see how that looks so let's give that a render again
so whilst we've got this output color transform on you can see that i've now
managed to soften the shadows which looks better
when we turn that off and i think i want to go just
slightly brighter on the light this should be a dark light because this
isn't really our main light the main light
will be the candles so this is just light that we want to look like is
coming through the w
indows so we don't want it to be too bright
but we do need to be a little bit brighter than that so i'm just going to
up that to four test again and then if i'm happy with it
we'll move on so there's four let's render okay so that's done
rendering let's turn that off yeah so what this is doing is just sort
of filling in the background and we can see a little bit of what's
going on which is all i'm looking for from this light in the next step then
we're going to add a different type of light to a
ct as our
candle light and then we will make some tweaks to
that to get their scene a bit more evenly lit
and making more sense so see you there now it's time to add some more light to
our scene to look like the candles are casting light into the
room the first thing i'm going to do then because it's quite difficult to see
what i'm doing now that i've turned this transform off is just turn it back on
just makes things a bit easier to work with you could also press 6 on your
keyboard to get the m
ore flat light as well and we're going to create
so from the create menu we're going to get a light and this time it's going to
be a point light and these act as a point in space that
light emits from so light shoots out in all
directions in some other applications they're known
as omnidirectional lights but if you imagine like a light bulb
with light going out in every direction it's that kind of light and that's
perfect for a candle flame so let's have our point light and then
we need to get i
t in place so this has to be quite precise so i'm going to do
this using my orthographic views so let's just put these into wireframes
so i can see what i'm working with and then we're going to move it over
here and where are we need to get it up to
about the right height yeah that's close and these are just
placeholders so i don't want it to be inside the flame i'm going to put it
just above the flame okay which flame is it that one okay so
that's positioned i can now go back into my full scree
n
perspective view and we'll turn the lights back on
and you can see that just by default this is already having
an impact on the scene so you can see if i move that around it's doing stuff
which is nice and now we need to make some changes to
this light so the first and most obvious one is to make it look
sort of candlelight colored so i'm going to go into my color here
and i'm going to choose somewhere in the sort of orangey spectrum for this
that's nice and if you want to see what kind of eff
ect that's having you can
just toggle illuminates by default on and off
so if i give that a click it turns it off
turn it back on we can see what that light is now doing
then what i want to do is add a decay rate to this light
so candle light tends to fall off it's not going to light things that are way
off in the distance and maya handles this with a decay rate
so the one that mimics real light the closest is this quadratic
one so if we turn that on you'll then see
that this is now doing next t
o nothing if i just toggle this on enough again
it's hard to see what impact it's having and now that means we need to just up
the intensity until it starts having an impact and you
can see it's just starting to there which might be quite nice but i want to
go a bit stronger now sometimes people think that when you
reach the end of a slider that's as far as you can go
so you might think that 10 is as high as you can go but if that ever happens to
you you can just type a number and that will usua
lly let you go higher
so let's try 20. yeah let's go up a bit higher than that
that's nice so i've gone up to well let's say 30
and then we'll just toggle that on enough so we can see what's happening
yep that's kind of nice yeah and when we turn off that you can
see that it's kind of hitting the scroll which is nice
so this might well work okay last thing that i want to do then is just go into
arnold make sure it's casting shadows so that
means that we're ready now to try another test render bu
t we're not
going to do it in this step because i want to show you a different
way to render in the next step which is using something called ipr
or interactive photorealistic rendering so
let's check that out in the next step in this step we're going to take a look
at using ipr or interactive photorealistic rendering
for arnold which is a really good way to work i
think anyway and it allows you to make changes and
see the results almost instantly which can be brilliant
so in order to open it in
a separate window
you go up to your arnold settings up here
and there is open arnold render view so we'll click that and it opens as a
separate window i'm just going to make this a bit smaller there we go so
we're just going to drop it down here for now
there you go you see the the shape of this is respecting the
size of our window that we set it to when we
went into the render settings so that's a good sign and i want to show you how
this works it will be very dependent how well it
performs on
what kind of processor or gpu you have
i've got a fairly good one so my rendering is not too bad but if you're
on a low end computer this might be quite difficult to work with
anyway once you've got the window open click on this little red play icon there
and that will start rendering what can be seen in here
you see that that's happening pretty quickly and it renders
out sort of in a circle and over time the image gets clearer
that's done then it took 19 seconds for me
and now that we've got t
his light you've got these little render artifacts here
that are they're called in the industry fireflies
and it just means that we've got to later in the rendering process
turn up the samples to get those to disappear it's because we've got a very
small bright light source in the scene whenever you get that lots of contrast
it can just create this sort of little issue anyway what's good about this
is that this is interactive so now if i make any changes to my scene so let's
just i've got my lig
ht selected if i move it over here
you can see in the bottom corner though it's happening at a low resolution
but it's re-rendering all the time to show what
changes are being made to my scene so if i now drop it towards the other candle
it'll just pick up and start rendering there but i don't want that one there
so i'm going to do control and z to undo put the light back and that will start
rendering and now what i can do is let's say i want to zoom in and see
what this is doing to the shadows
and getting real close and it's
rendering for me all the time i want to get in really close on these
shadows and then we'll give it a second because i don't want this shadow to be
too perfectly round and at the moment it is
i'm not a massive fan of that so let's increase the radius of this
light oh that's too far and again i can use
the interactive renderer here to see how much of an
effect it's having so that's now casting a much softer shadow
let's try 0.1 you can see that by changing that
the
light is now coming in much smoother the shadow rather is coming in much
smoother now that i'm fairly happy with that then
what i'm going to do is just press stop here so that will stop rendering the
scene in the background and i want to just duplicate this light
here and put it in place over on the other
candle so i'm going to do control d move it over here i'm going to use my
orthographic views to make sure it's in place
that's pretty nice yep that looks good okay and now with both lights in
place i
want to render this but before i do it i'm going to show you
one more thing this that is rendering in this window is not the same as what is
rendering here because this is fixed to an aspect ratio
this isn't so we can make this view tall and thin or long and
fat so to see exactly what's going to be
rendered in your render view you can turn on something called a
resolution gate or a camera gate so if we go to view and camera settings
you can choose a resolution gate and this rectangle her
e now is
everything that's going to be rendered over here
so what i'll do is just put this frame up in a way that i like
that'll do it for now and then we can hit play on here again and this will
render exactly as i want it to and at this stage now things are
starting to look pretty nice so i've got my two main sources of light
being the candles and that's now giving me some nice
highlights on the flasks it's coming together pretty nicely
that's going to do it for this step then i'm just going t
o stop my ipr rendering
in the next step we're actually going to do the candles again
but we're going to do a slightly more advanced light so we're going to take
the meshes that we created for the flames
and turn those into lights so i'll see you in the next step to see how we do
that in this step i'm going to show you how
to use mesh lights to create some pretty sexy looking
candle flames i know that we just created some point
lights to be like the candle light but that was just to introduce yo
u to
point lights i don't actually want them anymore
so we're going to delete those out of the scene so we'll get rid of that one
and that one i will just point out if you have any issues with selecting light
what you can do is just go into your outliner windows outliner
and all lights let me just undo all lights will be listed
in here so if i wanted to get rid of that point if i couldn't select it in
here for some reason i can just click it in here and delete it that way and then
if you just wa
nt to hide your outline and just click on the tab and it'll just
sit on this left hand side until you're ready for it
right before i create my mesh lights then i decided that i wanted my meshes
to be a little bit bigger so i'm just going to scale these up a
little bit because they weren't very visible when i
practiced this so let's make them a bit bigger now we're
just going to pick one so i'm going to choose the one that's in the corner
because i prefer rendering that one so now that
i've got t
hat one selected we need to go up into arnold so we've
just been using standard maya lights so far but arnold has its
own set of lights as well and these generally work pretty well with arnold
because that's what they're built for so what
we're going to do you have to have the mesh selected for this we're going to go
to mesh light and what that does is turns the mesh
into a light which kind of makes sense what
we'll do now is make sure that we show original mesh in fact what we'll do
let's get i
pr rendering going as we're working on this i'm actually going to
close this view i want to show you another way to do ipr rendering so i'm
going to change this panel here to a perspective view and then i'm going
to change my renderer to arnold you'll see that this little box pops up
and then i can press play and that's going to start doing some
rendering so at the moment it's just giving us a fairly
basic white light which is not quite what i'm going for so we'll just press
stop on that for now
and we'll make some changes and the main
change that we need to make is to the color so instead of just
changing the color to be a uniform color we're going to put a bit
of a gradient on it to mimic a little bit more of how a candle flame
would look so we'll click on the little checker
button there to make a connection and we're going to add a ramp
which is what maya calls sort of it's gradient builder
so click on that at the moment we've got a gradient going from black to white
so if we click
on black we're going to make this a fairly deep red color
and then we'll bring that up to about there
so you see now we're going from red to white next color i want and i'm going to
put it i think about in the middle for now we're going
to have a fairly orangey color so let's go somewhere in the orange
spectrum that's pretty nice now i need another
color in here so to do that i just click somewhere in this little rectangle and
that will bring up a third color this one's going to be quite yellowy
that's kind of nice and i want another color like this
orange so click here and it's remembered that
orange for me and now what i'm going to do is this
area here sort of is how i want my flame to look
so i want it to be orange there sort of yellow to about
there let's bring that in a bit closer yeah
that looks pretty nice so that's my gradient that i'm going to use to create
my flame out so i might move these a bit further apart get a bit more yellow in
there yeah that's cool so that sets up th
e
color if we now turn on our ipr rendering again
not too much is happening so let's now start making some changes on this
to get the result we want so we can see that light is being
emitted from it because it's impacting the top of our candle but it's not yet
doing enough i'm just going to go into my outliner to
make sure that i can select my new mesh light
and it will have been put inside the candle group i've expanded candle group
i've expanded flame and there is my new mesh light
what i want
to do is make sure that i tell it to show the original mesh
and that should get the flame to show up which does appear to be happening
and then it's up to you to mess with the intensity and exposure until you get a
sort of a level of illumination that you like so
i'll start by upping the exposure i think
that's pretty nice let's up the intensity a little as well
i just need it to light the environment a little bit i don't want to go too far
with it and this is just trial and error until
it look
s right what looks right for me might not quite look right for you so
use a bit of your own judgment and see how it comes out i think i'm
pretty happy with that for now one other setting that you might just
want to turn on before you're done is this light visible which i think
looks quite good it just brings the flame up a little bit more makes it more
visible so i think that's come out pretty nicely
so all we need to do now is repeat this for the other candle so i'm just going
to run through th
is dead wick i'll speed it up so you can see what i'm
doing and then we'll meet up at the end there we have it then we've now got two
candle flames that have been provided by arnold mesh lights and i've also
introduced you to using the arnold ipr renderer
as one of your panels in your viewport so i think that was a pretty successful
step that we've just gone through together well done in the next step
i want these candles to look more like they're glowing and in order to do that
there we need to
simulate like moisture in the
air that the light can hit and illuminate so that involves adding
an atmosphere to our scene which we'll do
through the arnold settings as well so i will see you in the next step for
adding an atmosphere in this step we want to make it look
like our candles are glowing a little bit more and in order to do
that we're going to add an arnold atmosphere to our scene which is
a really cool effect and it's one i'm a big fan of so let's jump straight into
it in order to d
o this we actually need to
go into our render settings would you believe
so we'll click on this little icon here to open those up under the arnold
renderer there is a section for environment
and then you can choose atmosphere or background legacy i like to choose
atmosphere so i'll click on that and we're going to choose an ai
atmosphere volume so once you've done that you can close
the render settings and it should give you the settings for the atmosphere in
your attribute editor remember it's
ctrl a if you need to open your attribute
editor up and then you need to set a density for it now it's very easy to go
much too high with the density so if i just click let's say up here
we'll go for 0.6 everything's going to be blown out
and it's just too much you can see that already even before i let the rendering
finish this isn't really the look we're going
for it might be useful in some contexts but in this one
i'm not really feeling it so we need to bring that back down and the number i'v
e
got written in my notes is 0.02 as being a good number you by
all means can tweak this up or down until you get an atmosphere that you're
happy with but i'm going to try this there we go and as you can see as that's
rendering in the main effect that it's giving us
is that the candles now give off a little bit of a glow
where they didn't before and that's really all this step is about about
making everything look better because it will
glow now we're now getting much closer to the end of this i
'm now going
to show you two more types of light for the light that
we want coming in through the window we'll start with the sky dome light
which uses an image to provide lighting and then we'll have a look at an area
light which is the one that i'm going to end with
so i'll see you in the next step for skydome lights
welcome back in this step we're going to take a look at a different way of
lighting our environment which is to use what's called a sky dome
light which uses image based lighting
so we take an image
a maya and arnold take parts of that image
generally the bright parts and cast light into the scene using that
it's a really good way of creating naturalistic looking scenes
or if you want really cool looking
reflections in things like metallic paint or something like that
okay so let's give this a go i'm just going to
turn that off and then i want to find and delete my
directional light because this new light is pretty much going to do the job that
directional is currently d
oing so that's gone and then we're going to
go into arnold find lights and create a skydome light
there it is by default it's just kind of lighting everything with this white
color which is fine and sometimes is useful but it's
not the effect that i'm wanting we're going to load in a hdri image so
that it lights things a little bit more naturally in order to do that we're
going to click on the little checker pattern next to the color for the light
we're going to choose a file and then we're goin
g to click on the file
and in our source images folder again if you're using my
assets you should have copied this and put it into your own source and we just
folder at some point otherwise feel free to find your own
hdri image so it's hdri underscore forest you can see there's a preview of
it it actually looks better in the scene
than it does there so we'll click on open
and just so we can see it a little better let's zoom out a little bit
and we'll just rotate around you can see it's just a ni
ce little wooded area
it's beautiful and this is now adding lots of light to our scene what i want
to do they can see there's the sun there i want to rotate that around so that
it's located where the window is so i'm going to select my sky dome light
turn on my rotate tool and then i just want to get in nice and
close here and i'm just going to press a in one of these views
and rotate it around you can see that the scene's updating to reflect that i'm
doing this until the sunlight is sort of ove
r there
somewhere and hopefully it'll cascade through this window
now that we've done that we're going to need to start thinking about
previewing it so i've still got my arnold renderer being previewed up here
so i'll just press play to let that start going and as this renders coming
through you can see that it's giving a much more natural look to the scene of
light cascading through the window falling across the scroll it's pretty
nice actually i'm quite happy with it if however you decide that
you're not a
fan of certain parts then that's where you can make changes
so perhaps you think it's a little bit too bright so you might knock the
intensity down a little bit so let's try something like 0.6
that does seem to be a little bit nicer and if you wanted to try to get a
cleaner set of shadows you could also try upping
the samples as this is mostly for preview purposes i'm not going to do
that i think what i'll do at this stage is
just find an angle that i like let it render out and the
n we will move
on to the next step so let's just stop this rendering for a
sec find a nice angle that's kind of nice and we'll just give
that a minute to render that's the rendering done then for this
particular version of my lighting i think it's come
out pretty nicely and it's something that for a different type of project
i would maybe try if you wanted to get the lighting to look even more
believable you could create some other walls
so let's just turn that off a second you could put some wa
lls here
on walls here and also put a cube on top to stop the light getting in
because it's currently coming in from every angle even if it's darker
somewhere else there is still light coming from that so if you really want
to experiment with this a little bit and control it so it's only coming in
through the window then you can do that or leave some
little gaps in other places to represent like other windows or doors
that's going to do it for this step then in the next step which is going to be
the last one where we use a type of light
we're going to use what's called an area light and i'm going to use that to
cascade in what will look a bit more like moonlight
and try and get some volumetric shadows going on through the window
so i will see you in the next step in this step we're going to take a look
at area lights and we're going to use them to get
a nice light cascading through the window that we've created
and the way the area lights work will give us a little bit more control
tha
n the sky dome light that we've just used so again we're going to delete the
sky dome light because i don't particularly want
it for this and we're going to create a new light this is another arnold light
so it's going to be the area light here it is
and what i'll do is just move it up and i want to get it
outside of the room pointing through the window so this line on the front
shows you which way it's pointing so i'm going to want it to point
this way so i'm just holding j to snap my rotation
and then it's going to go on the outside of the room
and be roughly in line with the windows let's just
get this in place using this view here and i want it to be slightly bigger than
the window i'm also just going to set it back a bit
move it up a bit and tilt it down
something like that and now what we're going to want to do
is to start tweaking this so i'm just going to turn off the resolution gate
for now so we'll go to no gate to do that
and we'll try and see what effect this light is havin
g and what changes we need
to make to get it to look nice so let's start up
our ipr render and see if it's doing anything
not really the first thing i'm going to change is the spread and just bring that
down that's not really had the impact i'm
looking for now it's time to turn the intensity up i think
i think it's now starting to do something we'll turn the exposure up as
well there we go and this gives us quite a
nice fantasy looking light where you get the streaks in it when it
hits something
this is being created by two things one
is the fact that i brought the spread of the light down if you take the spread
back up you'll lose those shadows i'll show you
what i mean there you go you can hardly see them now
let me just get a better angle of this so you can't really see them so we need
to bring the spread down to get that effect
and i think this look gives it a much more
fantasy magical kind of look which is what i'm going for
for the aesthetic of this whole scene really to make thi
s look cool you're
probably going to want to turn the samples up a little bit this is quite an
important light so i'm going to up the samples to about
four i think that will impact your render time everything will take a
little bit longer to do that but the shadows especially because the
shadows are being cast through the air the quality of the shadows really
matters i think what i also want to do as i did
with the directional light way back when we started lighting i'm just going to
add a pale
blue color to this which meyer has remembered that i had
that color so i'm just going to click on that
and then the scene will update again and you can see that this
is quite a nice light that we're getting and i think just to finish this off i'm
going to up the exposure a little bit let's try
4.2 i think that's starting to look pretty god damn nice so we're now
getting towards where i want the scene to look
but i'm going to make one more final change that affects
lighting and rendering and that
's that i want the liquids
inside the flasks to have a glow to them that will make the table more
interesting to look at and also add to the
magical theme that i'm going for because generally liquids don't glow
well depending on what kind of energy drinks you're into but generally they
don't so that's what we'll look at in the next
step so i'll see you in a sec to make some glowing liquids
in this step we're going to take a look at how you make things glow
using the arnold renderer and we're goi
ng to do it specifically on a couple
of liquids that are inside our flasks in order to do this
then we're going to need to go into the hypershade just to update those
materials so i'm going to stop my ipr rendering for now and what i'm
also going to do is just press 6 in that view there because
now that i'm using arnold lights they're not showing up in the hardware
render of viewport 2.0 so i might as well turn lighting off so
i can see what i'm doing okay let's go into our hypershade we'll
star
t on the red liquid first i think i'll just press six in there as well
okay so i'm looking for m underscore health
liquid here it is you can see this is kind of
how it's looking right now what i want to do is go to emission and
the way i remember that it's a mission is because we want it to emit
light so we need emission for this we're going to choose a
pretty bright red color for this like that and then all you need to do is
up the weight and you'll see that it starts to glow
even in this view
here it starts to glow and this is another one of those sliders
that can go past one if you want it to if you need a
stronger glow effect but we'll leave it at one for now
and change it if we need to i'll just repeat this for the mana liquid them so
i want to change the color to a blue i'll just go for that deep blue
color there and we will whack the weight all the way up and
they're going to start glowing what i'm also going to do though just
before i start rendering this to see how it's lookin
g
is change the specular color so i'm going to make it a
light blue for the blue liquid and for the red liquid i'm gonna make it
a light red which will probably look pink
so we'll choose our red color and we'll just add a bit of white into it
you see what that's doing is the specular is the shiny bits of it and we
want it to be kind of shiny red okay that should look good so now that
we're done with that we'll just minimize the hypershade for a sec i
might want to come back into it and we're goi
ng to turn our viewport
back to the arnold renderer and i want to zoom in a little bit now
because it's these bottles that i'm most concerned with and
let's just hit play and see how they come out
that's how it's coming out for now which i think looks pretty good
the liquids certainly look like they're glowing
i am going to make one change though and it's because of the way that this glass
reacts if anything even slightly overlaps it
what i'm gonna do i'll just turn this off for a second i'm jus
t gonna shrink
the liquid down inside the flask to make sure that's not
happening so i'll just close those we'll go into flask glass
one and get the liquid and i'm just going to use my scale tool
i just want to bring it down a little bit not much at all
just to make sure that it's inside the container
and we'll do it with the other one same thing again just bring it in
slightly and just to see what happens if we really dial up
the emission i'm going to take it up to about
200 on each so we'll do
200 on that one there we go and on the health liquid
we'll do 200 again and then we'll see how this is looking
so that rendering's finished then and i think i'm happy with the glow now
so it really is now starting to impact things away from
the liquid itself so you can see it's hitting the table it's hitting the cork
you can definitely see it on this candlestick as well
but now that we've got a mostly dark scene with some really bright spots in
it we're getting all these little render
artifacts
up here and especially on the table and these
are things that we're going to need to fix
so our next step is going to be about setting up for a final render
so that we get a nice looking image out of this that we can put up on our blog
or whatever and have people be proud of us
so i will see you in the next step where we're going to create
quite a sexy looking render of our scene welcome back in this step we are going
to make this image really look beautiful get rid
of most of the artifacts hop
efully and have a final image that we can show off
to people so they can see just how much you've learned in maya
to get us started then let's just turn off this ipr rendering
and i'm going to close that window for now i'm going to go back into our render
settings which is up here and let's get this set up for some nice
rendering so i'm now going to go up to i'm going to do 720p
if you want to have a really high resolution image and you've got the time
by all means go for 1080 or higher but beca
use i want this to finish at
some point soon i'm going to just leave mine at
7 20. i'm also just going to scroll up and i'm going to choose the image format
that i want this to be saved in i'm going to go for png
i like a png next we'll go into the arnold renderer and we need to up this
camera a my advice for this is keep it as low as
you can while still getting rid of those
artifacts as i was doing the prep for this i upped the camera a to 10 i think
and the render just for one frame took about
two hours which is a long long
time maybe try out different settings and get
something that you're happy with but we need to get rid of as much of those
artifacts as we can so i'm going to have a go at five
and if that doesn't give me the effect i want i'll take it up higher
what you might also want to do is if you're getting any breakup in any of
your shadows you might want to go into the light so
let's just say this area like for instance
and up the samples of the light and you'll see that so
breakup just looks like individual pixels like it was in the last step
where we got some ugly pixels underneath this if
you're seeing that on anything you can try upping your shadow samples i'm gonna
leave mine where they are for now and we're gonna do
a render so let's set that go so i'm gonna go to arnold
and render that's telling me it's done and i've
still got a lot of breakup and a lot of artifacting so that is something that
i'm going to want to address so let's go back into my render set
tings
let's up those samples to eight and you'll see
um that these numbers jump up as i do that so eight there we go
and we will render again so i'm going into my render menu on the arnold render
view and we'll just click on update full
scene so the rendering has just completed you
can see down here that it took almost 20 minutes so going up from five
samples to eight there added a lot on to the render time and
you can see that it's still not really done enough
on the noise here so what i'm goin
g to do
is drop the amount of emission down especially on the red the blue's not too
bad but the red needs to come down because the render is having a tough
time with it and i don't really want to waste three
hours rendering this if i don't have to so
let's go in here and we'll just make that change so i've
got it at 200 let's try something more reasonable like
10 and if i don't like it i can always change it again later and
we'll do the same for the mana liquid just to keep
things consistent th
is is a good opportunity to show you
something that can be a big time saver when you are working on
particular spots in your render the bit i'm interested in
here is where the red is below the bottle so what i'm going to
do is only concentrate on that so if you click on this button here you
can draw a marquee selection around just a bit that you want to be rendered which
i'm going to try and keep as small as possible
which is about that and then you can change your parameters here
so i'm going t
o try six on the diffuse and i'm going to take it up to six on
the camera a i'm going to leave everything else at two
it might need a little bit more on the specular but this is something that you
have to experiment with when you're having
issues with your renders so now what we'll do is we'll just ipr render
and it will only render within this square that we've defined
so you can see now that the rendering though it's still taking a long time
is only needing to happen within this rectangle
and
i'll know much more quickly whether or not i've managed to sort out the
noise in the red color that's being cast onto
the table and as this renders finishing up whilst
there is still a little bit of noise that could be sorted out by raising
these values further they're now good enough for me for the
purposes of what i'm doing in this tutorial
so let's turn off the crop region and this will now want to
render the whole thing i just want to press stop there i don't want it to do
it on an ipr rende
r we're just going to go to render
and update full scene so that's the rendering complete then
and that means that this step about setting up for your final render
is also complete there is just one more thing i want to
show you in this step and that's how to save
your image once the render is complete i'm just going to show you on this one
that's currently completing because i'm doing this a little bit out of order
but what you do once you're in this complete in your arnold render view you
can
just go to file save image
it will put you in the images folder of your project and then you just need
to give it a name and then save it and that will save out
your image into that folder so that you can put
that into other applications or share it online
or do whatever you want all the remains now
is for you to go to the next step for your final challenge
see you there welcome back to the last step and your
final challenge for this maya tutorial so in this final
challenge what i want you to do
is to experiment with the lighting and
rendering to really make the scene you've created feel your own
so since the last step i've gone on a little bit and made a few changes
so i've added an area light here which is just shining straight down which i'm
using to illuminate the scroll a little bit because that wasn't
really showing up very well i've also added a little bit of a green tint
to the glass on the bottles and i've replaced the emissive material so i took
the emission out and i put som
e little point lights
inside which i think gives a better look for the kind of glowing liquids and
this is the sort of thing i want you to do now
experiment see what you can create how cool can you make this scene look
turn it into something that looks the way you want it to look
and then once you've done that i would like to join me in the next step
which is where we will conclude the tutorial so i will see you
in the conclusion wow you made it to the end well done
over the last four and a half
hours you have learned how to set mire up how
to create 3d models how to uv map and texture them and then
how to make your work look super sexy with lighting and rendering
that is some seriously impressive stuff i'd love to see what you've made by
following my tutorial so if you'd like to send me a picture of
your rendered scene come and join my discord server and show
off your hard work the link for the discord server
is below you'll need to answer some questions before you can get into the
se
rver it's a bit of a hogwarts inspired
sorting thing give it a try i think it's pretty cool if you found
this tutorial helpful then please hit the like button and consider subscribing
to gamedev academy for more tutorials like this one i put a lot of time and
effort into all of my tutorials so you won't be disappointed
if you'd like to support my work to help me to continue to create
more detailed tutorial videos then you can do so by becoming a patron
through patreon all of my patrons get acces
s to all of the supporting
materials for all of my tutorials you can become a
patron for as little as five dollars per month
and you can cancel at any time if you're looking to continue to grow your skills
in maya now that you've completed this tutorial
then i really recommend that you check out the courses over at pluralsight
pluralsight has heaps of great courses on maya and i suggest trying out their
myer core skills learning path you begin by
measuring your skill iq and then they recommend w
hich courses
you should complete from the 11 in the pathway
based on your current knowledge the courses in each path are also split into
beginner intermediate and advanced so you know
exactly what you're getting yourself into if you would like to give
pluralsight a try use my link in the video description to
get a 10 day free trial that's long enough to complete two or
three of the courses to decide if you want to continue your membership
if you're interested in learning other software i have so
me excellent unreal
engine 4 tutorials which are structured in the same way as this tutorial
which you might like to try out they're also linked below
the last thing for me to do then is to thank all of my wonderful patrons who
support my work and allow me to create work like this and to thank you for
sticking it out to the end not many people make it through a video
that's this long but you've done it and that is something to be proud of
hopefully i'll see you in another video
Comments
THANK YOU!!!!! I was about ready to drop out of my 3D modelling class because the video tutorials were sooo fast and confusing with a lot of left out information that I was so frustrated. You are amazing!!! This is an amazing tutorial and yes you are an amazing instructor!
the most confusing part of this whole tutorial is how there aren't more likes?!!!?!?!? you sir are an amazing teacher
This is most likely the best tutorial I ever participated in. Went through a lot of Zbrush & Blender tutorials over the last few years but this is a pearl. Maya, for me, was a bit of a scary monster and I was honestly too afraid to touch it for quite a while. This tutorial changed the monster into a teddy bear and although there's still much to learn I believe we are now friends with Maya. Thank you Shane. You're a diamond.
Man i love your sense of humour and your personality. Literally made the tutorial that much sweeter. Very likable guy.
I just started and 20mins in and I'm loving the tut so far . A thousand thanks buddy . A much needed beginners course .
I've completed this and knew the whole basic moves in Maya only for 2 days, what a great course. This is gold man, Thank you so much !
dude you have no idea how much comforting you sound in these tutorials! i literally will die to learn from you in person! what a great vid!
I'm normally really bad at focusing on long videos/lectures, but your style of editing and voice over helped me learn far more in 4 and half hours than any of my months-long classes. Thank you!
Digital art and animation student here! I learned Maya from scratch in my first animation courses, and I'm excited to reinforce my learning!
Hello Shane, i just want to thank you for all the efforts you have done to make the 4 hours and a half tutorial, i'm an accountant who wants to try 3D modeling as a hobby and felt it was way to complicated but because of your teaching method and excellent explanations, i finally started somewhere. The World needs more people like You, Keep up the Good Work and many thanks once again !
2.5 hours in and I'm really really enjoying myself. Best Maya tutorial I have ever used, thank you so much for your hard work!
Thank you! I had -0 experience before this tutorial and now I have a desk with books and candles looking so scenery my eyes can't believe it! I had doubts before starting and even had more doubts as I opened the interface. But your amazing way of teaching the subject and various techniques applied in this tutorial made it SO easy I still can't believe it. Thank you man for real!!
DAMN I needed a teacher like you when I was in college so many years ago! You have an uncanny way of making something so complex, and make it fun, entertaining, and really simplistic!
Thank you for being generous enough to release this high quality beginning tutorial for free on Youtube!
Just wanted to say that I'd never tried Maya before, but with this course, the bits of humor, and a lot of persistence, I was able to create an awesome looking scene as described here. You're a great teacher, for the record. Thanks a ton! Absolutely subscribing after all this. Was a great ride and super informative.
ive been slacking off w uni and this is helping me catch up quickly, thank you
I cannot put into words what kind of a life saviour you are my good sir! Going through my Game Arts course and was struggling a lot. decided to sit down and slowly go through all the basics of maya... I didnt know more than half of the unique tricks you show here! From the bottom of my heart, thank you!!! :) and the jokes are quite funny :D I have never had so much fun learning 3D
I have to say, you make 3d modelling a lot more fun than what I experienced when learning 3Ds Max. I start a new course next week using Maya and I'm looking forward to it thanks to you! Excellent video, I'll be recommending it to my fellow students.
In art school now for a vfx degree and have been totally bs-ing and skating through my 3D classes. For some reason, the medium just eludes me! So I figured it’s time I take matters into my own hands. I feel like I’ve learned more from your video than from the 2-3 3D modeling courses I’ve actually taken. Thanks so much for doing what you’re doing!
Thanks a lot brother. Because of you I am an expert in Maya today. Thanks a lot