Modeling Demo File

This section will go over basic Modeling concepts, and will accompany a Maya file found here: http://tinyurl.com/hh77bdv

## Edge flow

Edge flow, often referred to as topology, is the direction that opposite edges face. To explain, let’s say you have a square, there is a top, bottom, left, and right side. If you draw a line from the top to the bottom, or the left to the right, that is the way the mesh flows.

### Holding edges

A holding edge is an edge with the purpose of keeping the form of the mesh. These are only needed when the mesh is going to be smoothed, they generally aren’t needed for game models.

### Supporting edges

These are similar to holding edges, but instead of keeping the form of the mesh, they help keep the texture from stretching.

## Different types of spheres

### Normal Sphere

This is the default sphere that maya creates, nothing special about it.

### No Triangles

This is the default sphere that maya creates, only with it’s pole turned into four sided polygons instead of three. This is needed in some pipelines, as certain rendering engines don’t accept triangles.

### No Poles

This is when you delete the poles entirely and append polygons across. This is only really useful in certain conditions and it is generally better to create a quad ball instead.

### Quad ball

This is when you smooth a six sided cube up until it looks like a sphere. One downside to quad balls is that they aren’t perfectly round.

### Quad ball snapped to sphere

If you need a quad ball, but it needs to be perfectly round, it is generally a good idea to use this method:

1. Create a quad ball with as many subdivisions as you need
2. Create a sphere the same size and put it in the same location as the quad ball.
3. Increase the spheres subdivisions until it is really smooth, normally two to three subdivisions will work.
4. Set the sphere to be a live object by clicking on the far right magnet icon at the top of the screen.
5. Select all of the verts of the quad ball and carefully scale it up a little.

If everything worked properly, you should have seen the verts snap to the smoothed sphere and should now have a perfectly round quad ball. Feel free to remove the sphere from being live and delete it.

## Break objects down into their forms

When modeling it is always better to work from large too small. Doing this will save you a lot of headache in the future and will help with creating cleaner more appealing models. As you learn to model more effectively you may start to hear terms like primary, secondary, or even tertiary forms. These are terms to help describe the level of detail that we are talking about.

### Primary Forms

These are the things that make up the overall silhouette. A cup is a cylinder, and baseball is a sphere, etc. On a face these could be things like the nose, ears, or chin.

### Secondary forms

These are the shapes that are just within those primary forms. Secondary forms are things that should only affect the inside of the silhouette.  For something like a baseball, these could be things like the string that holds it together. For a cup it could be the indent on the bottom of the cup. For a face it could be things like the nostrils on the nose, the inside of the ear, or a dimple on the chin.

### Tertiary forms

These are things that shouldn’t affect the silhouette at all but add detail to in model. For a baseball it could be the seams under the string, for a cup it could be a crack running along it. For characters these could be things like moles, large wrinkles, or smile lines.

## Complex shapes

This section is to help you learn ways to approach complex hard surface shapes. A lot of these tips can also be applied to soft organic models.

1. If you have a piece of concept really analyze it and try to figure out what it’s most basic shapes are (cube, cylinder, or sphere). Begin by building these shapes, don’t worry about an sort of extrusions, we are just trying to get the overall shapes.
2. Once you have these shapes figured out and are happy with the scale of everything, it is time to start messing with the primary forms. Feel free to add in some extrusions here, just don’t go crazy, we are just messing with things that will affect the silhouette.
3. If you can, break the object down into smaller parts that can be duplicated to make large shapes. In the example given, I have something that has radial symmetry, so to speed up my workflow I delete out everything but one small segment and work on that. Doing this can drastically improve the speed at which you can create a model.
4. Once you have the small segment looking good, it is time to make it whole again. Set the pivot to be at the center of the whole object and duplicate the object around until it is whole again. Once that is done select all the pieces and combine and weld the verts together.
5. The object is now done and has been approved, it is time to add in holding edges. If the pipeline permits it, you can also save on polygon count and use creases instead.

That’s it, we were just able to take a complex object and turn it into its most basic shapes. These steps don’t only apply to hard surface objects however, they can also be really useful for organic shapes, like characters.