Hard surface modeling in Maya tips
polycounter
Hey guys, am just trying to practice some hard surface modeling (using Maya) but never seem to be able to have full control of the process and get slowed down quite a lot making little tweaks here and there which I'm pretty sure are because I've made little mistakes moving verts without realising. For example I'm working on this piece seen in the image:
Will try and explain this as best I can - I would like to be able to cut in 'grooves' in a mesh but be able to move them if need be, the only issue is that once I've created support loops for them to stay hard when smoothing, its difficult to tweak them as there's edges all over the place and the topology gets messy. I usually have to delete the support loops, move the grooves slightly and then re-add the edge loops which can be a slow process - I'm mainly looking to improve the methods I'm using for more precise modeling.
Also, I've heard that some people start off modeling with a more dense mesh and subtracting from that, rather than starting with a low poly mesh and having to smooth it later, is this a better way to work? Hope that makes sense, thanks
Will try and explain this as best I can - I would like to be able to cut in 'grooves' in a mesh but be able to move them if need be, the only issue is that once I've created support loops for them to stay hard when smoothing, its difficult to tweak them as there's edges all over the place and the topology gets messy. I usually have to delete the support loops, move the grooves slightly and then re-add the edge loops which can be a slow process - I'm mainly looking to improve the methods I'm using for more precise modeling.
Also, I've heard that some people start off modeling with a more dense mesh and subtracting from that, rather than starting with a low poly mesh and having to smooth it later, is this a better way to work? Hope that makes sense, thanks
Replies
This will produce much easier topology to work with. Basically you want the verts around the grooves to have attached edges so the whole structure should be in quads.