The Making of Slow Decay - Page 2

MODELING

One of the tedious and time-consuming parts when creating pictures is modeling. But ... you need to do it ... empty scene is not very interesting for the viewer. ;) So let's go and see what I have done in this scene when it comes to modeling. First, I will list the tools I use often. The detailed explanation of those tools can be found Maya manuals. It is best to create empty scene and test these tools until the moment when you are familiar with them. Remember that you need a lot of hours working with basic Maya tools before you have enough practice to take the next step and create a little more complicated stuff.

Just to give you a short list of the tools I use very often when modeling: Create menu: Nurbs stuff: sphere, cylinder, plane, circle ... Polygon stuff: sphere, cube, cylinder, plane, CP Curve Tool, Edit Curves menu: Attach and Detach curves, Open/Close curves, Cut curve, Curve Fillet, Rebuild Curve, Surfaces menu: Revolve, Loft, Extrude, Bevel Plus, Edit NURBS menu: Project Curve on surface, Trim Tool, Insert Isoparm, Polygons menu: Create polygon tool, Append poly tool, Combine, Booleans, Smooth, Edit Polygons menu: Texture > Planar Cylindrical and Spherical mapping, Subdivide, Split Poly Tool, Extrude Face, Bevel, Cut Faces Tool, Merge Vertices, Fill Hole.

But let's see how can they be used to build up objects. I will take a few models from the scene and explain the process of modeling them. BTW the models from this scene, individually, are not complicated to do, but when you stick them all together in the scene they give a different, more complex perspective.

Left Building

For my first example I will take the model of the building on the left. Some elements of this mode are left out compared to original model from the picture, to make things simpler. I have rendered one image with that model. It is divided by colors so it can be easier to explain what I am talking about. Just click on the image to get the full size.

So let's start to examine this model step by step. First, we will start with the yellow part since it is the main structure on which every other detail is built. The yellow part was made with simple use of extrude tool which extrudes profile curve along the path curve.

Example:

First you have to draw a profile curve. I usually switch to front view for this. Then go to the Create > CP Curve Tool - click on the box for options and select 1 Linear. Now draw the curve similar to the one that I did below. Remember, these curves that I use for examples are not the real ones used in my picture ... they only show the way I did stuff.

Now that we have the profile curve we will create the path curve on which the profile will be extruded. To create path curve, I didn't use the CP Curve Tool as you probably supposed ... I have done things a little bit different. What I did, was that I created the perfect circle, detached a little part of it and then scaled that small part and deleted the rest of the circle.

Go to the Create > Nurbs Primitives > Circle. This creates the circle at the middle of the scene. What I have done is that I scaled it a little bit and selected two curve points like on the picture below. Then I went to the Edit Curves > Detach Curves, which divided the curves on two part based on the points that I previously selected. After that I erased the large part and I left the smaller one.

I have also scaled the path curve (part of the circle) so that it is proportional to the profile curve. Like in the picture. At this moment, one of the things you need to watch out is the pivot point of the profile curve because extrude tool use this information. It is best to align it similar to the pivot point in the picture below.

After I have done all my preparations, I have selected these two curves. It is important to first select profile curve and then the path curve. Then I went to the Surfaces > Extrude - click on little box and in the extrude options menu set the Result position to At Path, Pivot to Component and Orientation to Profile Normal. Also check that all other options are set to the default values. Click Extrude and that's it. The main structure in the model on the left of the image is here:

As you can see, it was easy to do this, just a few clicks and that's it. One more important thing ... I recommend to do this in separate scene/file and later when it is finished you just import it to the original scene where you blocked the image.

Now the green structure that holds the yellow one.

The big pipes are made in similar way as the object above. I created one Nurbs circle, and I have used the same path curve as the one above but a little bit scaled up. This is easy to do, so I will not explain this through the images. The stuff that I will show you is the model that holds the pipes and on which magenta stuff is attached. Let's see these few simple steps to get similar shapes.

First thing that I have done is that I created the profile curve. As before I have used the CP Curve Tool, which was set to linear (option menu in case you forgot). I just draw the profile curve as in picture below. This curve should be closed. I have used the linear curve to get the strong sharp edges... which is what I want for this model.

After I created the profile curve I selected it and jumped to Surfaces > Bevel Plus options. In options menu I set Bevel Width and Depth to 0.1, Extrude distance 0.8, Outer Bevel style to Convex Crease and Inner Bevel Style to the same as Outer. Also in Output options I have used: Polygons, Tessel Method to Sampling, Sampling to 1 and Samples 6. After you click Bevel you should get something like object in the picture below:

We still need to get a hole in the bottom part. This is where that grid will be. First thing I did is that I have used Edit Polygons > Split Polygon Tool. This is very useful tool and believe me you will use it a lot when it comes to poly modeling. After the tool selection, click on the edges like I did in the picture below and press enter or right mouse button to finish it.

After I made the separate polygon in the bottom part of this structure, I went to polygon selection mode, selected this polygon and done the extrusion (Edit Polygons > Extrude Face) three times. First time I just scaled down the polygon so that I get thicker edge. Then for the second extrusion I also scaled it down, but just a little bit and moved it a little bit inside. The second extrusion was made to get the smoother edge.

After I did the third Extrude of the polygon, I have just pushed it somewhere near other edge (picture below). Don't worry about the precision here, because one half of this object will soon be deleted.

But before you delete the half of the object we need to cut it in half. For this I switched to side view then I went to the options of the Edit Polygons > Cut Faces Tool. In the option menu of this tool check the Delete the Cut Faces and enter the cut tool. Now (in front view) we have to draw a vertical cut line that goes somewhere through the middle of this object. The way you cut it is crucial. If you do it from bottom to top then the right part of the cut object will be deleted which is what we want. Also, make sure that you keep the SHIFT key pressed to get the straight line going from bottom to top. After I did my cut, I have got the object from picture below. One more thing that I did is that I have set the pivot point to the inner edge. I hope that you know how to do this since this is a basic stuff.

To get the symmetrical left part, you just have to duplicate this part and scale it -1 in Z direction. This simple step produced the object below, but...

... They are still separated and we want them to become one. No problem ... just select both parts and jump to Polygons > Combine. The two objects have become one ... but they are still not fully connected. ;) The middle part of them has Vertices that are not merged together, and they should be. To do this go to the Edit Polygons > Merge Vertices options and in options menu set Distance to something small like 0.001. If you set it to a higher value some vertices that are not supposed to merge, will merge together, so in that situation you can mess up the model, and because of that be careful with this value, especially when the history is off. ;) So, as you can see it on the picture below, the basic model is finished.

Now let me show you how to do a simple grid in this hole that we have created. ;)

First, switch to the front view; create the cylinder (Create > Polygon Primitives > Cylinder). After you have created the cylinder, scale it and move to the position like in the picture below (not the green one but the blue one). Also make sure that you have rotated it... I have set it to 45 degrees. Now select that pipe, duplicate it (Ctrl+D) and move it in negative y direction ... this step is shown in picture below...

After you did the first duplicate you can do the repeated duplicate with Shift+D. As you will see, the duplicate with shift pressed on replicates the first duplication and transformation. Just do this several times until there are enough cylinders to cover the hole, like in picture below.

Now the other side. Just select all of the cylinders that you have created, group them together (Ctrl+G), duplicate the (standard way ... Ctrl+D) and set scale in X direction to -1 to get the mirror effect. After you have done this, you will probably want to duplicate few cylinders at the bottom to fill up the grid completely.

It's time to get rid of the parts we don't need. Guess what ... we will use Cut Tool again. ;) But first you have to select all of the cylinders and combine them together in one mesh so we can cut it in just few passes and keep them as one object. So select all of them and Polygons > Combine. Now go to the Edit Polygons > Cut Faces tool > options and make sure that Delete the cut faces is checked. Now cut the combined mesh like I did in the picture below.

After the cut, select the object and align the pivot to the center of it so you can manipulate it easier. With object selected select Modify > Center Pivot. Now move the grid to the position you want, and in this example I made another copy for the other end. Picture shows it all. ;)

At this moment you can also group the grid and the main element together (Ctrl+G), maybe do another Center Pivot after the group, and position it to the position you want. I have modified a little bit the structure (yellow one) that we did in first steps so that this new model fits better.

For the other parts of this structure on the left, I will not go through the whole process of modeling ... I will just mention in few sentences how I did these objects. So for example, the magenta stuff in the picture below was not too hard to do. I have used similar tools like in the previous parts. The process always goes in similar ways. For some parts I have created the profile curve, then Bevel Plus and duplicated this part few times. For the pipes I have used the cylinder and extrude-move-scale it few times to get the shape. There are also some simple primitive objects, like torus .... They are used at the position where pipe gets into the object below.

In this example I have also used a lot of cylinders which were moved, scaled and edited a little bit to fit the fence model. There are also simple poly plane objects between these cylinders... on which we will apply simple but good-looking texture in texturing section. As you can see, on top of every vertical cylinder in the fence lies one poly sphere. Yes, these details look simple when you zoom in closely, but it is a small part in the final picture so why not cut time. ;) The models that hold up the fence are also created from profile curves using bevel plus tool.

Now comes the fence from above (picture below). For this I will show you the few steps which I have used to make it in few minutes. As you can see, the fence is repeatable... so you just need to do the first model and then duplicate it.

Let's see a simple example of this in picture below. The model is separated a little bit just to show you what it is made of. The pipes on the top are made with the extrude tool. The path and profile curve are below. For profile curve I have created one nurbs circle and for the path curve I have used CP Curve Tool but this time set to degree 3 named cubic. The parts on the left and right are simple cylinders and spheres and the big flat part where the grid will be (simulated using textures) is made by lofting the two path curves for the pipe on the top and bottom. The loft tool is Surfaces > Loft .. You just need to select two curves and click on this.

Now let's get back to the initial model. We don't need the vertical cylinder on the right side since we will duplicate the whole object. But first make sure that everything is grouped together and that the pivot point is set to the position like in picture below.

Back to the scene from above. Go to the top view and position this part of the fence in its initial position. Be sure to rotate it to the right angle so that the fence follows the direction of the structure. Use the edges of that structure as the reference when rotating the fence from top.

Next step was to make duplicates. Do this from the top ... then after you do a duplicate of the fence part, move it and rotate as in picture below. Now...

...keep doing the duplicates until you get the full fence. You can try to do the duplicate with transform (shift+D) ... but you need to get the right rotation after the first duplicate that you have made, or you can do it by just duplicating it and moving, rotating, then again... ;) Well, that's it about the fence. It was a simple step, wasn't it?

That's it for that left part of the image...