Autodesk Maya - Week 12 - Hard Surface Geometry

 

Week 12 - Introduction to Hard Surface Geometry

This week in Maya, we learned about hard surface geometry and using supporting edge-loops to create hard edges/surfaces when using the smoothing tool. A hard surface model is an object that is man-made with hard edges. I made 2 hard surface models, one was my phone (Z Fold 2 by Samsung) and the other was a pistol, The Deliverer from Fallout 4 (Bethesda Studios, 2015). To start, I made a low-poly version of both models, and added bevels and supporting edge-loops to create the hard edges, and then used smooth preview to get an idea of how the geometry would look once smoothed and added supporting edge-loops where I need them to get the correct amount of smoothing/curvature.  

Here is my low-poly wireframe render of the pistol. I used as few tris as possible and as few edge-loops whilst keeping as much of the detail as I could. 

I then used the smoothing tool to create a high-poly mesh for my pistol and give it the curvature it's meant to have and this resulted in a lot of vertices/edges/faces, but it has a lot of detail as well. I have attached a wireframe render of this below:

I struggled with this geometry a fair bit as there are so many little details that I struggled to get all of this showing when I created it with the original low-poly model, which I then tried to keep in the high-poly model. 

I have also created my phone which took hours of trial and error because so many things kept going wrong with smoothing. Not only does it create a smoothed version of the geometry, it also shows you whether there are any issues with your model or not. It can be a good indication of whether you have any ngons or not. 

I'm very proud of this model, I paid a lot of attention to detail and applied several different materials to give it a highly realistic look, and the cameras weren't duplicates o each other - I created each lens separately within the camera bump geometry, this was extremely challenging as ngons seemed to appear out of nowhere and were quite difficult to correct. I also added a layer above the camera lenses and applied a glass material, giving the illusion of the camera lenses being recessed inside the camera bump with the glass layer on top. I'm very happy with the way this turned out and I hope to further improve it by retopologising.