Texturing in Maya seemed a daunting task to me, which is surprising since I have applied images to physical sky renders before, so I should have figured that one method of adding texture would be doing exactly that. Nevertheless, I was curious to find out how it can be done and also dabble with UV because that was another scary word based on the complicated images of UV mapping I have seen on Maya quizzes. We were introduced to those things properly in this lesson.
What is Soft Select?
Soft Selection lets you select vertices, edges, faces, UVs, or even multiple meshes in an organic way. It’s useful for making smooth slopes or contours on your model without having to transform each vertex manually. Alternatively, you could also use Sculpting to accomplish the same effect. It works by maintaining a falloff from the selected components to the components around your selection to create smooth transitions. For example, if you select a vertex at the centre of a plane and translate it up into a spike without Soft Selection, the sides are very steep and the point is very sharp. When Soft Selection is on, the slope and tip are smoother.
Soft Select Demo
As always, before jumping into the main task, we began with a useful technique or skill. With a bigger, personal project coming up, we delved deeper into soft selection and how it can be used. First the basics, the letter ‘B’ turns soft select on. We created a sphere to be able to see this, but only in a specific mode can the tell-tale gradient be seen. So, in face mode, we selected one of the faces on the primitive and looked at the yellow-red colours that appeared highlighting the geometry of the shape.
It was quite beautiful, and we were shown how to expand it if we wanted more to be selected: holding ‘B’ and the left mouse key, and dragging, increases the fall-out radius, which is the amount of soft select on the shape. Artists can decide how much they want to have by looking at the colours, which indicate how malleable the selected area is. The yellow parts move the most, the red parts move slightly or less than the yellow, and the black parts stay mostly still. Based on this, the radius can then be increased or decreased as desired. I think that it’s very useful and makes the tool more versatile, because a shape could be transformed on a larger scale with more subtle changes, or in smaller areas with very noticeable malformations, such as spikes for example.
We applied this to a flat surface next and went into the more intricate settings of the tool. So, I deleted the sphere and generated a poly plane, which we were told to scale up so it was as large as the grid. The next step was quite important – we added in more subdivisions, which would give the plane more dexterity when using soft select. Again, this is another variable that an artist can adjust as they wish to suit their needs (Maya continuously surprises me with its functionality). Next, we did something that I didn’t know was even an option, and had never done before. We double-clicked the selection tool and a window popped up with more customisable options! Our focus, of course, was the ‘soft selection’ area, but it was interesting to see what else you could open up and change.
This section enabled us to customize aspects specific to the soft select tool, for example, the first thing I did was change the secondary colour of the selection gradient so that it was yellow to purple to black, for fun! I’m glad that this is an option though, for people who may find it easier to see a particular colour combination. We were also shown how to manually increase and decrease the fallout radius. It was certainly much easier to change with the slider in the open window, with the poly plane, and I used this tool a lot when experimenting with the presets.
The presets were the primary reason we opened the more in-depth settings. They allowed the style of the form that was being pulled from/melded the shape to be changed and it was really cool experimenting with the different available ones and seeing what kind of effect they had on the plane. The first one was the most generic one and Maya’s default, but using the graph above there was an easy way to make an entirely unique form. It was done by clicking on the curve and adding more points, which can be moved around freely.
This was so much fun to do, and I tried it out with multiple of the presets. With the more complex curves, such as the stair one, I stuck to making little changes, but with the more basic ones, I could really experiment and create a bizarre-looking curve, to see how it would change the poly surface. This was by far, my favourite part of soft select, and as always, a lot of examples came to mind when thinking about application. With this tool, you could quickly and easily create cloth, ripples and my personal favourite, landscapes. I imagined the possibilities whilst working with the presets – volcanic and hilly environments or desert dunes and rocks.
I even made something that could be seen as a giant robotic or alien spider (the details could be added afterwards to make it more conventional, such as eyes, guns and metallic textures). I also enjoyed making something reminiscent of a crystal flower and some sort of villain-esque crystalline kingdom (the spiked areas gave it that quality).
Once we were finished with this section, we also quickly saw how soft select could be used with a cylinder. As an example, the teacher created a vase, whilst I attempted to make a barrel. Something about selecting the faces all-around a circular object and using soft select to move them in or out, or scale them, was very satisfying to me. It reminded me of modelling in real-life – working with clay or pottery.
UV Texturing
Now it was time for adding texture. We created a cube and added more subdivisions, like the poly plane. This time we went into ‘UV’ and then ‘UV Editor’. The editor opened up, where we could see the selected shape, in our case the cube, mapped out. Our aim was to download an image of this layout in order to be able to apply a texture.
We went to the top bar in the window and under ‘image’ we chose ‘UV snapshot’, which then allowed us to save said image on the desktop. I was clear on the task and so far, confident with what we were supposed to do. We would be using an existing image to apply a texture to the snapshot, which would then be put onto the cube in Maya. The teacher also told us that painting the texture by hand was also an option, for those skilled enough to do so, or in need of some more specific textures. I thought this was really cool and useful since you can be more precise and have great control over the final appearance of a model.
As directed, I opened up the snapshot in Photoshop and also imported the crate image that was given to us. From here, it was quite simple, but ironically, exactly where I made my first and only mistake of this part of the lesson.
We had to move the crate in the position of the first square of the UV map, duplicate it and repeat the step, matching each one along the template. I found this perfectly simple to do, however, whilst taking my notes, I missed the teacher giving us a crucial step, which was to turn the opacity of each duplicate down to ensure that the lines match up perfectly. I didn’t do this and unfortunately, it had a great effect later on.
After completing the template, we selected all of the layers and flattened them, to make one image, which was then saved as a PNG. Back in Maya, it was then a matter of adding the image to a material, just like we did for the flag in the nCloth lesson.
With the hypershade window open, I added a lambert. We couldn’t use lambert 1 because that is the automatic material in Maya, and if edited, will make everything generated have a crate texture. As usual, I clicked the checkered box next to colour, chose the ‘file’ option in the pop-up and clicked the folder by ‘image name’. After choosing the crate PNG, it was simply a matter of closing hypershade and assigning the existing material to the cube. My disappointment came after pressing ‘6’ to see how lambert 2 looked on my cube, when I saw black lines across the bottom and side of the shape.
These were a result of not aligning the crates perfectly because of my missed step. It was too late to go back and change it, and I simply had to continue onto rendering although I was quite annoyed at my carelessness. I duplicated the crate and created a stack that could be in the background of a scene. I then repeated the final couple steps for a poly plane floor, adding a metallic texture to make it more interesting. By this point, I was quite at ease with adding images onto materials and sped through the process.
I tried my best to experiment with lighting and colours as usual when rendering, continually moving the models and light direction (azimuth) to get the best angles that would cover up the black lines. Obviously, they would be visible no matter what, but here are some of the better-looking renders I could get.
The next part of the lesson involved going through a technique that I was already aware of, having applied it to my propeller model earlier on. I did, however, learn a useful new tool that I didn’t know about prior to the demo. We created a cube and added more subdivisions (5 x 5 x 5), then selecting all of the middle faces on one side, clicked this:
Circularizer Tool – Circularizing vertices, edges, or faces reorganizes them into a perfect circle using the selection’s centre as the circle’s centre.
Using this tool, we created a circular component within the geometry of the cube, which could then be manipulated. In our case, we used extrusion to pull the circle inwards.
Then the teacher demonstrated the technique that I had previously used, which was adding edge loops on all of the edges of the cube and around the circle too. We also inserted an edge loop inside, next to the rim and next to the inner edge. The point was to show how an edge loop could also be added on the back face, which is done through the extrusion tool, by clicking on the light blue cube and using the centre one to scale the entire face in. Now the geometry looked like this;
I had done something similar when modeling the propeller, since it had a circular hole as well, and an extruded nose from the centre. I wanted to apply a smooth mesh, so I had to add in quite a few edge loops to keep areas I wanted sharp and hard. This process involved a lot of back and forth whereas, with this cube, it was much more direct and streamlined. After clicking ‘3’, this is what the cube looked like (very smooth and professional!).
Using this skill, you could easily make the base of a camera or washing machine, or even cheese! Any object that has circular holes, or even jutting circular elements would be created quickly with the circularize tool, and the amount and position of the edge loops would also allow each circle to be edited differently, depending on the effect that the artist would like.
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Predominantly, my goals/hopes for this lesson were achieved. I got to explore soft select more thoroughly, and add it to my collection of skills within Maya, and despite the slip-up, my first experience with UV mapping wasn’t negative. I will make sure to turn the opacity down next time when working on a UV net and an embedded image because I certainly don’t want a repeat of the black lined inaccuracy. My mistake was also quite valuable, as it taught me about how meticulous you have to be. I am most looking forward to working more with soft select and even combining it with fluid simulations if we get to explore those a little since it would quite fascinating to merge the creative tools. I would like to use them when creating a scene with more natural elements such as mushrooms and trees.