Modeling with Mesh Sculpting tools - Maya Tutorial

- [Narrator] Up to this point, we've modeled terrains using height maps. Now we'll look at manual sculpting. The Maya mesh sculpting tools were ported over from the application mud box. And they don't have the full functionality of mud box. For example, we can't create layers or erase non-destructively, but these tools are still very useful. And there'll be found in the modeling menu set, in the mesh tools menu under sculpting tools. You'll see that there are quite a number of them. It's easier to get at them from the shelf. And I've got the shelf currently hidden. So I'll bring that back, from windows, UI elements, shelf. And we have different shelves here, here the sculpting shelf. I'll select my terrain model, and I can activate any one of these sculpting tools. The one on the far left is the "sculpted tool." Double click it to launch the tool settings dialogue. And by default, the object is displayed in wireframe. You can change that if you want by going into the display settings at the bottom of the tool settings. And we have wireframe display, we can turn that on or off or change the color or the alpha. The brush size is controlled up here. And just as we saw before with the artisan paint tools, we can use a keyboard shortcut to change the brush size. However the mouse, over the object, hold down the b key and drag left and right to change the brush size. And we have the brush strength. And again, we can use a keyboard shortcut for that. Hold down the m key and drag up and down to change the strength of the sculpting brush. And with these high values in the range of hundreds, we can now sculpt across a very large objects such as this terrain. Simply click and drag to sculpt. If you want to undo press the Z key, and you'll go back to the previous state. In the falloff section of the tool settings, we can change the shape of the brush, and we have this S curve by default. If we want sharper peaks, we can change the curve using a pre-set or we can edit these points manually. Once again click and drag. And now we've got a more mountainous shape. We can see that there are some stamps if we're getting close to the Alton right mouse button. We see these discrete points here. We can try to help that by reducing the spacing amount. We can bring that down to a very low value and try again. It is better but it's not perfect. We can soften this up, using the smooth tool. So we've got a smooth brush up here. Or we can just invoke this smooth tool from within any other tool, by using a keyboard shortcut. And that is shift. Hold down the shift key, and the brush circle turns into a blue color, and then you can drag across to soften that up or smooth it. Release the shift key to go back to the previous brush tool, and maybe we can increase the strength again with the m key. Bring that up quite a bit. And we can click and drag to create some mountainous terrain. Now it's not looking terribly realistic. We can help this along a couple of ways. One, is we can invert that brush. If we hold down the control key, then we can actually subtract or reduce. But as we do this, we'll notice that we're getting some weird issues. And the reason this is happening is because the default direction of the sculpting is along the averaged normal of this current shape. We'll see the direction is sent to average normal. Well, we'll fix that by using the Y axis for a terrain model. I'll just undo all those movements I just made pressing the Z key a bunch of times to go back to where I was. And if the undo buffer is set high enough in the Maya preferences, I can go all the way back to the state before I did any sculpting, change the direction to the Y axis. And we'll only sculpt in the worldwide axis. And we can click and drag once again. Create a couple of mountains. Hold down the control key. And we can invert that and produce depressions in the landscape, hold down shift, and we can soften that up. Or again, go back to sculpting. Alright, so that's basic sculpting. We can improve this, by going down into the section for stamps. Open up stamp. And we can click use stamp and we can click to import or pick. Pick stamp will take us to the content browser from which we can choose a bunch of stamps that are applied with Maya. And when I had in there a moment ago was black and white rebel. So I'll use that, enclose the content browser, and click and drag and we can produce a more rocky mountain as landscape using that stamp tool. By default, it's going to orient to the current strokes. If I drag the stroke in a certain direction that will orient the stamp in that direction. There's another cool thing we can do which is to use a different draw method. We can switch this over to scale image from center. And then when we click and drag, we'll get a preview of a single stamp. Release the mouse and that stamp is applied. This is a cool way to add some detail really quickly and easily. Tumble around with Alton left mouse button and keep sculpting. Since our direction is the world Y axis, we're only changing the Y position of all of these vertices. Go back out again, make a larger brush hold down the b key. And we can do a few more of these stamps here in the foreground. Changing the size of that brush with a b key, we can reduce the size of those stamps. Changing the strength of that stamp, we can use the m key and bring that back down. And now we'll get a more subtle effect. Once again hold down the shift key and maybe do some smoothing. Soften that up a bit. Alright, so that's the basics of using the sculpt tool. There are a whole bunch of variations here which you can experiment with on your own. There's one last point I want to make, which is, if you start off with a disc primitive, then you'll be able to reduce the level of detail here for performance reasons. So I can close that tool settings, go back to the select tool. Select that disc object going to its inputs. And I can reduce the number of subdivisions non-destructively. So for example I can bring that subdivisions down to only five. Now I've got a very rough approximation of my landscape, but I can bring that back up to a value of eight, and I'll get all that detail back again. I can't increase the subdivisions beyond the value it was at at the time I created the sculpt. So when I started I had a subdivisions of eight. If I try to take it up to nine it'll actually break the model. So we can't do that. We can reduce the level of detail and then bring it back up. But we can't increase the level of detail beyond what we had originally. And that's how to use the sculpt tools to create a landscape.