From the course: Maya: Retopology for Animation

Draw guidelines - ZBrush Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Retopology for Animation

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Draw guidelines

- [Instructor] When re-topologizing, I sometimes jump straight into building the new mesh. However, if you're uncertain of where everything should go, it make sense to plan it out first by drawing some guidelines. In this video, I'll be mostly covering the technical details of the process so that we can get into the edge flow theory in the next few videos. So let's check it out. So to get started drawing our guidelines, go ahead and select your raw sculpt. Now, if you can't select it, make sure that you're not in template or reference mode, make sure sure it's in regular mode. And then we wanna go up here to the live surface magnet and go ahead and click that. So what that does is it makes it a live surface. Any new curves that we draw are going to get drawn on the surface of this model. A quick note about live objects: if you save your scene with an object as a live surface, and then you open that scene later, Maya will not remember that the surface was live. So, if you're using the exercise files for this course, you'll need to re-active the live surface for the raw sculpt with each exercise file you open. Now, let's start out with some really simple curves in some really obvious places. It kind of goes without saying that we're going to want our new topology to follow the shape of the eye lids. So let's go ahead and get our curve tool out, and I'm just gonna click around this eyelid. Usually I wouldn't even draw this curve because it's so obvious that the new topology should follow this eyelid, but just for practice, let's go ahead and do that. Now when you're done drawing that out, go ahead and hit enter. So you'll notice I'm just doing this on one side of the model. That's because the model is symmetrical, so I really only need to plan out half of it. Okay, let's go ahead and make another curve somewhere else. So let me zoom out a little bit. It's also something that goes without saying that you want to have your edges running down the center of the model, but just for practice, let's go ahead and either hit G on the keyboard to activate the last used feature, or just go ahead and click on your curve again. And I'm just gonna draw a curve, just clicking out, going up half way. Now it doesn't matter if it's slightly deviating a little bit, that's okay. I'm just gonna draw this going up the center line. And then once it's this far, it really doesn't matter exactly, it's pretty obvious that we're gonna wanna follow that center line, but just for practice, go ahead and hit enter there. And then we can continue this curve, we can just draw a new one, it doesn't really matter if they're not, like, precisely connecting up. But I'll just draw this out. Just clicking around this nose. Sometimes it can be a little bit hard to see, that's okay. I'll just bring that down into the mouth. Go ahead and hit enter. Now if you need to modify any of these curves, you can do that by holding down the right mouse button to get that marking menu, and we'll go into control vertex. And then if you need to select one of these, and maybe hit W to go into your move tool, maybe slide this around a little bit, you can do that. And notice as we slide this, it's sticking to the surface. So we couldn't just slide this off into space. So that's kind helpful, it keeps us on the surface of the model. When you're done making edits, you can just hold down the right mouse button, go back to object mode, and you're good to continue working. Okay, if you feel like you need to practice some more, go ahead and create some more curves, either in really obvious places where you know you're gonna want to have that edge flow follow, or along the center line. Okay, in the next few videos, we're going to be getting deeper into exactly where these guidelines should go on the rest of the model.

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