- [Instructor] Hi I'm George Mastery
and today is a modeling day.
We're going to take a look at threads and screws
by modeling a bolt that looks a lot like this.
Now this is a great way to improve your modeling skills,
so let's just go ahead and get started.
Now we're going to start off with this scene here
called Hex Head,
and I've already modeled the top of the bolt,
and that's just to save some time.
And I've modeled this out of a simple cylinder
and it has six sides and a total of 18 divisions radially,
so that's an important number that we need to remember.
So I'm going to go ahead and hide this.
So I'm going to go Display, Hide, Selection, or Control H.
And now let's go ahead and get started with the threads.
So I'm going to start off by creating a helix.
Now a helix is basically thread-shaped
and it's a great primitive to start off with.
So we're going to go ahead and do Create, Polygon Primitives,
Helix, and I want to make sure that Interactive Creation
is turned off because I want this at the origin.
So I'm going to go ahead and create this,
and I'm just going to use the default values.
But let's go ahead and dial in the values
that we really want in the Attribute Editor.
So if we go in the Attribute Editor,
you'll see I have a poly helix tube shape.
And I can change the number of coils.
I'm going to go ahead and make it six coils.
And then we can adjust the height as much as we want.
The Width is the width of this,
I'm going to leave that at the default of two.
And then the Radius,
I'm going to bring that down to about point two five,
so we want this to be a little bit thinner.
And then two important ones here are the subdivisions.
So Subdivisions in Axis are the subdivisions
around this axis here.
Now we can certainly bring them up,
but actually I'm going to bring these down
to a very small amount.
We're going to just bring it down to four,
which gives us the minimum we need to create this thread.
And then the Subdivisions Coil,
that's really the number of subdivisions radially,
so you can see here we can increase or decrease this.
Now remember my hex head was 18,
so we need to make sure that that matches,
so I'm going to make that 18.
So now that we have this, let's go ahead and start modeling.
Now the first thing I want to do is get rid of
all of this interior detail.
I just want the outside of the threads.
So I'm going to go ahead and start deleting faces.
So I'm going to into Face mode here,
I'm going to delete the end cap here,
as well as the one up here on top.
Just hitting the Delete key after selecting.
Then I'm going to select one of these faces,
and then Shift double-click,
and that selects all of these faces.
I'm going to do it the same on the other inside ring of faces,
I'm going to Shift and then double-click select.
So now I've selected all of these.
I'm going to go ahead and hit Delete.
And so now we have the beginning of our thread.
Now what we need to do is fill in the gaps here.
Now I can do that in a number of ways.
Probably the easiest way is to use the Bridge tool.
So all I have to do is go into Edge mode,
and I select an edge and then select that edge directly
below it, and then go Edit Mesh, Bridge.
And that bridges that.
I can do the same on the bottom.
So I'm going to go ahead and select this one,
and then Shift select this one and again, Bridge.
But I don't want to do this for all of these,
so what I'm going to do here is just double-click
on this inside edge and then select both top and bottom
as well as the inside edges of these,
so I'm going to Shift de-select that one,
and this one,
and then just go ahead and bridge the rest of those.
Now you could if you wanted to,
you could actually select all of these and just
do one bridge, but I find it's easier to bridge
the beginning and the end and it just makes selection
a little bit easier.
So now that I have this, you can see I have a thread
that looks very much like a drywall screw
or something like that,
so we need to make this a little bit tighter.
So I'm actually going to go back into my Attribute Editor,
and find my helix.
So I'm going to go ahead and go polyhelix2,
and then I'm just going to dial down that height.
And as you can see, I've got History turned on,
so I can actually go back and modify this,
this is a great feature of Maya.
A lot of people don't use History as much as they should,
so I'm going to bring this down to maybe about three point five
or so.
Maybe three point two five.
There we go, I just want a thin edge here on the inside.
And then I'm going to kind of mirror this on the outside here,
so I'm going to go into Edge,
double-click on this Select Edge Loop.
And then we're going to bevel this,
I'm going to go Edit Mesh, Bevel,
and then I'm going to bring that fraction down to about
point one, and what I really want is I want this and this
to be the same size, and they look close enough.
So now that we have this, we've got a thread,
so there we go.
Now let's go ahead and do some of the hard parts,
which is making the top and bottom of this.
So I'm going to go down to the bottom here.
And what we need to do is fill in this hole.
Well the easiest way to do that is to use a cylinder.
I'm going to go back in Object mode here,
and let's go into our top view here and Create,
Polygon Primitives, Cylinder.
And this time I'm going to look at my options here.
I want to make sure my Axis divisions are 18,
and then Radius and Height don't really matter,
I just want to make sure it's 18 divisions.
And then Cap divisions,
I'm going to go ahead and give it three divisions
and that'll just give me a little bit more detail.
So I'm going to go ahead and Create that.
What it does is it creates a cylinder.
But what I really want to do is just take the top or bottom
of that cylinder,
so I'm going to move this out,
and then select Faces,
and then I'm just going to select all of those faces,
hit Delete, so all I have is that bottom cap.
And then move that up a little bit.
And let's go ahead and size it
so that it's inside that ring, just barely, so there we go.
So we need to stitch all of this together.
We're going to go back into Object mode here.
So now that I have this in place,
I can move it up just below the bottom of this,
and then select it, and then we're going to combine it,
and then stitch it together,
so I'm going to go ahead, do a Mesh Combine,
and then go into Edge mode here.
So I'm going to select Edges here.
I'm going to select all of these edges.
And then Shift Select all of these edges,
but if you notice we've got some additional edges here
that we need to kind of figure out.
So I'm going to de-select these,
and then I'm also going to de-select about two of these
because we're going to need some room to kind of
stitch all of this together,
so what I've done is I've selected from here
all the way around to here,
so I've got all of these matched.
And again, we can use our Bridge command,
so I'm going to go ahead and hit Bridge,
and that bridges all of that.
But if you notice, we've got some stuff left over.
So we need to stitch all of this together.
So I'm going to go ahead and select these faces here
and delete them.
Now notice how we've got a lot of detail here
and no detail here.
So what I need to do is kind of flow this detail into
all of these edge loops that we have,
so I'm going to go ahead and delete these faces,
and now I should have enough here
to connect everything together.
And the easiest way to connect things together
is to use what's called Target Weld.
So I'm going to go into Vertex mode here,
and go Mesh Tools, Target Weld.
And all you have to do is hover over a vertex,
and notice how they highlight.
And then left-click and drag
and snap it to another vertex,
so I'm going to basically just stitch this up.
And even though it looks kind of not right,
you can see how all of a sudden now
I've got this connected and I have all of my stuff
connected properly, everything's a quad.
So now that I have this,
all I need to do is select some vertices,
and we can start guiding these into place.
So I'm going to select these.
And then we can move the bottom of this up just a little bit
and scale it down to get the bottom of that screw.
Okay so the rest of this is a little detail work
of just kind of just pushing these into place
so you've got a nice flow into that.
Now let's turn our attention to the top here.
And let's go ahead and create the shaft of that bolt.
Now the easiest way to do this is to use an Extrude,
so I'm going to go into Edge mode, double-click on this edge,
and again we get the whole top of this
plus this little side detail,
so I'm going to Shift, de-select this,
so all I get is that top.
And then Extrude, so we're going to go Edit Mesh, Extrude.
And instead of using the Extrude tool,
I'm just going to go immediately to my Move tool
by hitting W, and I'm just going to move that up.
And that makes sure that I move this directly up
in the y-axis.
Now once I have this,
you'll see this spiral's a little out of shape,
but we can fix that using scale,
so I'm going to go ahead and scale this down to zero.
And now we have basically the shaft of the bolt.
But we still need to tie everything together.
So if you notice here, I've got some vertices
that are out of place.
But we can snap those together by using Target Weld
one more time.
So I'm going to go ahead and target weld this one,
and then we also have some detail here
that still isn't connected.
We have more detail here than we have on the other side.
So I've got this kind of open edge here.
And I still need to stitch it all together.
So we can do that by adding some detail,
we can add some edge loops here,
so I'm going to go into Mesh Tools, Insert Edge Loop,
and I'm going to add an edge loop that matches the bottom
and the top of that thread.
And as you can see, that goes all the way around
and then stops at that open edge.
So now I'm going to go ahead and just reposition
some of this detail here,
so I'm going to select these two edges,
and then just do a Swide Edge,
and what you do is you middle-click and drag,
and so I'm just going to kind of drag that up
so I have a little bit more detail here.
And then do the same for this one here,
so I'm just trying to get this detail to kind of flow
a little bit more gradually up into here.
And then we need to connect all of this together.
So we can connect that together
using what's called the Multi Cut tool.
So I'm going to go ahead and select Multi Cut.
And then I'm going to click on an edge somewhat far away,
somewhere around here.
And then click on there, there, and then this edge.
Notice how if you go a little too far,
it goes to the vertex, we don't want that,
we just want the edge.
So what I've done is I've created additional detail
to flow this in.
So now that I have this in place,
all I have to do is hit Enter.
And this cut again, so this time instead of on the edge,
I'm going to go on the vertex,
and what this does is it creates a quad here.
And then I'm going to again do the exact same thing
and hit Enter.
So now we've got this detail in place,
and all we need to do is kind of snap this together,
and again we can use our Target Weld.
I'm going to go into Vertex mode here.
And then snap that to that,
that to that,
that to that.
And there should be one more here.
And this one to this one.
So there we go.
Now I'm going to go into Object mode,
and let's just go ahead and select this object.
And hit Three to see how it smooths.
That looks, looking pretty good,
now all we have is this one hole to take care of.
And that's going to be pretty easy,
all we have to do is select an edge here,
and we're going to extrude it and connect it in,
so I'm going to go ahead and hit Control E to extrude.
Bring that detail out, go back into Vertex mode,
and then just do another Target Weld.
So I'm going to go ahead and here to here, and here to here.
And now this is all sewn up.
Now all I have to do is just kind of reposition my detail
just a little bit to get that kind of smooth flow
back into the thread here.
Now I'm going to go into Object mode.
I just want to smooth this out.
Now as you can see, this is kind of ending fairly smoothly.
So now we have all of this.
I'm going to go ahead and un-hide my object,
I'm going to do Show, Show Last Hidden.
That should bring out that bolt.
Go ahead and move that up into place.
And then all we need to do is connect it together,
so I'm going to go ahead and select some faces here,
these ones here.
Make sure I don't have anything selected
on the other side there.
And then I'm going to scale them up,
just to match that outline,
and then I'm going to delete these faces.
And then go back into Object mode,
and all we have to do now is combine the objects,
and bridge those two gaps,
so we can do that by doing Edge,
double-click on that edge loop, Shift,
double-click on this edge loop,
Edit Mesh, Bridge, there we go.
All I have to do is just kind of connect this together,
so I'm going to select this edge loop here,
and let's go ahead and scale that down just a little bit.
And there we go.
So now, we have our bolt.
And go ahead and turn off our grid here
so we can see this a little bit better.
So there we have it.
That's pretty quick.
But we've actually modeled a bolt from scratch.
So hopefully some of these techniques will help you
in your projects.