Hi, my name is Lucas Ridley, and welcome to this digital krater school tutorial.
So I teach a Miah for Beginners class and I've had thousands of students take it and I've answered hundreds
of questions and there's a few questions that keep popping up.
So I want to make this video for the total beginner who starts out with modeling, which is pretty typical.
And the first section of the course is about modeling.
So I think that's why I see these problems arise most frequently out of any other problem.
So this video is for the total beginner.
It's not for someone who's familiar with Miah.
And take a look and hopefully you will avoid these pitfalls that I see happen over and over with the
beginning students in my class.
So I've opened up a new myosin and I want to recreate some of these problems that I find.
And I know the process that people are getting there.
So I want to recreate that and show you kind of the mentality of what's happening so you understand
where the mistake has been made and how to correct for it.
So in the class that I teach, the first thing we do is to model a Ghostbuster trap.
So it's kind of a rectangular shape.
And one of the fundamental things you do in modeling is you extrude faces out.
So I want to take this face and I kind of extend it out not just by moving it, but I want to leave
an edge behind here.
So how I do that is with the extrusion tool and it's this little button right here.
And I think maybe this is what confuses the students, is that the the icon looks like, you know,
a face has already extruded extrudes.
It for you maybe is what the mentality I think is.
So when people click it like I just did and nothing happens, they think, oh, the tool didn't work,
let me click it again.
And they end up clicking the politics shrewd tool.
I've seen upwards of 20 times and people's history.
And so let me just click it a few times and sorry, a double click.
It opens up the options for it.
And then sometimes I'll even see it where people will, you know, select multiple faces and do this
as well.
And then maybe they start messing with the options here, like, OK, well, this isn't working.
Let me turn faces together off.
Let me hit that.
OK, that didn't work.
I'll just hit this a few more times.
Sorry, I keep double clicking it, but, you know, again, I've seen upwards of twenty times and how
I know that is because all this history is kept in the channel box here and the inputs.
So if you scroll down you can actually see all the extrudes we've done.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
And then eventually the student will figure out, oh, I need to pull this thing to get them to extrude.
And then they get frustrated because this is the next level of mistake that, you know, they're not
sure how to diagnose what went wrong in their mind.
They think, OK, I have this tool.
It says Keep it together is on.
I finally got it to work.
Now, why are the faces separate?
Well, that's because at some point, like I did, they actually turn key pieces together off.
And you can actually go back in the history and see where that happened on your face.
Six when I did that on the sixth time, I tried turning the faces off.
So it actually separated this four steps ago for me.
And I just was adding, you know, faces on top of that.
So the faces were already separated four steps ago.
And so when I finally figured it out, they're already separate.
And you can see these multiple loops here as I extend it out and you can, you know, start to kind
of move edges around.
You can see, look, there's more edges here, there's more edges there.
It's all this hidden geometry that's stacked on top of itself because we kept extruding, but we never
moved anything.
And that is the main point here.
If you hit a face and you select it and go poly extrude, but you don't move it, that edge loop that
is still stacked on top of itself right there.
So let me hit it one more time.
So if I grab an edge, I don't know if I'm selecting the first, second or third one that stack on top
of itself.
So if I pull this out now, look what happens.
It's all kind of wonky.
I don't know why that is.
Well, it's because you extrude and you didn't pull the face out and that's where that stems from.
So let me just show you real quick how to fix that.
If that happens, it kind of in a simple way, just delete all that noise.
I want to actually grab this lower face.
Let me undo this a few times and just get this face back down.
So what I can do is pull this up and then start selecting edges and pull those up.
OK, so if it starts to look like this, I know that it's a face stacked on top of itself, so I haven't
grabbed the correct face, I haven't grabbed the cracked edge or other.
So until, like, if you see this kind of flashy black thing, that's because faces are stacked right
on top of each other.
So this is actually the edge that should be above this one.
Something grabbed.
That pull it up, so now I know this is the order in which they should be this one shouldn't be below
this one, right, because we get that kind of feedback where we say it's all wonky.
So now I know that's fixed.
I can actually just kind of get back to square one by deleting all of this stuff.
And you can use two different methods.
You can use the Pinda polygon tool, which I like most, or you can just fill the hole.
If it's something as simple as this, you can go to the mesh tools, which, OK, so it's kind of confusing
as it says may cause here.
But the actual fill hole is in a different place.
It's not super well organized.
Yeah, fill holes under mesh, so it'll actually just make another face for so now we can go back to
extruding this and pulling this up and now, you know, now we have like one face by itself.
So we pull this and it should just be that one single edge.
So it's how we fix that.
All right.
So the next step I want to show that people mess up is with loops.
So kind of another super basic thing.
I'm just going to make a new cube here to mess with is the insert edge loop tool.
So let's grab that under mesh tools, insert edge loop and we can just start clicking and making edge
loops and, you know, we're making a bunch whatever.
And then we're like, you know what, I don't want one of these.
So let's go to the edge mode, double click to select the edge loop.
And I'm going to hit delete on my keyboard, which is the key point here.
And the mistake is made right now when I had to leave the keyboard.
But it's hard to see.
Right, because it looks fine.
And if we go into vertex mode, we can see all those vertices are left behind.
That's a big no no.
If you go in a vertex mode and you see a bunch of vertices with no edges through them, that's a major
mistake, OK?
And we can select those and delete them.
But what ends up happening is let me just leave those there and how people end up discovering this later
way down the road.
So they made that mistake here.
And then they keep modeling and doing stuff and maybe they try to insert another loop.
So let's do that.
And they click something and they're like, hey, this loophole is broken.
And they and they blame it on the loophole.
They're like, hey, it doesn't go all the way around this edge.
Tools broken.
It was going around earlier.
Like we go down here, look, it goes around because it's not that edge loop is not going into a face
that has more than four sides, which is the point.
Right.
So when you leave these vertices behind, actually you can see it even by selecting the edge.
You can see the red selection only goes, you know, to where that vertices is.
So we go to Vertex and we grab it, pull it out.
You can actually see those edges.
So now we actually created a face that has, you know, more than four sides.
So if an edge, the edge look tool doesn't know how to go through those faces because that's called
an end gun and that tool wants and needs four sided faces.
That's why it's working down here, because there's all of these are four sided faces.
I can click this as many times and I'll go all the way around.
But as soon as I do it, where there's vertices up here or runs into where there's more than four sides
and it's hard to tell again, because, you know, in this mode, it's not super visual that that's
what's happening.
You have to go to vertex mode or try to select the edges and think, you know, even in that little
dot there, that's actually cutting that edge in half.
So it's making that be more than four sides, even though it looks like it's four sides.
Right.
That I can understand why this can be confusing because it's just a straight line and think, oh, it's
a straight line.
You know, that's not that that still looks like four sides to me.
Well, it's not the vertex actually cuts that edge in half.
So that makes it more than four sides for this face.
All right.
And that's why the tool will not work.
So the tricky thing, though, is you can delete Vertex as with the delete on your keyboard, but to
properly delete an edge from anything, you can hit control and hit delete on the keyboard.
So hold down control and then hit delete or you can select an edge hit shift and.
Right.
Click and go to delete edge.
Those are the two ways to successfully delete edges and not leave behind vertices.
All right.
And that leaves me to the kind of final point.
So we've gone through extrusion mistakes and what those lead to keeping faces together on and off and
how to find that in the history.
Over here on the right in the channel box, you can kind of see where you make mistakes.
And then we just learn about edges and loops and in Gon's and how to delete the vertex of that are left
behind and how to properly delete edges.
So the final one that I want to mention is kind of a mentality and the mentality is antithetical to
learning.
And I'm telling you, I'm talking about is the questions that some of the questions are really this
isn't everyone.
But I'll receive a question and the first sentence makes it hard to answer.
And what I mean is the first sentence is I did everything right and this doesn't work.
So in the very first sentence, they're already not accepting blame.
They don't think they did anything wrong.
So the learning process is stopped immediately for them and their mind.
And this is what is kind of tragic for me to see that, you know, when you're learning this stuff,
you kind of have to be your own teacher.
You know, in my classes, I have hours of courses, but you physically have to be the one.
To follow along and do it for yourself and as you progress and evolve in your career and learning all
this stuff, you need to learn how to become your own teacher and to problem solve.
You know, if you get a job in the industry, that's one of the main points is problem solving.
So if you're how you start is I did nothing wrong and this doesn't work.
So you start pointing the finger at other things.
It makes it very, very hard for you to troubleshoot and problem solve for for yourself, because there's
not always going to be me there to answer questions.
There's always going to be a co-worker who's willing to answer a question.
So you need to figure out how to troubleshoot for yourself.
And the way to do that is to change that mentality.
If you have that mentality, the you know, the first step is I think I made a mistake.
So then you can go back through the actions that you made and to diagnose what you did wrong.
And I make mistakes.
Everyone makes mistakes.
It's OK to admit you make mistakes.
I think as someone learning, they get super defensive and think that they have to prove maybe their
intelligence or something else.
So square one for them as I didn't do anything wrong.
I'm smart, I'm not dumb.
And there's all this kind of underlying kind of immaturity going on there that you need to get over
and mature as a student and an artist and, you know, accept that you can make mistakes.
So when you ask a question, don't start with I did everything right.
All right.
And that's the final mistake I'll leave you with for the total beginner starting out.
And if you're in my when I classes and you want to ask a question, don't start the question with.
I did everything right.
OK, start started with what the problem is and then we can go from there and diagnose it and figure
it out.
But hopefully if you've watched this video all the way through, you will not make these mistakes and
you won't ask these kinds of questions and you'll have other problems and I can help you with that.
In the classes I teach, you can enroll in them at digital creator school dotcom.
I teach a bunch of different MIAH classes and the one in particular where I think I get the most questions.
It's one of the first courses that people take is the modeling class, because that's kind of how you
get into learning 3D.
The first thing you need to do is learn how to model something so you have something and you know,
animate or texture.
You have to have something has to exist.
So it's natural for the first thing to learn is modeling.
That's why I think I get the most questions and I see the most mistakes happen in modeling.
So if you wanna learn the stuff, head over digital creator school dotcom, become a member and you'll
have access to every course that I put out.
And currently it's over 50 hours and I add to it about every month.
So there's a few new hours of teaching that you'll have every month.
And you can ask me questions there and I will help you learn this kind of stuff.
So if you like this video like comments, subscribe.
Let me know that you like this stuff is kind of relatively new for me.
Next week I'm going to try to do something more advanced, so stay tuned for that.
But give me feedback.
Let me know if you enjoy this stuff or not.
It's kind of relatively new.
So if you like it, I'll keep doing it and I'll hopefully see you in class at Digital Crater School.
Dotcom, thanks for watching by.