Hi and welcome to this updated lesson with Maya, twenty twenty 22 coming out just today, I wanted
to go ahead and make an updated video that shows you an even better way to make cords, ropes, wires,
all that kind of good stuff.
They actually came up with a new method, which I want to share with you.
So we're going to use the Ghostbuster example and replace the cord that we've previously made in the
course.
So I'm just going to select that geometry.
And before I do delete it, I just wanted to mention notice the issue we had here previously using the
extrusion method along a curve.
You always had the problem of that extra little bit that you extruded from, and then also the possibility
of flipping normals of the faces if you adjusted the curve later.
And that seems to be pretty much resolved with this new method.
So let's like that geometry and delete it.
If you're following along with the course project files.
And I'm going to like the curve.
And kind of weirdly enough, this new feature is not in the mesh controls, it's actually under create.
So got to create you have sweet mesh, I'd be curious to see if they leave this function, this operation
here, because it seems a bit out of place to have on the menu.
I feel like it's a mesh operation.
But anyway, go to create sweet mash and boom, you have record no fussy extruding all along a curve
and creating divisions.
It's pretty smartly creates the geometry for us.
And we have all these settings now in the Ashry Ed for this sweet MASH creator.
So let's run through a few of these.
Obviously first we can see that it's too big so we can go to these scale profile and the default profile
that we have is a poly profile.
And so we can just scale that profile down until we have the correct size for the cord that we want.
So it's not intersecting the ground anymore, roughly in here somewhere.
And then we can see if we turn on the wireframe on shaded that it's a bit rough, not just in the profile,
but also in the along the length.
So let's address both of those issues with the resolution of the curve or the mesh that the curves making
so we can get to these mesh creator tab here and then we can increase the sides of the circle so that
that is solving the profile issue, the resolution there.
And then if we scroll down to the interpolation tab here, we have Moad precision on it.
We can just increase that until we have enough subdivisions along our curve that it's no longer kind
of low poly looking.
So that's the main kind of points here.
And to really get back to the one we had before, we can just click add caps and we're kind of done.
So that's really a much more efficient way, I think, to create a curve or a rope than the extrusion
method that we've learned previously.
Let's take this a little bit further, though, because there are some really cool options here to go
even further than just a simple chord here.
Let's say we want a braided rope or we wanted to create the interior wires of of a cord.
We could click the distribute button here.
And now we have the option to add the number of instances.
Let's say let's imagine this is the interior of a cord and we want to wire splaying.
This would be the way to do that.
Or if we wanted a braided rope, we could do that very easily as well.
All we have to do to get the braided effect is go down to the transformation options here and then just
increase the twist of this.
And of course, we can take that past the soft limiter of two and type in a value that we want.
Of course, with ninety, we can see we've kind of broken the model and it's intersecting itself.
So that just gave us a better range to now adjust this down to something that makes sense for the subdivisions
we have and the length of the cord that we have here.
So this is a really easy way to create a braided rope.
I can also turn off the wire frames.
You can kind of see that.
Now, the other thing we're left with is the fact that now these are kind of separated from one another.
We can click on the sweet mesh creator to get back to the menu.
We can basically adjust to values.
One is the scale of the instances.
So now that they start to kind of intersect each other and connect with each other.
The other issue, though, if you want to compensate for the fact that you've scaled everything up,
you'd have to go into the scale profile and then bring that down so we can do that to maintain the overall
profile of these instances at the same kind of scale.
So you'd have to kind of tweak these together to make sure that you're overall not scaling everything
too much.
And so those are the two things you'd want to adjust.
Obviously, there's these other kind of distribution types that you can experiment with to get different
types of effects.
The other noteworthy adjustments here you can make is a really cool taper here that I think would be
useful for hair if you're doing some kind of who knows what.
But it gives you a lot more control than previously where you'd have to.
I don't even really know how you do this previously, but this is a really cool effect, something that's
kind of small to improve upon.
But they really went far with it.
Now, the other suite profiles are pretty self-explanatory.
They just give you different modes to adjust the profile that it's using.
You know, something even like a rectangle could be turned into a sphere just by adjusting the corner
radius, for example.
But so and this is a road if we turn off distribute, we could see and turn off the twist.
We could see this could be something just to create a path or a road very easily using the line method
here.
And then, of course, we have an arc which is just like a semicircle very quickly, easily to do.
And then we have a wave, which would be, you know, maybe the gutter of a sidewalk or something.
But it's pretty nice that they give you these most common scenarios here just at the top menu.
And it's very kind of user friendly showing.
These icons like this now, the final one I wanted to touch on was custom, and it was a bit finicky
when I'm when I'm playing with it, let me show you.
Obviously, it's going to take a custom curve that we define.
If I just draw one out, let's just say something like this and I go back to the mesh and the sweet
mesh creator, I can choose this custom and it will pop up this new window that asked me to select what
curve I want to use as the profile.
Once that's selected.
Let me turn back on the wireframe on Shaded to show you kind of what I mean.
The profile that I drew was the Kubic interpellation.
So it's it's smooth.
But if you look at the profile that we're getting from this, it's very rough.
Let me just close this down so you can see the profile of this thing.
You can see it's pretty low poly.
And the only way I found that that would be improved is it appears that this option is actually controlled
by the relative scale of the profile, which is kind of surprising.
It wouldn't just take an absolute kind of interpolation of this.
So what I mean is because this is relatively small, I guess, for how wherever it's determining that
scale factor is, if we scale this up at the control vertex level.
So if I just take these and I scale these up, you can see it starts to add more subdivisions.
So now it gets to be a lot smoother.
So it's based on the relative scale.
And, you know, maybe it's the relative to the length of the curve.
It's being swept down.
I'm not really sure.
But just know if you're not getting the right result for the custom.
It's probably because the scale of the control vertices again, I'm not scaling this at the object level.
I'm scaling this at the control vertex.
Although you can see if I scale this up at the object level, it's not changing at all.
You've got to do it and go into actually edit the control vertices and scale those up.
So that's kind of one finicky thing I noticed experimenting with this.
And then again, obviously the way to counteract this is it's scale of the entire thing.
If we just want to scale that down, we can just scale it down through these attributes here and get
back down to the size that we wanted.
But that's something noteworthy to look out for.
If you want to use a custom effect, I think this would be great.
Like if you're doing, you know, corner trim in a room and you're modeling a room or something, the
a great way to get custom trim suite along a curve instead of using the old extrude method.
So I'm really excited to use this in my next project.
So hopefully this is helpful for you and you get some cool ideas to use at your own projects.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson.