Welcome to this lesson where we will discuss how we're going to use an image plain to create this character,
and in this series we are going to model this character that will later use for rigging and animation.
So before we get started, like we did on hard surface modeling with the Ghostbusters Trap, we need
reference.
And in this case, its concept art that I drew based off of, you know, looking at some other art.
And you always want to start with a piece of reference and you don't just want to look at it like we
were doing in the hard surface modeling example.
That's that's one way to do it.
But the more advanced way to do it is to actually have this image in your scene and use it as a direct
correlation with where you're placing edges and vertices and faces.
So in this lesson, we're going to bring this image into my.
Let's go over to Maya and let's create a plane.
Any time you create a plane, the default is to have 10 subdivisions.
And when you start modeling, you'll quickly realize that the more subdivisions and the more faces you
have in the scene, the slower it's going to be.
So there's no reason for this image plane to have this many subdivisions because we're not deforming
it anyway, so we can reduce this down to one.
So it is just a single face and then we need to map this image onto this face.
And it's currently not the same dimensions.
You can see this is a square and this is in a square.
And you'll often runs that when you're using reference, you know, it's not going to always fit up
perfectly.
So we'll deal with that as well.
So let's go to let's rotate this image up in the Z direction.
We can see what the Z direction is over here in the bottom left.
We can see it's pointing this way.
So it's rotated up and so it's facing front.
So if we go to our front camera.
We'll be able to see this face.
OK, and let's add this image to this as a sign this a new Shater.
This is something new.
We're going to right click on this and scroll down to assign new material.
OK, now we get a new window and there's a lot of different options, but for our purposes, we're going
to use the Lambert, OK, and because the default shares Lambert one, it always is in your scene.
So when you create a new Laimbeer, it's going to say number two.
So let's just call this reference.
And I'll put SAHD for Qader, so we have all these different attributes, we change the color and we
can do all sorts of things, which if I hit six on my keyboard, it's going to update a little better.
So now that I can I can show that color change and we can change the transparency.
There's all these things, but we want to map the image into this color attribute.
So let's hit this little checkerboard over here and we get another new window and I'm going to use file
and choose file.
It creates a file note, of course, and lets just type in reference here as well with an underscore
to the file so we know it's a file and this might help us later if we need to locate this or something
like that.
But enter make sure you hit enter because any time you rename something and then try to map something
into it without hitting enter here, it'll say, you know, can't find this node because you didn't
finalize this change.
So any time you name something like this, you want to hit enter.
So that's when you actually map in the file, which we're about to do.
It'll know where to actually put it, which is reference underscore file one instead of file one.
So let's go to image name will hit the folder and let's go to find the.
Reference image.
Character design JPEG had open.
And if I right, click on this sample, it'll update the little test swatch here, and sometimes if
you're having trouble, I just hit spacebar to get the four of you up here and then hit spacebar again
to get back to perspective.
That was just an accident.
There is one bug that I found in this version of Maya, and every version of Maya is going to have its
own fun sorts of bugs in it.
You'll have to just kind of troubleshoot.
But the textures should just pop up when you do what we just did.
Right.
We designed the new shader.
And when we look at the color now instead of a checkbox, it has this kind of arrow box thing.
If we click that, it'll take us to that final node.
So it's not showing up.
Even though we see it's registering here, it's not showing up in our viewport.
So it's it's six.
Make sure we're in texture mode.
Or you can also hit this button up here, which is the texture option, but it's not updating here.
And this may not happen for you, but the bug I found in my version of Maya is you have to open up the
hypercharged, which is this little ball icon up here, which we'll get into and later lessons.
So you can see when I open up the Hypercharged, it finally made the texture reload.
This, again, is a goofy thing.
And Maya.
So if that has happened and we've you've assigned the shader to this and you've loaded in the file,
try opening up the hyperspeed.
And so it'll kind of refresh the textures.
So you might have to do that more than once to see if it'll have to close and reopen it.
And yeah.
So let's deal with the scaling issue now because this image is squashed a square right now.
So go into wherever the file is and UniMac.
I just Right.
Click and go down to get info and on a PC, I think it's properties somewhere.
It should show the dimensions of the image.
And on a Mac, it's right here.
So ten, twenty three by fifteen, thirty nine.
So we can use that to scale this up.
Let's go back over to the channel box by clicking this button up here.
And currently this is at an odd scale, so I'm just going to do one for that.
And ten, twenty three.
So I go ten.
Twenty three.
And it's going to freak out because, you know, that's a that's a massive distance, as you can tell,
but all we're trying to do is get that ratio for right now.
So 10, 23, three, 15, 39.
We want to go in the direction we can see here.
So let's type in fifteen, thirty nine there.
And so this thing is massive now, OK, and that's fine.
But we now have the correct dimensions of this image at least.
So let's scale this back down to something more manageable.
And.
Now you have a reference image and it's properly scaled to the right dimensions, and if we want to
lock this in, we can just freeze the transformation's.
And what I mean is, you know, all of these numbers are a little weird right here.
And if we want to have it be a little more clean, we can just freeze the transformation's so that it'll
be one and all of the scale dimensions.
So let's go to edit.
So let's go to modify Free's transformation's, and I can see everything went to one and everything
else is zero, let's duplicate this and rotate it.
And 90 degrees, and now let's go to the front view.
And let's just line up the drawing to be right in the center of our grid here.
You know, we can see where zero and zero for X and Y are.
So we need to just center this thing up.
So it's roughly in the center.
Of the scene so that everything that we model can be symmetrical and mirrored over to the other side.
So that's pretty good.
Let's go to the other side, the one that we duplicated and rotated.
So let me back up, because it looks like we just we didn't do anything.
So, you know, we move this one to the center, but this one is still rotated 90 degrees and we haven't
moved it in any direction yet.
The reason we rotated it 90 degrees is because this is going to be the side view.
So we want to line up this image to the right to be in the middle.
And sometimes these might very well be two different images.
So you might have to create a new shader and applying Yarshater with the new texture on it, just like
we did already with this one, you might have to do that again if you have a different image.
And so let's go to the right view.
And now we can see this one.
I mean, S.R. kind of zero axis here and this is kind of up to you where, you know, you can kind of
eyeball it.
You might just kind of split the difference and maybe look at the neck or the spine or something like
that.
But this roughly needs to be in the center as well.
So if you wanted to kind of minimize the distraction of having this other image here, we can go to
our custom menu, go to the edge loop, and we could create an endless loop here and we could just drag
it over to wherever we wanted it, basically, and hit V in the selection tool selected with the cue.
Let's go to face and we can just delete that.
So now all we have is this side of you and we could do the same for this side as well.
It doesn't really bother me.
And it might be nice to kind of have this in the same view where when we're modeling the front.
So you can leave that for now.
One last thing I'd say about reference images is that when you're modeling, it's a little distracting.
If these are selectable, you know, say you're modeling a cube in here or something like that to make
the skull and you keep actually selecting the reference image.
So one way to get around that is to click and drag, select everything.
And let's first put these in their own group and call them reference.
So it's a little more tidy in the outliner, and then let's go over to the display tab over here and
hit this far right button, when we do that, it adds these images to a new display layer.
OK, all that means is it gives us a little bit more functionality that we can turn these on and off.
But it also means that we can template these really easily or reference them.
So with a template, it'll only make these outlines.
But if we click this third button one more time, we get an R and that means reference.
So when we click, we can't actually click these anymore.
So we can always turn that off again by hitting that.
But let's keep that on R so when we start modeling, we won't be accidently selecting the reference
images.
I'm just going to rename this display later reference.
And it says it already exists, so you might need to add like a little.
Suffix like disp or something like that.
OK, I'll see in the next lesson where we will get started modeling.
Thanks for watching.