Hey, I want to make a little update video to this course and introduce you to a tool that I've been
using a couple on a couple of projects recently and that's the quadrature tool and it's related to the
work we're doing right now in the course.
And so it can be an alternative method to the things I've already taught or in and am teaching after
this as well.
We're basically we're creating the topology as we model, whereas this method you could actually reach
apologize on top of an existing model, which is typically the workflow.
If you're coming from another modeling package like Ze Brush, which has a ton of geometry, you need
to bring it back down to something manageable for animation because you don't want like a million polygons
on a character that's going to be animated, it's going to be a nightmare to animate.
So what you can do is apologize after the fact or make good topology as your modeling, which is what
I traditionally have shown in this course to do with this character.
So this is actually kind of an alternative method to use and just to have in your back pocket as another
tool to use.
So it's related to the stuff we've been doing because you're already familiar with make life right and
you need to make live on the thing that you're apologizing.
In this case, it's the skull, and we've already kind of made decent geometry topology rather on this.
And so it's not super necessary to go about this.
But if you just want to kind of like start clean with new topology, this would be a way to to generate
it.
So what I'm going to do is hit make live, which we're familiar with by hitting this magnet button up
here.
And another thing to turn on is the wire free on shedded, which is this button right here.
So when I click that and it gives us a nice view of this is the make live object because it's green,
and we can remember that from an earlier lesson that that's that was the case.
I want turn on anti-aliasing just so the edges of that are a little cleaner.
And then I'm going to go to the modeling toolkit here and I'm going to go down to Quadra and this is
the tool that we're going to be using.
There's a few settings down here, but I just usually leave it on default, and what I use it for is
for apologizing.
Like I said, where you can actually just come in here, not only how I start as I start very broad,
very big strokes.
So let's say I'm going to do start with the skull, the top of the head first.
So I'm going to make some pretty big quads here.
So I'm just hitting left mouse button in four different places and then I hold shift.
And that makes one whole face.
And you might think to yourself, Well, if I look at it from this angle, it's not following the head
very well.
Well, that's OK.
We're going to deal with that in a second because what we don't want to do is start in here and start
at this scale of the faces.
We don't want to be in here like making faces this that big or that small, because that's going to
be very time consuming.
And I'll show you why here in a second.
So I've hit control shift and I left mouse button click and actually delete that face the way to extrude
out, which is what we've been doing.
You know, you can actually hold down shift and move and edge.
Here you can hold down tab and left mouse button move edge.
So that's just while you're in the quadrant tool.
If we jumped back into modeling traditionally and I went to like the edge mode here, I'm just going
at four so I can get to this edge and see it a little cleaner, I can actually hit shift and then extrude
like this.
So that's another alternative.
But because we're staying in this tool, I'm going to go back to that method.
I just want to show you the comparison there.
So you can see Quad Draw also kind of turns on this kind of x ray mode here so we can see through the
model and see the faces that we're making.
So by again, by holding tab, I can extrude out and not have to go back to the time move tool that
we had before when I hit Tab and then do it again.
You can kind of see that starting to get to be diagonal.
And one thing we can do is hold down shift and just relax this out.
So we're kind of brushing this area out, and it's relaxing the geometry down.
We can also just left mouse button on whole faces or vertices or edges and move them individually so
that we can rearrange it the way that we want it to.
Now the other cool thing about this about holding tab is this is that instead of what we've been doing,
Tab Left Mouse clicking, if we tab middle mouse click, we can actually take this whole edge loop up.
Now you can start to see it's kind of wonky because we're going in one direction, but the faces are
all kind of facing different directions as we go around the sphere.
So you'll want to make sure that you're kind of clean that up as you go along and they're following
where you want them to go.
So we can just move this up.
So it's kind of more in line and then we can hold down, shift and brush this area relaxed that back
out so that it kind of evenly distributes the faces that we've created some trying to pull this one
down individually.
Now to the core stuff that I referred to earlier about, why are we starting so big?
That's because we can use the kind of edge loop tool here and create edge loops after we've made these
big chunks.
And because we're still on the make live features turned on that will follow.
The shape of the make live jump to underneath it, which is the skull, so if you look right here,
we can see that the blue edge here just goes straight down where it should be following the contours
of the skull.
So if I hold control on my keyboard and then I left mouse click, we can see it will jump out to that
point.
Now it's also because we don't have an edge on the profile here, so I can control and click there.
We can see that it's starting to contour to the skull as well, so we can see there's a spot here that's
still sticking out.
So I could add an edge there, add an edge here, and that's a ton easier than if we were to go on and
make each individual square by themselves.
So that's why we started big and then we can add edge loops in after the fact.
Now it's worth noting that we may want to hit shift and relax this area to relax and back out again.
Alternatively, you could jump back into a more traditional method, like using the multi-car tool and
when we hold control here, we can also make an edge loop and we still have make live on, so it's going
to act very similarly.
But the advantage of maybe using the Multi Multi Cut tool here is that we can hold down, shift and
actually get to the middle of that cube of that quad rather.
And so we already have a pretty even topology there.
So when we jump back in a quad draw, it maybe won't have to relax it as much, but that's just to give
you an example of comparing those tools.
But what I like to do is just stay in this tool and not jump back and forth between the others as much.
So that's a really good way to use the Quadra tool now, just as a general note about topology in general,
I want to re-emphasize basically what we're doing here is we are making sure that we're having good
topology for animation and to do that.
We want to make sure that we have the right kinds of loops.
And that's why in this course, we were inserting this edge loop here for the eye socket so that we
could animate a blink later on in the course with a blend shape.
So one thing that I would also do is I would just in the workflow wise, I would maybe stop what I'm
doing here on the skull and think, OK, I kind of have the skull cap in a good spot, but I know I
want this edge loop here around the eye socket.
Now, another bit wonky of a way to use this tool is if we just hold down tab on the face without actually
being near an edge, it'll give us this face.
Now you want to be careful about using this because it can actually have the first face kind of flipped
if we were to start drawing to the right.
See how it kind of keeps flipping around.
It's kind of going based off the direction that we're pulling it.
So if I meant to go.
That direction, see how it overlapped itself.
I want to make sure that the first face I do is actually behind the cursor so I can kind of drag it
here and whip it around.
And the other thing is, if I want it to be bigger faces, I'll have to do is just middle mouse drag
and scale the face up.
And so then I can just click and drag around the eye socket.
And we can kind of just paint these even quads.
And we can loop it back up here, hold down shift and then click.
That was kind of the original method and then we can just kind of relax this area out and now we kind
of have that edge loop.
Then we could, you know, continue our traditional modeling techniques.
Now back to the earlier topology, when we did the odd and even kind of connections, that's where something
like this comes in.
We need to connect these two spots.
We could kind of divide them up and say, set an edge.
Basically at each point where I know I'm going to need to connect between here and here and here and
here.
And so maybe it'll go there and there.
And so I need an edge for here and here.
And then this vertex and I need one here, right?
So that means when I hold down shift now, I have this nice bridge between those areas.
And so you can just go through and make as much topology as you need.
And again, just kind of jumping back and forth between the tools I could hold down tab and middle mouse
drag two edges out.
And then the vertex will also snap down there so we can very quickly topologies something like this
without too much effort.
And then, of course, hit shift and then relax this area back out.
So we're not getting too much stuff bunched up there, too much quads bunched up in that section.
So it's a really nice tool that I've been using lately, and I just want to update this course.
If there's any other updates or you have questions, you know, hit me up and asked me about them,
or if you want me to update the course with a topic, I'm considering doing a follow up course that's
maybe a bit shorter than this one.
So stay tuned for that.
And check out Digital Critter School YouTube channel, where I'm posting a bunch of videos about just
the animation industry in general and some other Maia tips.
So thanks for watching, and I'll see you and the next lesson.