Maya Tutorials: Soft Selection in Maya

Maya Tutorials: Soft Selection in Maya (Soft Select)

Soft selection in Maya

Soft selection in Maya or its Soft Select often becomes a problem for many novice modeler and animator. Sometimes when you select a vertex, the surrounding components become a different color, and then questions arise. The main questions are “how to remove the yellow faces when selecting?”, “Why did the yellow faces turn on?”. You just need to disable the Soft Selection, press the b key. In this little Maya lesson, I’ll tell you how to work with this tool.

Use the Soft Select tool to select components (vertexes, faces) with the recession enabled on the surface of a polygon or NURBS model. It is this recession that makes it possible to smooth out the transformation, which is based on scales. Transforming the component with a downside will allow us to perform smoothing of the transformation on several components at once, without having to configure each component separately.

In this lesson we will use the Soft Select (soft selection) to make a correction of the model of the human head.

And so, we make more a nose to our character:

  1. Select the Move Tool.
  2. Next, right-click on the model and select Vertex from the marked menu. On the grid of the model of the head there will appear peaks.
  3. Choose a vertex on the tip of the nose.
  4. Press the “b” button. A colored area appears near the selected vertex.

The colored area on the model is a collection of weights that move ascending to the top.

The next thing we need to do in this lesson is to change the radius of our soft selection.

  1. Hold down the b button, and then move the mouse with the left button pressed to the left or to the right. The transformation area will increase or decrease depending on which direction your mouse will move. Adjust the size of the selection to cover the nose and touch the face as little as possible.
  2. Drag the z axis of your manipulator from the edge. When you move the top, the remaining vertices of the nose begin to slowly pull out behind it.
  3. Select the Rotate tool from the toolbar, and using the Z-axis of the manipulator, rotate the vertex down about 45 degrees.
  4. Select the Move Tool again and drag the y- axis of the manipulator down.

This will create a kind of bend on the nose.

  1. Press the b button and turn off the Soft Select.

This lesson is ideal for those who are just beginning to model in Maya. For example, when designing cottages for houses. By the way, this is now quite in demand. Specialists in the field of house design get a good idea in our time. It is knowledge of modeling in packages Maya or 3D Max, or Autocad will allow to find work in this area.