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Tutorial: Keeping it simple but ditching the low-poly look, islands in Maya 2015

Melinda May
Sep 22, 2015
3 min read

For Leap, we'll be needing a bunch of little floating islands for the environment. They're supposed to look cartoonish and simple, but I tried that and I got this..

It's no secret that doesn't look so good. But just smoothing the island sends the polycount skyrocketing, something we really can't do... Especially considering how many islands there are going to be in the environment.

So.. le's start with a simple plane. It doesn't need to be perfect.

Make it live- it's going to be used for Quad-Drawing. If you don't know how to do that, hit the magnet button up the top with the plane selected.

Using the Quad-Draw tool in Maya's modelling toolkit, the next step is to draw some dots in a vaguely blob shape. Add in some corners and divets around the edge to make sure it has some shape to it.

Now it's time to draw a quad ring around the outside to make sure you have one continuous edge to select (trust me, it's important later.) Then fill in the middle.

Luckily for these islands, they're going to be a static mesh so topology doesn't matter too much. Still, keeping it relatively the same size if you can is recommended. (Topology 101)

Take your new broken dinner plate of an island and extrude down a bunch of times, scaling the faces in as you go. Like so:

Now it's time to add in a few extra edge rings and start grabbing vertices with your soft-select on (with varying sizes for different levels of definition.) Pull them around until you've got something a little less rigid and don't forget to mess up your flat faces at the bottom.

That looks way more like a lump of rock floating in the sky, but it still looks really low quality. Now, you could just soften the edges and leave it at that. (Hey, there's no shame in that... Sometimes low-poly is what you want. But at least remember to soften the edges.) Sadly, soft edges still doesn't give me the shape I want. It's still really jagged at the base and that's going to look funny, plus soft edges often give you strange shading problems.

This island is currently about 2,000 tris.

The first step now is to set the defining edges. Using the Insert Edge Loop tool, go around any corners or divets you want to keep their shape (otherwise your island is going to look very blobby). One extra loop (total of two) will give you "kinda defined" and two extra (total of three) will give you "Yep, this is definitely a corner."

It's a good idea to add in a few around the top rim of the island, that's an edge you want defined if a player may be walking on it.

Quickly: not to distract you from modelling fun, but now is when you're going to want to sort out your UVs. For these, I just Planar Mapped the UVs from the side and cut them just under where the rim starts to shrink inwards. Then using Maya's Auto Unwrap function, they turned out decently.

For a process that takes one minute, you could have worse deformation. Anyway, back to modelling...

It's time to smooth this sucker. Go into Mesh and hit Smooth, usually set to 1 or 2 subdivision levels.

That looks a little too smooth to me. Even using the lowest subdiv level it's too much for rock. Plus, this newly smoothed level is at 10,000 tris. So, jumping back into the Mesh menu, find the Reduce button and open that little options box.

Making sure it's reducing by percentage and keeping it somewhere around 50%, suddenly the mesh has a lot less polygons than before. Now it has around 4,000.

Although it seems like a super rudimentary fix, smoothing out a mesh does a good job of shaping it and getting rid of those hard corners and stretched polygons without having to take it into another program. Reducing the mesh from there retains these shapes, and once I got used to this process it ended up taking between 5 and 10 minutes to produce individual islands.