Using Subdivision Surfaces in Maya

Video Transcript

"Hey everybody my name's Matt and I'm speaking to you on behalf of Expert Village. Right now I'm going to touch on subdivision surfaces really briefly. If you go up to Create and go down to Subdivision Primitives. I'm going to create a cube and you'll notice that it's smoother than a regular cube. If it were a polygon. I'm going to hit 5 to turn on shading and you can hit 2 and 3 to smooth this out even more. If you hold down your right mouse button over your subdivision, you can select Polygon and you can right click again and select Vertex and adjust. It's like a cage around your subdivision surface but it stays smooth underneath and this is called a Proxy. And you can do anything to this cage around your proxy that you could to any polygon object and as you can see, as I adjust the vertexes it adjusts the proxy underneath. There's another set of menus up here. If you select Surfaces at the top left. There is a Subdivision Surfaces menu over here that you can play around with. I'm going to go back to Standard Mode and you can right click Vertex there and subdivision surfaces have their own set of vertexes. If you right click there and click Display Finer. If you have a complex object, it will display and even finer level of vertexes. The benefits of subdivision surfaces is that they're easy to work with like polygons and you can get some nice smooth curves in there without actually having an enormous amount of faces that will bog down your computer."