Making Tire Threads in Maya

Well, this is first tutorial that I have made and it’s about something I have also struggle during my early days of car modelling. I hope this tutorial would be helpful for those who love modelling cars, especially the beginners. So, this tutorial is about making tire threads for your car tires. There are many ways in Maya to make tire threads. You can either model it or just create it with the help of textures and mapping processes. The modelling process I’m going to show here is simple but the end product would be pretty high poly. The final output would look something like this.

The idea is to create a single section of the threads and duplicate it and to use bend deformer to achieve the tire shape.So lets start.

Step 1: Create a plane. Make sure its rectangular. Right now don’t worry about the scale as it doesn’t matter unless you are making this in an existing scene.

Give subdivision width 5 and subdivision height 1 respectively (or you can have it your way, try experimenting). Before next step make sure you have something like, seen above.

Step 2: In this step we tweak the geometry we have into something that looks like a section of tire thread. This is what I have got.

This may not look anything like what I have said. But eventually we’ll get there. Here also you can have reference of some tire and make some other shapes out of it.

Step 3: Now insert edge loops on the borders and along the subdivisions as seen in the following pics.

After you have done inserting edge loops, the geometry would look something like this.

Step 4: Now select all the centre faces and extrude it in Y- axis. In this case you’ll have to select 5 faces and extrude, as shown below.

Step 5: Now we again add edge loops to each extruded ends of the geometry as shown below.

This is done to hold the meshes together (to get a sharp edge) when you smooth the geometry. If don’t when you smooth the geometry by pressing 3 this is what you’ll get. So make sure you do this.

After you have inserted edge loops correctly and if you go to smooth mode, you’ll get something like this.

Step 6: Now that we have a section of the tire thread the next step is to duplicate this section and place it as shown in the picture.

Press Ctrl + d for duplicating the geometry for first time and Shift + d the next time so that it will place correctly every time you press it.

Step 7: Now select all the sections and combine it (Mesh > Combine). We are combining the sections because we have to merge the vertices of one section to another.

Step 8: Select the vertices in between the sections and give merge vertices. You’ll find the merge vertices button in the under the Polygons Shelf. 

After merging the sections you may have the problem of two or more vertices merging to one. This depends on the merge vertices attribute called Distance. By default it’ll be 1 and reducing the value should solve the problem. (Check the distance value in the above picture)

After combining and joining all the section the result will be something like this.

Step 9: Now select the polygon and go to Create Deformers> Non- Linear> Bend. In the interface you’ll see a vertical handle. Select the handle and rotate it 90 degrees in X and Z axis. (It depends on what axis you’re modelling).

Step 10: In the bend attribute you’ll see the Attributes such as Envelope, Curvature, Low Bound and High Bound. Change the Curvature attribute to bend the polygon into a tire shape as in the below picture.

Bring the ends close enough to merge it together and there you’ll have tire threads. To remove the handles just delete the History (Alt +D). 

And that's it. I hope you understand the whole process if not please feel free to ask any doubts and may be I can clear it for you. Thank you.