For this 1 week assignment we were tasked with watching a series of Maya Tutorials on Linda.com. The tutorials would cover how to bend shape and form to create some tools.
The first of these tools was a Sledgehammer. Created using 2 polygons ( for those who do not know polygons are essentially just objects in Maya like a cube) the first was a simple cylinder for the handle set to 12 inches hight and a radius of 0.75 inches. Using the scale tool the centre of the cylinder was squashed and the two ends of the cylinder were stretched slightly to add a curvature to the handle, after which the edges of the base and top of the cylinder were selected using the shift key to add a bevel.
A bevel adds more faces to a polygon, in this case specifically the edge gains an extra face and more can be added, this is used to make a curve to the edge of the object similar to the circumference edges of a DVD case. I added more faces until there was a smooth curve appearance to the geometry.
The final polygon added was a simple cube with a width and depth of 2 inches and a height of 6 inches. For this polygon however I added 2 more subdivisions. A subdivision segments the polygon, in this case the cube, into the number of subdivisions added and in this case it's segmented into 3 because I added 2 subdivisions. Again like with the cylinder I used the bevel tool to create an octagonal shape on either side of the centre of the hammer part as showcased above, whilst also adding a bit of a curve to the circumference of the end faces.
The second tool I had to create was a crowbar made from a Torus polygon (essentially a doughnut). For this half of the torus was deleted, once deleted the object left behind had a bend at either end of the object. From here the faces on one end were selected to be deleted so as to create a curve at one end a straight handle on the other.
Now to create the handle I selected the edges on the very end of the crowbar (as shown above) and extruded them making the length of the grip. At this point I extruded the edges again but at a much shorter length. Then I selected the right half of the edges from the end of the crowbar, then I deformed them with the move tool into a flat surface, creating a diagonal point for the flat end of a crowbar. Once more I extruded the edges a short distance and used Fill Hole to create a flat end to the crowbar.
On this extruded face I used the InsertEdgeLoopTool to add more faces to the end for editing. Now I entered Vertex mode and went into the right perspective view, making the object flat and allowing me to select all vertex's in one highlight. I then moved the centre vertex's on the end of the polygon back to the line highlighting where the previous extrusion was made. This created the fork shape on the end of the crowbar handle. This same process was used for the other end of the crowbar and nothing more was needed to be done on the geometry of the shape itself as the curve was already in place.
The last tool to create was a ladder, this was done in 2 parts starting with the structure. These supports where made using a simple poly cube, using the InsertEdgeLoopTool I made it so that one side of the cube had a total of 3 faces; with the two outer most faces being very thin. I then went into Face mode and selected the middle face of the 3 I had created, using the move tool I pushed them back about 2 3rd's of the way through the cube's depth. Now the shape was sorted I could sort out the dimensions in terms of it's height deforming the cube into the purple object in the image above, once here I simply duplicated the cube and rotated it 180 degrees on the Y axis to make the other side of the ladder.
Now I needed to make the steps, so for this I made a simple poly cylinder and rotated it on the X axis 90 degrees lying it flat on the ground. I then deformed the cylinder to be the correct length between the 2 supports. I then placed the cylinder 10 centimetres away from the top of the ladder supports and duplicated the cylinder all the way down until the bottom, with each cylinder having a 10 centimetre gap between them.
Now with all 3 objects complete the tutorial instructed me to begin UV mapping these objects. UV mapping is where you add a texture like the one shown above to the object you are trying to texture. These cubes allow you to see how the texture will appear on the object and should there be an issue with the texture (such as stretching) then you can sort it out in the UV texture editor.
No comments:
Post a Comment