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Introducing Autodesk Maya Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help!

Learn the Maya interface and the basics of modeling, rigging, animating, texturing, lighting, rendering, visualization, and visual effects. The expository text is reinforced with fun and challenging step-by-step tutorials, including creating a solar system, an alien hand, a steam locomotive, a toy wagon, and other projects that help you learn the ins and outs of this complex software.

Professional visual effects artist and instructor Dariush Derakhshani leads readers through the nuances of the complex software without over-explaining or over-simplifying. The tutorials offer realistic, professional challenges for those new to 3D, and to those coming from another 3D application. Introducing Autodesk Maya is the perfect guide to get you up and running in the world's most popular professional 3D software application"-- Includes index 1.

No way around it. It will save you tons of time and will put you in sync with how the commands in this book will be called out. Maya is flexible. Maya keeps track of these nodes in something called History. What this means is that an object will build up a collection of nodes that can just be thought of as a collection of instructions.

If there was a mistake in Step 2, it can be undone by using the Undo function to go back to that step. However, to get back to the state of things where they were earlier, the next three steps have to be done again. In Maya, these ive steps are all indicated by nodes that are accessible via the Channels Box and Attribute Editor. By selecting one of these nodes, the parameters of that node become accessible and editable.

Indeed, this is a powerful idea, but has a few restrictions. Objects collecting these nodes — collecting this history — can slow Maya down. It also means that things have to happen pretty linearly in many cases.

Now, both of these examples are solvable. Maya allows models to be worked on without saving the History. Further, even if the History is saved through the process, if things get slow, the History can be deleted.

The core idea here is to remember this nodal structure as we will be referring to it often through the coming tutorials. However, a brief overview will assist in understanding how Maya works. FIG 2. View Panel The View Panel is the panel where the models are viewed go igure. Think of the View Panels as the viewinder for a camera.

We are looking through a camera at this digital 3D world. This 3D world by default has a grid lying on the ground to help the artist understand where things are within this digital space. This grid is only a guide and does not show up in any renders.

Notice that in the bottom left of the View Panel is a little XYZ indicator to help keep the user oriented in the 3D space by indicating the three axes. The Y-axis is the up direction which is a diferent system than if you are coming from something like 3DS Max , while X and Z indicate the other two directions. These directions are important as this Euclidian grid organization is how Maya keeps track of where objects are in digital space much more on this later.

Navigation The way Maya allows us to understand this digital space is to allow the camera through which we are looking to be moved. The alt key is the magic button here. By using the alt key and mouse, the camera becomes mobile. What this means is the camera rotates around the center of the world or an active object or object parts. This means the camera acts as though it was on tracks and can move side to side and up and down in a lat plane relative to the active object or object parts.

Rather, the camera itself is moving closer or farther away from the object. Tips and Tricks Alternately, if your mouse has a scroll wheel, this can be used to dolly the camera as well. But my students — who laugh at my three button mouse — tend to do just ine with the scroll-wheel. So do what works best for you. Orthographic Versus Perspective The View Panel can actually be split into multiple panels to view the models from multiple cameras in multiple ways.

Try this as an experiment. Still in Maya, move the mouse into the View Panel. Hit the Spacebar quickly and watch the View Panel change to four panels Fig.

Think of this again as the viewinder of a regular video camera. The interesting part is the other three View Panels: top, front, and side. These are a little unintuitive, but very useful View Panels.

These views are clearly diferent than the persp View Panel. This is because these are orthographic View Panels. Take a look at Fig. It shows a character model with a bunch of spheres surrounding him. The View Panel has been split into four persp and the three orthographic views, top, front, and side. Now look carefully at those spheres. But in the other three View Panels, all the spheres are the same size — regardless of their distance from us.

That book takes basic Maya instruction and expands it speciically spheres closer to us appear the same into creating interactive 3D games. Well, there are some real limitations to the perspective View Panel that can actually get in the way of efective understanding of the 3D space.

In the real world, our eyes give us some further hints about the world around us that this view does not. First, there tends to be a lot more objects to help us judge distance and the size of an object, but there are other things like depth of ield that communicate to our brain where things are in space.

Try this, put your inger up in front of you and focus on that inger. Note what happens to the background — it goes blurry. Alternately, with your inger still out there, focus on the wall behind the inger and note what your inger does blurry again. In that perspective View Panel, there are no such visual clues. The grid on FIG 2. In the orthographic views, not — as can only be seen in the this would never happen Fig. The two spheres are easily seen as their orthographic views.

They are horriied to discover that nothing lines up as soon as the four panels become visible, or they actually move the camera.

This view plane is a plane that is perpendicular to the camera — which means that in perspective, it will likely be tilted in relation to or not parallel with the loor or walls of a room. This means that when a piece of furniture is selected and moved in the persp View Panel, it likely moves up and down above or beneath the loor in addition to being shifted around the room.

Alternately, if a piece of furniture that is sitting on the ground is moved in the top View Panel, the furniture is then only being moved in the X and Z directions not in the Y , and thus, it stays right on the ground. It is for reasons like these that I always recommend to students to work with all four View Panels open. Later, they become comfortable enough with 3D space and camera manipulation that they might do most of their work in just the persp view — but even then, there are times when those orthographic views make for more eicient manipulation.

First, when they are split into these four View Panels, any one of the View Panels can take up the full-sized View Panel space by moving the mouse into the space of that View Panel and hitting the Spacebar again. The space these View Panels take up can be adjusted in all sorts of other ways too. There are a few preset layouts at the bottom of the Tool Box and highlighted in Fig. Clicking on any of these will create some layouts that are specialized for different types of tasks.

Figure 2. By default, the View Panel draws things as wireframe — which means the edges of the polygons are shown, but nothing looks solid. The number 4 on the keyboard not the number pad will display the contents of a View Panel as wireframe. The number 5 makes it solid Smooth Shaded , 6 shows any textures that may be applied in the scene Smooth Shade with Textures , and 7 shows it with an approximation of the lighting.

Do note that hitting 4, 5, 6, or 7 will apply the display change to whichever View Panel the mouse is within. Suice it to say these separate pull-down menus allow for customization of an individual View Panel. The way it is displayed is by pressing and be conigured. Maya allows for nearly the entire interface but the View Panels to be hidden try hitting Cntrl-Space.

But the many options of the interface are available either via keyboard shortcuts or via the Hotbox combinations. When pressing the Spacebar and then clicking right in the middle of the Maya area, Fig. Tutorial 2. This will create a cube sitting right in the middle of the digital space 0,0,0. This is what turning of Interactive Creation did. When Maya is told to create a cube, it automatically creates a cube that is one unit wide, by one unit deep, by one unit tall that is sitting right smack dab in the middle of the digital world.

Step 3: In the persp View Panel move the mouse into that space , hit 5 on the keyboard to draw the cube solid. Step 4: Click anywhere besides the cube. This will deselect the cube.

Step 5: Choose the Select Tool and click on the cube to select it it will highlight green. Pretty straightforward, eh? There is quite a bit happening here that we need to talk about. An object must be selected irst before something can happen to it.

Second, when an object is active and the Move Tool is activated, the Manipulator is presented. This manipulator handle is actually four handles in one. The irst is the yellow box in the middle. Clicking and dragging on this handle will move the selected object along the view plane.

The other three handles are the three-colored cones. These handles move the active object only along one axis. Try it. Last little bit about this tool. Ctrl-clicking on any of the handles will turn that axis of. Note that the center yellow square has changes from being lat to the camera to being lat along the XZ plane.

If the object is now moved via the middle yellow box, the object will only move along the X and Z axes. Ctrl-click on the yellow box to turn all the axes back on and have the object move along the view plane once again. Constrain Ctrl-clicking the directional handle move it with the directional handles and move it along the view plane that you wish to turn of.

Ctrl-clicking with the yellow center handle. Just experiment for a minute. Each of the rings in Fig. Dragging the red rotates the object around the X, the green around the Y, and the blue around the Z. If you click and drag in the middle of all these handles — but not any one of them, the object can be rotated in all directions; a sort of free rotation.

The yellow cube in the middle allows the object to be scaled in all directions at once. This is important when the proportions of the object need to be maintained. You can guess that the other cubes or the stems beneath the cubes allow for constrained scaling: the red cube scales along the X axis, green along the Y, and blue along the Z. The issue comes in selecting or deselecting when the scene has a lot of diferent objects within it.

To understand how it works, follow the following steps: Step Use the Move Tool to move the cube of the center. Again move this to a new location. Step Repeat the last two steps a few times so that you have six to ten cubes Fig. Step Activate the Lasso Tool and simply draw by clicking and dragging around a selection of cubes Fig.

The results will be multiple objects selected some highlighting white and one highlighting green. Ironically, I hardly ever use this tool, especially on objects although on occasion, it becomes useful for components more on this later ; I just often ind it quicker to simply select the objects I want directly. But being able to draw around desired objects is so intuitive, the tool is worth highlighting. Adjusting Selections Importantly and powerfully, there are lots of ways to adjust a selection.

Maya has one of my favorite paradigms for this; but takes a bit of early experimentation to understand. Shift-click on any of the cubes not selected. This will add this cube to the collection of selected objects. Step Now Shift-click on any cube that is already selected. This will remove the cube from the collection of selected objects. Step Now Shift-drag called marqueeing around all the cubes.

What will happen is the cubes that are selected will be deselected and those that are not will become selected. This is little diferent than the way most graphic programs work and most 3D applications as well. Shift-selecting is a double-edged sword that selects and deselects depending on whether the object being clicked on is active or not. This means that selection work can happen quickly. With a quick Shift-marquee, everything that was selected will not be and everything that was not selected is now selected.

This will deselect it. This will add everything to the existing collection of selecting objects. Shift-clicking or Shift-marqueeing toggles whether an objects is selected or not.

Ctrl-clicking or Ctrl-marqueeing always removes from the selection. Shift-Cntrl-clicking or Shift-Cntrl- marqueeing always adds to the selection. Tips and Tricks Now for the last few steps, we have been using the Select Tool.

Objects versus Components Thus far, we have been working exclusively with cubes. We have been selecting and manipulating the entire cube object.

These parts are called components. Components actually difer depending on what type of object is being dealt with in Maya. We will talk about the diferent types of objects more later, but let us look at the component types for the polygon objects we currently have in the scene. Step Right-click-and-hold on any of the cubes in the scene. A Hotbox will be presented that among other things presents the components available for the object.

Note also that there is also an Object Mode more on this later. Step Choose Face Fig. I want to start manipulating the faces of this object — not the entire object. However, there are some additional tools within the Tool Box that now can come into play. Step Activate the Paint Selection Tool. Paint across faces on the cube Fig. A little red circle will appear that dragging the mouse will alter the size of.

This will allow for being able to select a whole lot of components at once with a big brush or pin-point components with a small brush. Warnings and Pitfalls This tool can be a little inicky. The Soft Modiication Tool allows for a collection of components to be selected and modiied quickly. The real beneit of this tool is that the inluence of modiications falls of the farther away from the manipulator handle the components are. Step Swap to Object Mode. Step Swap to the Selection Tool and marquee around all the cubes.

Which will select all of them. Hit Delete on the keyboard to get rid of them. Cubes are nice for many illustrations, but for things like the Soft Selection Tool that works great for shapes that have a lot of components, the efects can be better illustration on other types of objects.

This will create a sphere in the middle of the scene. Step Click away from the sphere to deselect it. Step Activate the Soft Modiication Tool. Step Click anywhere on the sphere. Notice that this manipulator has iconography that represents the Move Tool cone ends , scale cube ends , and rotate light blue circle.

This is because, all at once the components within the yellow area can be moved, scaled, or rotated depending on which part of the manipulator handles are used. Step Adjust the area of inluence by holding the B key down and click- dragging to the left to make it smaller Fig. To understand the power of this tool, take a look at Fig. The left hand of the image shows the effects of the last few steps. See how this deformation is smooth? The right hand image shows how this would look by simply selecting the components and using the Move Tool to move them.

From here, it would be a real hassle to get that soft falloff that the left side has. However; if you understand the Move, Rotate, and Scale tools, when this tool is activated, it should become clear what this tool is meant to do: everything. Tips and Tricks If an object is selected, Maya will highlight it green or possibly white if there are more than one objects selected.

But if Maya still thinks it is selecting a component, the object will display highlighted as light blue. Note there are handles to Move, Scale, and Rotate the object. The manipulator handles in the middle of the form allow it to be moved; the light blue squares on the corners of the containing cube allow the form to be scaled, and the rotated arrows on the edges of the containing cube allow it to be rotated. It becomes even more powerful when the handles are used in combination with the Shift and Ctrl buttons Shift-dragging one of the scale blue squares scales in all directions for example.

You may ind it to be of great help in your own modeling worklow. The second is just an empty space and will change depending on what Maya is doing. What happens is any tool that is used will appear here; so if the user then swaps to the Move Tool for instance, they can quickly swap back to the last tool used by selecting it here in the Tool Box.

And if you have to click on every single tool used you will be slow and your wrist will be shot at the end of the day. Because of this, Maya has assigned some keyboard shortcuts to these often used tools. Channel Box The Channel Box is a wealth of information and a spot of incredible manipulation potential. When an object is selected, the Channel Box Fig.

This provides information, but notice all of the input ield there. From here, a user can numerically manipulate the objects position, rotation, scale, and visibility. We will do much with the Channel Box in coming tutorials. So for instance, in this case, the Outliner shows the four cameras persp, top, front, and side as well as the pSphere visible and selected in the scene. The Outliner will also show other nodes in this case, the defaultLightSet and defaultObjectSet more on these later ; but is more useful as a list of the objects in the scene and their organization.

Later, we will be grouping things together this is actually an important part of the construction process and will be spending a great deal of time naming objects. If any object is double-clicked in the Outliner, it can be renamed. Objects can also be rearranged and parented directly within the Outliner. When I work, I almost always have the Outliner visible; either nested into the interface like in Fig. It provides information about exactly which object is selected, allows objects to be selected by name by clicking the name of an object in the Outliner , and the ultimate reorganization of objects.

Modes This can be really confusing for new Maya users. We alluded to this earlier, but Maya is such a big program that many of its pull-down menus are not even visible unless we are in the correct Mode.

This really allows the pull- down menus to show tools relevant to the task at hand. If Animation is the active mode, then all of the pull-down menus right of the Assets pull-down menu will change to show the animation-centric tools. Change this mode drop-down menu to Polygons, and suddenly all the pull-down menus right of Assets turn to polygonal modeling menus and tools. Changing these will change the pull-down menus that are visible.

Interface Wrap Up The other areas of the interface notably, the animation areas, the Layer Editor, and Masks—and a host of other tools near the Masks will be covered in other tutorials. The Shelf is a place to store tools — or rather store the icons of tools. In this book, I will be referring to tools other than the Move, Scale, Rotate, and Select Tools by their pull-down menus.

Now with this comes a disclaimer. Projects When creating things in Maya what is really happening is a variety of iles are being assembled to create a new asset. What is really more accurate is that a lot of assets are being linked together within a Maya ile to create a new project. The diference here is signiicant: Maya does not actually import things like texture iles that are used on objects.

Rather, it simply links to where that texture ile lives on the hard drive. There are a wide variety of iles that Maya accesses throughout the production process everything from shadow maps to cloth caches that are not contained within the Maya ile called a scene.

Because of this, allowing Maya to keep track of where these various assets are is critical. To aid in this, Maya uses something called Projects to contain all the relevant assets. A Project can contain many Maya scene iles that are part of a larger whole. A Maya Project will also act as the container for iles that Maya outputs like renders for instance. Projects become especially critical when multiple users are working on a Project or especially important for students in a lab situation when an artist is working on more than one machine say their home machine and a school machine for instance.

If all the assets are in this Project, Maya can simply be told what the active Project folder is, and suddenly Maya can make all the necessary linkages. The sooner a student masters the idea of Projects, the smoother their creation process goes. In the following tutorial, we will create a Project in which we will create one of several of the Projects we will create in this book. Over the course of the coming chapters, we will model, UV map, texture, light and render the level. Should you have the desire, the model could be taken into your game engine of choice and made interactive.

But, before we start making the very irst object the Project needs to be created so as we move from chapter to chapter, from concept to concept, and asset to asset, we can keep things together. Tips and Tricks The Project Window allows us to create new projects and deine where they are. Notice that by default it has a bunch of input ields Scene, Templates, Images, etc. These are already illed in with names. Generally, these default names work great and I recommend leaving them as is, as this is the paradigm that other artists will likely be working with and if someone ever inherits your Project this will ensure they know where to look for things.

Step 2: Click the New button top right of the interface. Step 4: Click on the folder icon at the end of the Location input ield and choose where you want to store what will become the new Project folder Fig. Step 5: Click the Accept button. Then go ind where you deined the folder to be Fig. The other folders are where we and Maya will store necessary iles and assets.

The second important thing that has happened here is that Maya knows that this is the active Project. It means we know where to store things and Maya knows where to ind them. We now have looked at how Maya thinks a bit. We can create and manipulate objects in a very broad sense and have created a Project that will hold our assets. In the next chapter, we will start roughing out our game level and really get to it. In Maya, this is especially true. When you are looking at the mounds of research, you will have done before a project and are trying to plot out how to model a particular shape, there will actually be quite a few methods that will present themselves.

Picking which is best for which situation is the key. The Polygon Figure 3. The polygon is both the star, and the smallest of players — it is what all forms that we see are made of. These components are labeled in Fig. The simplest way to think of this is that every polygon has a front and a back, and the normal by default runs perpendicular to the front of the face. Edge: A face is surrounded by edges.

These edges deine the limitations of the polygon and the face. These edges also exist within 3D space, but actually contain no geometry of their own — they simply help describe the geometry of the polygon.

When an edge is moved, rotated, or scaled, it changes the shape of the face and thus the polygon. Vertex: Each edge has a vertex on either end of it. Vertices are one dimen- sional components that exist in 3D space. When a vertex is moved one vertex cannot be scaled or rotated , it changes the length of the edges it is a part of, thus changing the shape of the polygons those edges contain. Do note, that a collection of vertices can be rotated or scaled which really is simply moving their relative location to each other.

Traits of Polygon To understand what polygons are and how they work, consider this metaphor. Polygons are like very thin but very rigidly strong plates of metal. An individual polygon cannot bend — it is planar. However, multiple polygons can be joined along their edges, and they can indeed bend where they connect.

What this means is that if you take six polygons and attach them to each other, so that they share edges and vertices, you get a cube Fig. Increase the number of polygons and the number of places where the shape can bend increases; this means a form can become more and more round as the polygon count increases.

FIG 3. But notice that even the seemingly smooth sphere on the far right of Fig. Check out the close-up of that sphere shown in Fig. Well, polygons are not only the building blocks of shapes but also the building blocks of the data set that the computer must keep track of for any shape or scene.

Especially in situations like games, this data set can be hugely important when considering framerates the rate— frames in a second—at which the video card is able to display the information of a scene.

Now, to be fair, polycount the number of polygons in a scene is rarely the most limiting factor of gameplay. But get too many polys and even the most robust systems can be ground to a halt in both games and inside of Maya as the scene is being manipulated. Thus, the age old dilemma — and the craft of good 3D — is to use as many polygons as are needed to describe a form, but no more.

How many is too many? The answer is tough and really a moving target. So the answer is: depends. I know, terribly unsatisfying, but along the way in our tutorials, we will always be keeping our eye on efficient use of polys, so that we can ensure a project that is most useful on the most machines. Maya does have a Polygons Mode that allows for the user to create polygons directly; it also has some other modes that are involved in making shapes — particularly the Surfaces Mode which has an entirely alternate collection of tools that also create shapes.

It would seem like this indicates that there are other forms besides polygonal. And particularly three- sided polygons called tris. All of the modeling techniques in Maya — either polygonal or NURBS or Subdiv Surfaces — are simply ways of creating and manipulating collections of polygons — triangular polygons.

The process of converting a model into all tris is called tessellation Fig. The top image shows the form as modeled, and the bottom shows the tessellated version as the renderer sees it.

Since the inal product is going to end up polygons, creating the forms from easy-to-manipulate polygons often yields the most reliable results at rendering time. Because even the polygons that polygonal modeling creates are tessellated, it still is a bit indirect, and sometimes things like NURBS simply create a better form more quickly. Often, the tessellation issues are easy to manage with other forms of modeling — and in fact, we will be using other forms of modeling throughout the book when they are the more eicient path.

But enough talk. Escaping the Madness This is our ictitious game in which you, the player, have been institutionalized because of your insistence on the guilt of a local politician in the recent disappearance of several youth in the community. The rub is that you actually are a little crazy and tend to see things much more dire than they really are Fig.

Because of this, the mental hospital that you are currently held at appears to you as run down and abandoned. However, we will be building a section of the mental hospital you are trying to escape Fig. Although the walls, windows, and furniture will appear gray, we should still be able to create sophisticated shapes that help convey the terror of the space Fig. Gathering Research Abandoned sanitariums are actually pretty easy to ind online. It means that there is a plethora of great research easily seen and assembled.

Sometimes, this sort of research collection can be about inding images that assist in understanding architectural structure how wide are the hallways, what sort of doors are in the facility, what shape are the windows, etc. Most importantly, this sort of research can greatly assist in establishing mood. As I was collecting research for this tutorial, I stopped when I had assembled about images. Generally, the spaces we will be creating are based on the architecture of this facility.

This keeps things clear for Maya, so it knows where to ind what. When irst sitting down to a machine and getting ready to work on a project always make sure that you are dealing with the right project. If you start creating and saving assets into the wrong Project, paths and connections can be made that will haunt you much later down the line.

Step 1: Set the Project. Step 2: In the dialog box that next appears, be sure to navigate to the Escaping the Madness folder, and when inside that folder or with that folder selected , hit the Set button.

Similarly, I never open a Maya ile by simply double-clicking it in the OS. Scenes are what people usually think of as Maya iles. This will open a dialog box similar to Fig. Note that this is a chance to double-check that your Project is set correctly. Warnings and Pitfalls If you are not taken to the scenes folder, stop. Go back and try setting the Project again Steps 1 and 2.

So, why are we saving when there is nothing in the scene? First, this gives you a chance to double-check that the Project is set right. If Maya takes you to any other place but the scenes folder you know something is wrong.

Second, saving often is just a fact of life when using Maya. What this does is that instead of dragging out an object into existence which is how Maya works by default these days , it creates an object at 0,0,0 in world space and usually at a size of 1.

Problems with Scale Units in Maya can be a little tough to work with. However, it can be a little diicult seeing exactly what the size of an object is. What this is referring to is the scale of the object since it was created. See the problem? Then, if the object is scaled ive times as big, to 5 feet, the Scale settings in the Channel Box will also show 5. It gives us a quicker look at what the size of an object actually is. To be fair as soon as components are altered moving vertices or faces , the Scale setting in the Channel Box becomes completely inaccurate since at that point we are reshaping the object — not scaling it.

But, for early roughs I like keeping the Channel Box as relevant as I can as long as I can — it just makes initial work go faster. Changing Units Step 5: Change the units to feet. In the Categories column, select Settings. Click the Save button. In a game model, this units setting is not all that important. Maya will export the ile according to the unit setting deined in the exporter so the absolute size could be tweaked there.

However, if later you end up using any physics in Maya, the real size of objects matters an object will appear to fall of a shelf to the loor much diferent if Maya thinks the shelf is 3 feet of the loor than if Maya thinks it is 3 miles of the loor.

This means that you have a linear history of every save you make within Maya. It just takes a second to tell Maya to incrementally save the iles, but can save countless hours in the disastrous occasion of corrupted iles. Click the Incremental Save option, and click the Save Scene button. Save often. Roughing Out the Scene If you have drawing or painting experience, you are probably quite familiar with this idea.

With very broad strokes, we are going to construct the bones of the scene. Some of these bones may be altered and even deleted later, but they help establish scale and make sure the size of walls, doors, and rooms are appropriate.

Step 8: Adjust the Scale of the plane to yield a plane that is 8' wide by ' long. To do this, with the plane selected make sure the Channels Box is visible and change the Scale X input to 8 and the Scale Z to This is going to be the size of the main hallway. Step 9: Keep the polycount low by ensuring that the plane is one polygon. In most cases, having the much more dense default of 10 polygons by 10 polygons would be ine. However, because this is a game model, we want to be ever mindful of keeping the data set small.

Part of this efort is wrangling the polycount. If the hall is one big long plane, one polygon will do it. A total of polygons will do it as well, but add lots of unnecessary information for video cards to draw. Naming your stuf is not just vanity or anal retentiveness. Step Hit 5 on the keyboard to show the plane as a solid shape Fig. Roughing Out the Walls Step Create a new cube that will become a wall. Adjusting the Manipulator By default, the manipulator of an object is at the geometric center.

This is a logical place to put it, but because the manipulator handle is the point around which the object rotates or scales, having it smack dab in the middle can cause problems in many situations.

For one example, consider a door. Most doors do not rotate around the middle of the door — but rather rotate on hinges on one of its edges. For doors, we want to deinitely have the manipulator handle not in the middle of the door. Another example is the walls we are building. When we created the cube, it is sitting halfway through the loor.

It would be much easier if the manipulator was at the bottom of the cube, so that as the cube was scaled, it would only grow up. Having a manipulator for the wall on the bottom will also allow for the wall to be snapped to the hallway loor.

With the cube still selected, move the mouse over each View Panel and hit f while in each panel to frame that cube or my tech editor pointed out Shift-f will do the same thing.

Step In the front View Panel, hold the d key down on the keyboard. Notice that the manipulator changes to look something like Fig. This shows that the manipulator handle is ready to be moved or otherwise manipulated. Step Still holding the d key down, press and hold the v key snap to vertex.

Now grab the green line of the current manipulator and drag downward toward the bottom of the cube. The manipulator should snap to the bottom. Release both the d and v buttons. Lots of things happening here. First, there is the inger gymnastics of holding down the two keys at once, but that is a critical step.

Holding the d key down tells Maya that the manipulator is to be moved. Holding the v key tells it to snap to the nearest vertex. By dragging the green line of the manipulator, we move the manipulator down only in y — it does not slide of to the sides of the cube but remains right in the bottom middle of the cube. Warnings and Pitfalls There is often the tendency for new Maya users to always grab the middle of the manipulator the yellow square when trying to move things.

This is intuitive, but it means that the object being grabbed can move in any direction. So for instance, in this case, if the manipulator even while holding d and v down is grabbed by the yellow square, it will snap to one of the corners of the cube and not stay in the middle — this is because the yellow square means it can move in all directions and will move in all directions toward the nearest vertex. The cube will snap to be sitting right on the loor Fig. It looks like we are snapping to the loor; in actuality, holding x down simply snaps to the grid.

Alternatively, the v key could have been held down as well while moving the cube up in Y, and it would have moved up to the next level of vertices visible in the scene — which also would have been the loor. Either way would work. Step Snap the wall to the edge of the loor. Still with the Move Tool activated hold v down to snap to vertex and grab the X handle of the manipulator red and move the cube to the edge of the loor Fig.

Warnings and Pitfalls My tech editor reminded me that you must have one of the corners vertices of the loor visible in the persp View Panel in order for snap to vertex to work. So, you may need to dolly back to make sure you can see a vertex of the loor to snap to.

Step Resize the wall to be 6 inches thick 0. This can either be done via the Scale Tool or in the Channel Box editor by entering. Because the axis of the cube is at the bottom center, when the scale settings are changed the wall grows up and out and its to the loor. Step Snap the new wall to the other side of the hallway. Tips and Tricks Remember that when snapping to the other side, only grab the X handle red of the manipulator. So, why a plane for the loor, but cubes for the walls?

The basic idea of Booleans is that one object can be subtracted from another or added, or the intersections of two objects found. Boolean functions will often create polygons with many more than four sides that sometimes need some reconstruction. However, having said this, in many situations, like cutting out doorways that are square, it can be a very handy tool that works quickly and eiciently.

Step Create a cube that is 3' feet wide, 6'9'' 6. Step Adjust the manipulator to be at the bottom center of the cube and then snap the cube up to match the loor. Note that the new cube completely penetrates the wall.

It needs to in order to create a hole that goes completely through the wall. This is the reason why this new cube was 1' thick — so that it would indeed be deep enough to make it through the wall. The results should show up like Fig. Tips and Tricks Notice that the result of this procedure is a pretty messy Outliner. This is due to History being active, and the objects used to create the new polySurface1 are still around — more speciically, the nodes of those objects are still around.

Then, after working the Boolean magic on one doorway, there is no need to create the next door hole from scratch as it already exists. Step Repeat for the other side of the hallway, only this time work with door holes that are 3 feet wide and 8. We only need three; roughly place them as shown in Fig. Step Cleanup. Finally, use your newfound skills to move the manipulator to a place that makes sense for these new walls probably bottom middle. Why do we need to move the manipulator again?

Well, when the results of Boolean operations are new objects. These new objects, by default, have their manipulator at 0,0,0 in world space. So, even though the walls were once well organized in regards to their manipulators, those walls are gone, and in their place are these new walls with holes in them; so, we have to do a bit of reorganizing again. Component Level Editing Thus far, most of the work we have done is on an object level. Sooner or later, projects will need to move beyond just simple forms and require more complex and interesting shapes.

Remember in past chapters, we talked about some of the components of 3D forms within Maya: faces, edges, vertices, and normals. In modeling, the faces, edges, and vertices will be of particular interest and use. For a refresher on swapping between objects and components, check out Chapter 2. Building a Room Step Create a room that is 12' wide, 12' deep, and 10' tall. So after spending all that time creating separate walls for the hall, here we are creating a room with a box.

What gives? Fair question. The reality is that either could work — especially for game levels. First, it spares the unneeded polygons on the back sides of the walls that would never be seen. Second, when baking lighting into the scene, the UV set can be much easier to manage and light separately if each room is independent of the walls in the next room. Ultimately, the biggest reason to do it diferently this time is to show new modeling techniques.

Step Move the new cube of to the side somewhere where it is easy to work with. The absolute location is unimportant. Extruding Polygons Extruding a polygon face is one of the most efective ways to manipulate and grow a form.

The name of this tool is fairly indicative of what it does. Importantly, new polygons are made around the edges of the extruded polygon, so the form remains contiguous. Take a look at it in use. Step Right-click on the object and choose Face from the Hotbox that pops up.

On one of the shorter ends, select a face by clicking on it. Notice that the manipulator immediately changes to a strange looking hither-to-fore unseen form. It actually has handles that allow this extruded face to be moved the cones , scaled the cubes , and rotated the blue circle. With the new manipulator handles, grab the Move Z handle the blue cone , and pull the face out to approximate Fig.

Notice that there are now new faces around the edges of the extruded face that tie it back to the base shape. Step Scale the new face down. Still within the same Extrude manipula- tor tool, scale the face in X by click-dragging on the Scale X handle the red cube. Just eyeball it for now to look similar to Fig. Tips and Tricks We are translating and scaling all within the same tool here and all within the Extrude function.

However, do note that after a face is extruded, it can be selected at any time and moved, scaled, or rotated using the regular Move, Scale, and Rotate tools. Step Create a door frame. Select the face on the opposite side of this new extrusion. Step Delete the face. Hit Delete or Backspace on the keyboard to get rid of this polygon and the one below it Fig. Leaving the polygons we are interested in.

Sometimes extruding faces is a means to an end. In this case, extruding the face provides the polygons we need to sculpt the doorway. Step Adjust the doorway geometry to look more like a door. Do this by irst swapping to Vertex Mode right-click on the object and choose Vertex from the Hotbox menu. With the Move Tool, select the two vertices shown in Fig. There is the rough version of a doorway here, but it will be important that this doorway matches the doorways of the hallway.

Step Create windows. Do this by swinging around to the other side the three-sided wall and select the faces shown in Fig. Remember to this you need to swap to Faces Mode. Step Make sure the faces will extrude independently. Keep Faces Together does what it says.

With this checked on which it is by default , when multiple faces are selected, it will extrude them as one mass — in this case, it would be as though we were making one big window across all three walls. But since the idea is to create three separate windows, it will be important that when these faces extrude they discretely extrude into their own shape. Step Use the Extrude Tool and the scale handles of the Extrude manipulator to create shapes like shown in Fig.

Tips and Tricks Note that even though there is only one manipulator handle, when this handle is manipulated, all three faces adjust. Step Give the windows depth. Tips and Tricks Notice that this time you should be using the move handles — not the scale handles of the Extrude manipulator.

To do this, simply delete the faces selected Fig. This is the view from inside the room. The idea here is that this part of the wall will never be seen. The walls seen on the insides of the rooms are contained in these room objects. So, the face on the outside wall of the hall just gets in the way. Do this in steps: irst snap to vertex and move the manipulator only in Y to snap to the bottom of the room. Then, snap to vertex and move only in X to snap to the front of the room. The idea here is to have the manipulator placed in a location that facilitates snapping.

Having the manipulator on the front edge of the room will allow us to snap this part to the edge of the door relief. Step Move the room into place so it snaps right up against the second doorway Fig. Do this by holding v down and with the Move Tool snapping to one of the bottom corners of the door relief. You may need to rotate the room into place. Notice that at this point the doorway of the room is much bigger than the doorway of the hallway yours may be smaller. Not to worry — we knew this was going to happen as in earlier steps we were just roughing out the shape to get the geometry we needed.

But in this step, we have made the important step of lining up the inside wall of the room to the edge of the doorway. Notice in Fig. Alternately, sometimes the orthographic views will be the best way to understand where the object is in 3D space. Do this in Edge Mode right-click the room object and choose Edge from the Hotbox. Be sure to snap to vertex to make this match exact. And later, you may choose to actually delete this second room in favor of a completed grouped room once the windows are created and placed.

Step Adjust the hall loor by moving the edges, so that they close the gap between the hall and the rooms Fig. This is actually a good method for a fairly astounding number of forms; but sometimes an alternative primitive can be used to create forms much faster.

This could deinitely be hewn out of a cube, but we could much more easily build it using part of a cylinder and part of a sphere, and assembling the two together. Step Create the octagonal base of the room with a cylinder.

There, change the Subdivisions Axis to 8 Fig. This is part of the power of those polygon primitives. The parameters of the shape can be changed, and thus, the primitive can be reshaped. This means that when history is deleted, this node disappears and is no longer editable via its INPUT parameters.

Step Remove the roof. Do this by swapping to Faces Mode and deleting the polygons that make up the top of the cylinder. This will turn the cylinder into a sort of cup Fig. Step Create the dome for the roof. Move the sphere over to near the cylinder. With the sphere selected, look in the Channel Box and under the INPUTS section, expand the polySphere1 node and change the Subdivisions Axis setting to 8 to match the number of walls in the lower room.

Do this by switching back out to Object Mode right-click on the sphere and select Object Mode in the Hotbox. Swap to the Move Tool and move the manipulator hold d of the dome to any of the corners remember to Snap to Vertex.

Then, using the Move Tool be sure to release d , grab the manipulator by the middle yellow square, and move the dome up to snap into place atop the cylinder Fig.

Step Combine the meshes into one form. Technically, we could leave the roof and walls separate. There are a couple of beneits to combining them. When meshes are combined, Maya thinks of them as one object. Likewise, game engines see it as one object and thus reduce the draw calls. Further, when there is one object and especially after we get the ceiling and walls merged—more on this in a moment— , the UV mapping — deciding how texture is applied to a surface — gets a little easier.

Step Merge the vertices between the walls and ceiling. To ix this, irst undo the experiment, then marquee select around all the vertices along the seam of the two shapes.

Step Scale the room to taste and place it in the scene as seen in Fig. Note that in Fig. Step Name the rooms. The naming mechanism is arbitrary at this point. But naming is important to do as you go along.