21/03/2011
Today I looked for some Maya tutorials to strengthen my basic understanding of the program.
I used 5 videos from youtube:
They were very helpful and taught me a few shortcuts and hints to navigate the program much easier. I started to play around in Maya with the tools, and tried to create a simple robot design.
This proved much more enjoyable that my last experience with animating in Maya.
30/03/2011
Our first task is to make a door asset using the fundamental techniques of Maya. I started by making a simple cube, centering it to the (0,0,0) co-ordinates of the base grid. I moved the cube over to the positive X quadrant and removed the faces on the side facing negative X. This meant that I would only need to create half of the mesh, which could then be later mirrored and combined.
One of the first things I did was make more space to view the area I was working in, so I removed some unneccessary tool bars. I then used the forward orthographic view to load an image plane from my door concept work. I adjusted the settings to distance the image plane from the centre axis, and altered the ratio to enable me to work precisely.
(Upon failing to save my image plane for the next time I worked on it, I opened my door file to realise the image plane was invisible, this has taught me to always save the reference material in the same folder as the master copy of work)
One of the main principles of making a great model is to ONLY ever use quads. This is so programs can easily differentiate space and then make them into tris. This principle is proving quite hard to adhere to, especially from my amateur point of view.
I had many problems with tris, they kept appearing in places after editing other parts of my door. At first they proved to be impossible to remove or convert, but after a discussion with Mark, he showed me how to rectify the problem by merging unwanted vertices together, and creating new vertices to allow quad tesselation.
My door was slowly turned into a flat rectangle. At this point, I selected the furthest right edges and warped them to match the image plane. I had a few methods to do this, I could use the 'extrude' tool to pull at the faces and create new mass, with new subduvisions, or I could use the 'move' tool to simply manipulate what I already had. Each has its pros and cons, for instance, extrude is good for quickly extending an area but it adds many new faces and hides what's already underneath. The move tool is also very handy for manipulation but it is also easy to bend quads out of shape.
19/04/2011
UV Mapping seems quite intimidating as I have no idea which sections of my door to partition off and then flatten. So I have to apply a Lambert texture before being able to UV it, using a checquered pattern enables me to see where there is stretching. I then 'extracted' different parts of my door to enable easier unwrapping of the model.
Found a useful website:
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