The process of converting a model into all tris is called tessellation Fig. The idea here is that this part of the wall will never be seen. Maya has several diferent modes that allow the user to do diferent things.
 
 

Introducing autodesk maya 2012 pdf free download

 

Maya allows for some very lexible methodology, so that this process can indeed be luid. Very powerful. In the next chapter, we will look a bit at Maya and how it works. They have owned Maya since , and few 3D softwares have as deep a market penetration or as wide a name recognition.

At a recent presentation that I gave at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, there were two pieces of 3D software that this group of nuclear scientists had heard of, Blender a free open-source competitor and Maya. None of the other 3D competitors were even on their radar. Maya began as part of Alias Research, Inc.

Silicon Graphics, Inc. The Octane was many thousands of dollars, and Maya was charging a per-seat license that was thousands of dollars per year.

Early in its life cycle, Maya made some stunning market expansions. Maya 1. By the way, SoftImage after freeing itself from Microsoft has made a real resurgence and has some really amazing technologies.

Ironically, it too has recently been acquired by Autodesk — and thus is now the step-cousin of Maya, which was acquired by Autodesk in Now, it has settled into a single version and is released as an updated version nearly every summer. Nowadays, Maya is not versioned by number, but by year — Maya is the current version as of this writing. So What Is It? Maya aims to be a one-stop shop, and indeed, it is an incredibly robust, powerful, lexible, customizable, expanding, and complicated tool.

Most any emerging tool in 3D — from particles, to cloth, to hair, to luids, to motion tracking — inds an early iteration in Maya.

Maya is very quick to develop and exploit new techniques and ideas. Now sometimes, this move to be on the bleeding edge can be a problem. Yeah, luid efects are awesome — but it can be pretty hard to use for the uninitiated and takes a huge amount of development horsepower for Maya developers.

And at the end of the day, how many projects really use luid — or need realistically rendered luid efects? Luckily, especially since their Autodesk acquisition, Maya has made some good progress in continuing to evolve their core tool sets. It is this set of core tools modeling, texturing, animation, and rendering that is the basis of all 3D projects and the technology we will be exploring through this volume.

However, Maya allows for assets including animated assets to be exported in a variety of formats that can then be imported into various game engines and made interactive.

More recently, it has also found a home on Mac OSX. Increasingly, the hardware required to run Maya has become available to the masses — regardless of your OS persuasion. One of the things I really like about Maya is that its cross-platform nature is pretty lawless. Generally, the keyboard shortcuts are even the same between Macs and PCs. Files generally low quite well from one platform to the other although sometimes there are some strange inconsequential error messages that show up.

I will frequently work with a student who worked on a Mac at home, worked on the project in class on a PC, sent it to me where I worked with it on my PC at home and continued working with it on my MacBook Pro at school the next day, only to pass it back to the student on a PC. Few problems arise. In fact, over the course of this book, some tutorials will be written using Maya for Mac and some with Maya for PC. Having said that, hardware matters, although not in the ways you may think.

At its core, hardware for our needs includes a processor b memory c video card d hard drive, and e monitor. Processor The processor is the brain of your system.

It is important in the creation process, but is especially critical in the rendering stage. However, big multi-core, multi-processor systems can get expensive quickly. Generally, I advise my students to not put huge amounts of money into getting huge numbers of cores or big processors — there are other areas that their money could be better spent in.

Most any processor available today will run Maya. Memory RAM can make a big diference for big projects. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, we recently had a very large project, and on my machine which, at the time, had 4 GB of RAM, we were unable to assemble all of the assets. Now 48 GB of RAM is expensive and, frankly, for most unnecessary, but the point is that more RAM allows you to open larger and more assets not to mention allows you to efectively run things like Photoshop at the same time.

RAM is also critical in the rendering process, and the more RAM you have, the faster your machine will render. How much RAM is needed is a tough call. But keep in mind that if there is a little money available, RAM is a relatively cheap way to upgrade a computer. Video Processor This is an area often misunderstood by people new to 3D.

At its core, the video card is responsible for drawing the information that the computer is chewing on to the monitor. In 3D, this is a huge consideration. A small video card means that a very small data set meaning few objects with few polygons and fewer textures can be drawn at a time. A small video card means that the creation process can be slow and downright painful. Of further confusion, many video cards today are shared on the mother board of the computer.

Stay way, way clear of these setups. A separate video card by either ATI or NVidia is really the only way to go when considering a computer system. This will allow for upgrading later new video cards are amazingly cheap these days. Measuring video card speed is a complicated thing, but the most basic measurement has to do with memory size.

Put your money into a good video card. A gaming card is ine no need generally for beginners to use high-end workstation cards. A good video card will ensure that the worklow continues to be smooth, and that textures, forms, and importantly movement is shown quickly and smoothly.

I recommend to my students to look at 1 GB cards at the least. I have always had better luck using NVidia cards with Maya. Monitor Strangely, beginners will spend all their extra money on a bigger processor and then scrimp on the monitor. At the end of the day, you have spent a lot more time looking at your monitor than the CPU. Maya has a lot of tools and screen real estate is a premium. The bigger monitor with the bigger resolution will allow much more space for content and make the size of the tools less important.

Three Button Mouse I mentioned this in the Introduction, but if you skipped over that part let me mention this again. Maya uses three mouse buttons. 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? Start by pressing the button below! Author: Dariush Derakhshani. Mastering Autodesk Maya Read more. Introducing Maya 8. Introducing Maya Autodesk Revit Architecture Essentials. Introducing Autodesk Revit Architecture Autocad Autodesk 3ds Max Essentials. 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. Introduction to computer graphics and 3D — 2. Jumping In headfirst, with both feet — 3. The Maya interface — 4. Beginning polygonal modeling — 5.

 

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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.

Step Finish the homework challenges for room shapes. The results are shown in Figs. Conclusion Using simple polygonal modeling techniques, the shape of a game level or any set design really can begin to come into form quickly. However, I always counsel students to rough out all their rooms irst using methods similar to this. If they are creating an animated short, it gives them a quick look at whether or not they have the appropriate acting spaces created.

For games, a roughed version like this provides the perfect start to a game prototype and is the version that we irst put in a game engine to run around in and see if the scale and scope of the level is what was envisioned. Tutorial 3. However, things are simply too blocky without necessary stuf.

In this tutorial, we will expand on the techniques, we have built to begin to create beds, gurneys, chairs, and other props that will be placed around the scene to make it look like people once lived here. It might not look like it at irst glance, but we are actually just extending skills we already have — particularly with regards to extruding polygons. We are going to construct this form out of three forms actually. The irst will be the drawer compartment area, the second will be the drawer, and the third will be the frame that surrounds the drawer and its compartment.

After, we construct these two forms we will use the Combine technique we looked at earlier to make it one mesh and thus reduce the number of objects to keep track of and the number of draw calls if this ends up in a game engine. Step 1: Create a new Maya scene. We could build this right within the hallway scene; but this will allow us to explore working with the import functionalities of Maya.

Step 2: Create and scale a new cube to approximate Fig. Do this in Object Mode with the Scale Tool. Step 3: Start to create the drawer cavern with the Extrude Tool. This time, click on one of the cube handles of the Extrude Tool and notice that the middle of the manipulator turns to a light blue cube. Click and drag on that cube and the extruded face will scale in all directions at once — creating a face that pulls away evenly from its old size Fig.

Step 4: Finish the drawer cavern with a second extrusion into the cube. Step 5: Create the drawer from a new cube, using the Extrude Tool. Check out the sequence of screenshots shown in Fig. Why make the drawer separately? By building it separately, we can easily plug the drawer into the compartment and very easily make it look broken or partly opened.

Step 6: Move the drawer into place. The key here is to make the drawer ofset — not perfect Fig. This will provide some important opportunities to look at adding geometry needed to create the forms desired. Already, cubes have had holes dropped out of them and new forms built of of them. Sometimes, more reined extrusions need to be made.

To get these, new geometry needs to be formed to allow for new faces to be extruded. Step 6: Create a cube and resize it to be slightly bigger than the drawer compartment. Make sure it is also fairly lat Fig. This is ine for our purposes here.

Getting too caught up getting the exact size would just slow down the learning process. The point is to see the general tools and their application. Insert Edge Loop Tool This is a powerful tool that allows new geometry to be inserted between loops of edges. Remember though that this tool is also powerful for non-linear shapes like organic ones where new geometry is needed to better deine a shape.

Step 7: Add geometry to extend the legs from. So what just happened here? This splits the faces the edge loops cut through into two faces. These new faces can be extruded into forms that would not have otherwise been easy to accomplish with the current skill set. Step 8: Add further geometry with additional loops. Again, activate the Insert Edge Loop Tool and create further loops parallel and perpendicular to the irst edge loop Fig.

Take a look at this new shape and notice that there are now squares on each of the corners of the shape. These are the faces that we will use to extrude out the legs. So to get the edges shown in Fig.

Step 9: Select the faces that will become the legs. Do this by rotating your view to below the cube. Select the faces shown in Fig. Step Extrude the legs down to the ground. The Cut Faces Tool also creates new geometry, but is much more linear in its approach. Think of this tool as a sort of laser that slices though the entire object. Because of this, it will be important that the tool is used in a non-perspective view.

Step Create new geometry to create further cross braces. First, make sure to view the object in the Front or Side View Panel either will work. Select the frame shape in Object Mode.

Hold the Shift key down to con- strain the cut and drag from left to right on the screen to approximate the cut shown in Fig. Repeat for a second cut. What happens when the Cut Faces Tool is used — is a lickering line a straight line through the whole screen will appear to show where the cut will be made.

This line rotates around the place where the mouse is clicked. This means that unlike the Insert Edge Loop Tool , the irst click is really important — as moving the mouse only rotates the cut. So click wisely. Bridge The Bridge Tool is a relative newcomer to Maya, but is a really handy one. What it does is allow for components to be bridged together by new polygons.

In this case, it will be used to connect the new geometry made on the legs. In Face Mode, select two faces that face each other on the inside of any two legs Fig.

Step Connect the legs with the Bridge Tool. In the Bridge Options window, change the Divisions setting to 0. Click the Bridge button Fig. The default setting for Divisions for the Bridge Tool is strangely 5. What this would mean is that with the default settings , the two faces would be bridged together, but there would be ive edge loops around the new shape created.

Obviously, there is no need for this amount of geometry, so setting the Division setting to 0 simply bridges the two selected faces by creating new faces that join the edges.

Step Repeat the bridging process to connect all sides Fig. Tips and Tricks G is the keyboard shortcut to repeat the last used tool. So, if the last thing done was to use the Bridge Tool, two new faces can be selected, g hit the faces are bridged , then rotated around, two more faces selected, g hit, etc.

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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.

 
 

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Enter the email address you signed up with and we’ll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Getting Started in 3D with Maya. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher other than as may be noted herein.

Notices Knowledge and best practice in this ield are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary. Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein.

In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. Acknowledgments Books are always a team efort. Of especial help with this one was the tireless work of my tech editor, former student, colleague, and friend Jake Green. His contribution toward maintaining the consistency and the tone of the book was invaluable.

His work is inspiring and his progress over the years has been tremendous. It was good fun working with that team and there are great things ahead.

Finally, in this, my tenth book, I give a special shout-out to my high school English teacher — Ms. Her excitement for literature and writing has been highly inspiring, and I often ind myself looking back on her instructions and ideas as I tidy up what I have planned to write.

Many thanks Ms. Torres — can I get some extra credit for this….? In recent years, 3D has gone from a specialty and sometimes gimmicky afterthought to a staple of the creative industry. And of course, all of this is in addition to the ubiquitous presence of 3D in most every form of entertainment and in every form of digital entertainment.

Like many new forms of digital art, at the beginning, the technology was instantly available to everyone, but the on-ramp was steep and often diicult to ascend. The area was looded with hobbyists who could get their hands on the software, but continually produced uninspired work. This happened in the professional world as well — for all the never-ending genius of Pixar and the nice work of early Dreamworks, there emerged as competition, some really poorly conceived and even more poorly executed feature ilms that really besmirched the hallowed artwork of 3D animation.

Reviewers for games are no longer dazzled by the fact that games are 3D, but they start making real commentary on the artistry and eicacy of modeling, style, and animation choices. Movie reviews have become incredibly discerning, and substandard technique in modeling and animation is quickly caught and called out. Animation consumers have come of age. Beneits and Drawbacks of Tool Sophistication This is good and bad for animators or aspiring animators.

This means that there are many very powerful toolsets that have allowed for further power, faster, and at a lower skill set. From the early days of having to use the command line to create a cube, the current click and drag to get full cloth dynamics and luid integration into a project is a huge leap forward. However, the bad news is that viewers of 3D are simply less impressed with another bit of dazzling technology — they demand a compelling story and a deft touch in handling the visuals of any project game, TV, ilm, web, etc.

The days of blindly dazzling efects are over — consumers are just too savvy. Often times, this comes from formal training college, university, art school, etc. There are clearly folks who are able to intuitively produce products that show these skills, and others who gain these skills in the old fashioned way — through reading and immense amounts of sweat equity to grow the skills themselves.

Having said this, no matter what the art and composition skills of the artist are, without knowledge of how to use the tool — the skills will never have a chance to be put on display. So in addition to traditional skills, the competitive 3D artist of today also must understand the tools — and how to use the tools to convey their knowledge of story or art.

This book is designed to assist in getting into dynamic, complex, and very powerful tools faster, so that great artwork can ind a visual voice and great work can be produced. It seems like magic, and more importantly, it looks like fun. The 3D hobbyist market has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. There was a time that a bit of Bryce and some simple Poser satisied the weekend 3D warrior. But those days are past for the most part.

If this is you, this book has many sections that will get you up to speed well beyond a dabbler in a hurry. Because each chapter starts with some background information, it will help those of you without a technical background in 3D graphics to get a chance to understand what the core ideas are before diving into the tutorials.

I also know that diferent students learn in diferent ways. Some learn aurally — they listen to a lecture and they grasp the idea and are of the races.

Some learn visually — they watch the demo and seeing is learning. And most importantly: How can I use this technique in my own work? Do this and the book will be much more than just a collection of steps — and become a platform to creating your own projects. If this is your situation, this book should move quite quickly for you, and you might be able to skip past most of the theoretical discussions at the beginnings of each chapter as you learn to translate your current vocabulary into Maya-speak.

For you, the descriptions of the technology at the beginning of every chapter and tutorial will be critical. Be sure to read those parts carefully and take a careful look at how those ideas are being illustrated through the course of the tutorials.

The tutorials all have a pedagogical goal that goes beyond just following the tutorial recipe. Grasp that goal and it will speed your mastery of the tool and allow you a irm footing upon which to lift your students.

Book Organization The book has nine chapters. Some of it is theoretical, and much of it is metaphorical. After the Introduction, there will be several tutorials designed to illustrate how the concepts work. These tutorials will be the bulk and meat of the book. Appendices Occasionally, there will be a technique that is a precursor to a collection of tools within Maya which may get in the way of a smooth low of ideas in the text — or simply be out of the scope of the tutorials.

In these cases, appendices have been created for some quick reference. You may already know these ideas from past Photoshop work or work in some other 3D package — but they are there in case you need them for reference. Homework and Challenges The real goal of this book should not be a successful completion of the tutorials. It is true that these tutorials can be an important tool in learning Maya; but they are the means to an end.

The end is or should be creating your own projects. If all you can do after inishing the tutorials is do the tutorials again — the book has failed.

To achieve that goal, each tutorial has a few short challenges. They will help you determine if you have really grasped the ideas presented in the chapter or if the chapter should be reworked. More important than knowing what to do next is knowing why to do it next. Although you could just skip over that narrative and continue onto the next step, take some time to look that over. These parts of the text will help to explain the method to the madness of the tutorials and help to ensure that you are getting the most out of the tutorials.

Sometimes these sections will include hints as to worklow, other times they will remind you of keyboard shortcuts. Warnings and Pitfalls Maya is powerful, but it can be a little like weeding your garden with a backhoe; it can simply have too much power. Similarly, it is such a complex tool that it can have too many options for some of the simpler tasks. The Warnings and Pitfalls sections will give you the heads up on problems that are often encountered by new Maya users.

These are born of many years of teaching Maya and hopefully will save you from many hours of frustration. Other Conventions When text is to be entered into a text ield in Maya, it will appear like this in Courier in the book. Maya has several diferent modes that allow the user to do diferent things.

Of some considerable confusion, this means that certain pull-down menus are only available at certain times. We will talk more of this, but the mode will always be listed before a bar. This is indicated with a little square after the tool name in the pull-down menu Fig. FIG 0. One note here though: Regardless of which platform you are running on, make sure you have a good three-button mouse or a two button mouse with a scroll wheel that will act as the third button.

You PC users out there are probably already in a good place with your mouse. Make sure that all three buttons work. The tutorials covered in this book were made using Maya ; however most of the techniques have been around a long time and could be done with earlier versions of Maya as well.

Conclusion So there it is — or here we go. But even in this more narrow deinition, 3D can mean several things that have diferent goals and diferent technical beneits or limitations. We will generally lump them into two areas — high rez and low rez short for high and low resolution. High-Rez 3D High-rez animation refers to the amount of polygons and the size of the textures used to describe the surface attributes of those polygons.

The medium that high rez is usually delivered through is either ilm or TV. Because both of these formats are linear forms of motion pictures, what we are really talking about are many pre-rendered frames that are played in rapid succession to create the illusion of movement.

DOI: And in fact, in cases like ilm and increasingly with TV with the rise of HD , the amount of information needed to hold up on the big screen or on high- resolution TV is pretty immense. All this information is beautiful but also intensive to work with and costly to render.

When ilm is running at 24 frames per second, an intensive render of an hour per frame can mean that it takes an entire day for 1 second of inished animation. Now generally, rendering times are carefully monitored by studios where time is really money, and individual frames are broken up into layers that allow for quite a bit of lexibility and quicker rendering times.

But in any case, rendering times of even minutes a frame means that either a studio has a rendering farm of machines to do that work or there is time when just the computer has to do its work. High-rez work is fun to do because the inal product has a great deal of polish, and each frame can be carefully crafted and tweaked. In this book, we will do some high-rez work as it allows and requires for some special considerations in the construction of forms and textures.

Low-Rez 3D Low-rez 3D are assets that computers can draw more quickly. The broadest and well-known instance of low-rez animation is in games. While high rez can take hours to render a single frame, games have to render at least 30 frames every single second. Tons of polygons or textures that are really huge may be beautiful, but a data set that big simply cannot be drawn fast enough by the hardware of today to make the game interactive.

Games work at a higher frame rate by using a very careful polygon count. Forms tend to be blockier as there is less information describing the form. Everything that can be done to help hardware draw faster is incorporated to ensure a smooth experience for the player. This sort of eiciency can be a formidable challenge and takes some careful consideration throughout the creation process.

In this book, we will be doing some low-rez work both a game level and a game character that will illustrate these ideas. Now as the technology has increased, the gap between low rez and high rez has been closed. Sometimes, at irst glance, it can even be hard to see the diference in low- and high-rez assets; but as you learn more about the 3D process, it will become more and more clear which is which.

Some assets may be reusable between high-rez and low-rez projects — but this is seldom the case. It tends to imply that there is a linear progression in the process of creating animation. In reality, animation of all types tends to be a cyclical process of creating assets, reviewing, recreating assets, reviewing, reining assets, and so on.

Perhaps the only two parts of the worklow that really do reliably happen in order is that the animation starts with a sketch and ends with rendering. Further, it is true that very broadly speaking, some things do happen before others a model must be created before its UVs can be laid out for instance.

With this in mind, we can start to visualize how projects come together by linearly deining the process. An Idea, a Sketch, Lots of Research, and New Inspiration There is this myth that sometimes loats around the uninitiated that great 3D happens when someone knows 3D software well enough and suddenly the brilliance just lows out of the computer.

The reality is very, very far from this. Great 3D animation almost always begins on a paper — drawn with good old traditional media of pencil, charcoal, or paints. No doubt, the inal rendered digital output must pass through a computer before its inal output — but there is no technical expertise that can compensate for poorly conceptualized or poorly designed projects. This is why when students contact me before starting our program here at the University of the Incarnate Word and ask what software they should be working on — I always tell them to put the computer down and draw.

On the business side, 3D production is time intensive and thus costly. It is much cheaper to approve the 12th sketch of a character or game level than it is to approve the 12th digital model created. Thus, the irst step of most animation projects is planning in the form of drawings. These drawings can be maps of game levels, character style sheets, character pose studies, story boards, set designs, mood renderings, etc.

Sometimes these sketches are simply out of the imagination of the artist, director, or other mastermind of a project; but sometime along the line, the critical stage of research must be taken. Research As part of the myth that loats around, that computers create great 3D animation rather than great artists using computers to create great animation , is the idea that designers just sit down and great stuf just appears in their sketchbooks or designs. In reality, great designs — whether they are game levels, movie characters, or stunning visual matte paintings — are born of research, lots and lots of research.

Here at the University of the Incarnate Word where I teach , before students begin putting any polygons together digitally, they assemble mounds of research that helps inform their design choices.

Research helps a 3D genius to understand the cut of World War II Nazi criminals, and see the stylized muscles present in comic book heroes and how the proportions are tweaked to create epic heroes.

Take a look at any online gallery of 3D work, and there is almost always a clear dividing line of relevant detail that is missing by those who have failed to do their research. There are rarely happy accidents in 3D; every frame is a hard fought battle and is the result of many choices made along production pathways that culminate in the inished, rendered frame.

Ensuring that options have been explored quickly through sketches that are informed by good research will make sure that the production choices yield a product worthy of the blood, sweat, and tears poured into that frame.

Usually, this happens through modeling: the process of assembling the building blocks of 3D forms called polygons into shapes that deine volume and shape Fig. FIG 1. Form is deined, but everything is gray plastic. Maya is not actually the most amazing modeling package. To be sure, it is suicient and has become very good in recent years in adapting techniques and tools that are seen in other packages.

The result of the modeling process is a collection of gray polygons that show the form of a physical space or character. It is a critical part of the process, and choices made in modeling will afect the possibilities of almost all the rest of the animation process. Poor choices of polygon organization will make animation diicult and can make proper deformation nearly impossible. Getting the modeling right — and the topology the way the polygons are organized — is very important.

We will spend a good amount of time in the coming chapters talking about these considerations. However, before we can start getting good textures on a surface, we have to deine how that surface will attach to textures — or how textures will attach to that surface. UV mapping — the process of laying the 3D form out into 2D space — can be a bit tricky to understand. A bad UV map takes the most amazing textures and stretches or squishes them over a surface makes stubble on a chin look like long black scratches , so that the texture is reduced to a mushy collection of pixels that make a form look worse than before it was textured.

In the following chapters particularly Chapter 5 , we will look at UV layout very closely. Good UV layout will ensure that great textures look great on your beautiful geometry.

There are lots of terms that get thrown around and sometimes thought to be interchangeable — such as textures, materials, etc. Is it smooth or rough? Is the surface transparent? All of these questions can be deined with some quick texturing.

At its most powerful, the texturing process can also be used to indicate geometry. Or — more powerfully — surface deformities like pock marks, scars, bullet holes, and even armor details can be deined through painted textures rather than extensive modeling.

This becomes incredibly powerful in areas where the number of polygons matter — like games Fig. Rigging and Skinning Rigging and skinning is the process of creating organization or deformation objects that allow a geometric form to be manipulated and animated. It can also refer to non-organic things like vehicles car tires rotation mechanism, shocks, weapons attached to a vehicle, etc. Technically, rigging is the process of creating the organization or objects that deform the meshes, and skinning is the process of attaching the polygons to those deformation objects.

They are really two diferent procedures and concepts but are certainly intertwined and must be mutually considered throughout the process Fig. Animation This is the sexy part of the workflow. This is where the model forms and textures, that were carefully rigged and skinned, are assigned keyframes that allow for changes over time. But, having said all that, animation can also be one of the most rewarding parts of the worklow.

Lighting and Rendering Lighting is the process of creating and placing virtual lights that illuminate the forms being created and animated. Rendering is the process of the computer drawing the inished frame that incorporates all the forms, textures, animation, and lighting. Whether to put this at the end or up with texturing is always a diicult call when laying out this sort of worklow illustration.

In all reality, textures are nothing without efective lighting and rendering. So often, the process of lighting a model and iguring out how to render it occurs much earlier in the process. Flexibility in the Process When laid out as it is in the preceding pages, the process feels very linear.

There are always times where things need to be tweaked — or assets added — as a project progresses. Maya allows for some very lexible methodology, so that this process can indeed be luid. Very powerful. In the next chapter, we will look a bit at Maya and how it works. They have owned Maya since , and few 3D softwares have as deep a market penetration or as wide a name recognition. At a recent presentation that I gave at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, there were two pieces of 3D software that this group of nuclear scientists had heard of, Blender a free open-source competitor and Maya.

None of the other 3D competitors were even on their radar. Maya began as part of Alias Research, Inc. Silicon Graphics, Inc. The Octane was many thousands of dollars, and Maya was charging a per-seat license that was thousands of dollars per year. Early in its life cycle, Maya made some stunning market expansions. Maya 1. By the way, SoftImage after freeing itself from Microsoft has made a real resurgence and has some really amazing technologies.

Ironically, it too has recently been acquired by Autodesk — and thus is now the step-cousin of Maya, which was acquired by Autodesk in Now, it has settled into a single version and is released as an updated version nearly every summer. Nowadays, Maya is not versioned by number, but by year — Maya is the current version as of this writing.

So What Is It? Maya aims to be a one-stop shop, and indeed, it is an incredibly robust, powerful, lexible, customizable, expanding, and complicated tool.

Most any emerging tool in 3D — from particles, to cloth, to hair, to luids, to motion tracking — inds an early iteration in Maya. Maya is very quick to develop and exploit new techniques and ideas.

Now sometimes, this move to be on the bleeding edge can be a problem. Yeah, luid efects are awesome — but it can be pretty hard to use for the uninitiated and takes a huge amount of development horsepower for Maya developers. And at the end of the day, how many projects really use luid — or need realistically rendered luid efects? Luckily, especially since their Autodesk acquisition, Maya has made some good progress in continuing to evolve their core tool sets.

It is this set of core tools modeling, texturing, animation, and rendering that is the basis of all 3D projects and the technology we will be exploring through this volume. However, Maya allows for assets including animated assets to be exported in a variety of formats that can then be imported into various game engines and made interactive. More recently, it has also found a home on Mac OSX.

Increasingly, the hardware required to run Maya has become available to the masses — regardless of your OS persuasion. One of the things I really like about Maya is that its cross-platform nature is pretty lawless. Generally, the keyboard shortcuts are even the same between Macs and PCs.

Files generally low quite well from one platform to the other although sometimes there are some strange inconsequential error messages that show up. I will frequently work with a student who worked on a Mac at home, worked on the project in class on a PC, sent it to me where I worked with it on my PC at home and continued working with it on my MacBook Pro at school the next day, only to pass it back to the student on a PC.

Few problems arise. In fact, over the course of this book, some tutorials will be written using Maya for Mac and some with Maya for PC. Having said that, hardware matters, although not in the ways you may think.

At its core, hardware for our needs includes a processor b memory c video card d hard drive, and e monitor. Processor The processor is the brain of your system.

It is important in the creation process, but is especially critical in the rendering stage. However, big multi-core, multi-processor systems can get expensive quickly. Generally, I advise my students to not put huge amounts of money into getting huge numbers of cores or big processors — there are other areas that their money could be better spent in. Most any processor available today will run Maya. Memory RAM can make a big diference for big projects.

At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, we recently had a very large project, and on my machine which, at the time, had 4 GB of RAM, we were unable to assemble all of the assets. Now 48 GB of RAM is expensive and, frankly, for most unnecessary, but the point is that more RAM allows you to open larger and more assets not to mention allows you to efectively run things like Photoshop at the same time. RAM is also critical in the rendering process, and the more RAM you have, the faster your machine will render.

How much RAM is needed is a tough call. But keep in mind that if there is a little money available, RAM is a relatively cheap way to upgrade a computer. Video Processor This is an area often misunderstood by people new to 3D. At its core, the video card is responsible for drawing the information that the computer is chewing on to the monitor.

In 3D, this is a huge consideration. A small video card means that a very small data set meaning few objects with few polygons and fewer textures can be drawn at a time. A small video card means that the creation process can be slow and downright painful. Of further confusion, many video cards today are shared on the mother board of the computer.

Stay way, way clear of these setups. A separate video card by either ATI or NVidia is really the only way to go when considering a computer system. This will allow for upgrading later new video cards are amazingly cheap these days. Measuring video card speed is a complicated thing, but the most basic measurement has to do with memory size. Put your money into a good video card.

A gaming card is ine no need generally for beginners to use high-end workstation cards. A good video card will ensure that the worklow continues to be smooth, and that textures, forms, and importantly movement is shown quickly and smoothly. I recommend to my students to look at 1 GB cards at the least. I have always had better luck using NVidia cards with Maya. Monitor Strangely, beginners will spend all their extra money on a bigger processor and then scrimp on the monitor.

At the end of the day, you have spent a lot more time looking at your monitor than the CPU. Maya has a lot of tools and screen real estate is a premium. The bigger monitor with the bigger resolution will allow much more space for content and make the size of the tools less important.

Three Button Mouse I mentioned this in the Introduction, but if you skipped over that part let me mention this again. Maya uses three mouse buttons. 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.

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