Introduction to Maya 2013

In this lesson, we'll take our new NURBS piece of geometry and modify it and shape it a little bit. So let's take a look at some of the ways that we can start to modify this as a piece of geometry. Now, it still has what's called a history connection to the curves. So that again-- and we kind of looked at this earlier, but-- if I modify these curves, the resulting shape will change. So you can see that I've got this where this is sort of more of a circle shape, but it's transitioning very rapidly to what's more of a square shape. And so I want to give it a little bit more room to transition. So I'm going to take this curve that we added here and kind of move this point up a little bit to kind of straighten that out. And let's go ahead and take also these two points on the sides, and kind of move this up. You can see because of the way that it calculates these, that it's actually modifying the shape in the back as well because of how that curve is changing. Now, I can also come in here from the side view, and you can kind of see here-- I can sort of straighten out the top. I want the top to be fairly straight. And so I can come In here and select this curve as well and start to bring it down just a little bit so it kind of straightens everything out a little. And I can come in and get that curve on the back and just make sure that it's pretty straight. Now again, I'm manipulating the curves, and the curves are in turn manipulating the loft-- the loft of geometry. But we can also start to manipulate the geometry itself. So to get rid of this history connection, all we have to do is select Object. And we can go to Delete By Type-History. And now when I select this curve, you can see that there's no connection at all to our geometry. So if we don't want to see those curves right now we can go ahead and turn off under Show-NURBS Curves, and now we're left with the geometry itself. So what I want to do is go ahead and look at how we can start to add resolution to this piece. Now as a NURBS piece of geometry-- and you can-- we'll talk about this in more detail in the introduction to modeling-- but as a NURBS piece, this is basically a flat sheet that's folded in on itself. So the thicker green line here? You can see that that's where the division is happening. That's where it's divided. And I'm going to go ahead and move that division to the bottom by going into Component mode. And this time I'm going to select "Isoparm," which are basically these lines. Now we can't really shape the geometry using these lines. It's more for the construction of them. But if I go ahead and select that bottom line-- and I'll go up here to Edit NURBS, and I want to go to Detach Surfaces-- I can move that seam down to the bottom. Now we can also use I support arms to add resolution. So you can see we have this long area as open here. And I want to add some isoparm. So I can just click and drag from one of these, and it'll leave a little yellow dotted line there. I'll hold down Shift and drag another one out. And then one more. Now once we have those, we actually have to add them. So we'll go to Edit NURBS and go to Insert Isoparms. And that inserts a little bit of detail there. We can do the same thing up here. Come in here, and we'll insert an isoparm here and here. Go ahead and say, Insert Isoparms. So we can start to make that a little bit more even. Right now this NURBS piece of geometry is really, really thin. There's basically no thickness at all. And we want to give the illusion that there is a little bit of thickness. So we can do this by extracting curves from this piece which is really nice. Remember we used curves to actually create this, but we can now actually use curves or extract curves from this. Now the curves that we have already are actually still there. We'll go ahead and use the existing curve on the front one, and then we'll extract one from the back. So we've got the existing curve here. We want to create something that is thick. And so we'll go ahead and duplicate this curve. And we'll just think about using a loft. So we'll bring it forward here and scale it down a little bit. Then we'll make another duplicate of this one. We'll kind of scale this down a little bit and move it forward. And then we'll duplicate it again. And this time we'll kind of move it back in here and scale it down a little bit more. So now if we select our curves in the correct order -- which would be this curve at the base, the first curve we duplicated, then this one, and then the one is going all the way back-- and we choose to do a loft now, you can see that we can create what's sort of like a rim. And we turn off our wireframe. And let's turn off our curves as well. So you can see we've created a little bit of a thick rim here. And you can look up here to see the thickness of that, so you may need to make it a little bit thicker, but that's the main idea. Now for the back, we have a curve already that's back here. But we can also create a curve. So let me go ahead and hide this curve. So now we don't have a curve here anymore, but what we do have is this isoparm. And so we can go ahead and select this particular isoparm. And now what we can do is to go ahead-- and we want to go to Edit Curves-Duplicate Surface Curve, and that'll actually extract a curve right from this. And you can do this at any point along this. It doesn't have to be at an isoparm. It can be at any point along this surface, which is one of the nice things about working with NURBS. So now we have this curve. Let's go ahead and delete the history of the curve. And I'm going to go to Modify-Center Pivot. And then we'll do the exact same thing. So we'll duplicate this, move it out, scale it down a little bit, duplicate it again, scale it down a little bit and move it out, and then duplicate it one more time and move it in and scale it in. And then again, we just want to make sure that we select our curves in the correct order. So we'll select going this direction. And then we just want to do another loft. And there you can see by turning off our curves and also making sure our wireframe is off, you can see we've now created a bit of thickness there along the ends, which is what we want. We could also start to come in and add a little bit of sharpness here. So you can see that we've got this real smooth curve here. But maybe I want to add a little bit more sharpness here? Well, what we can do is start to add isoparms closer together. And so we'll come in here and add another isoparm kind of right in here. And Edit NURBS-Insert Isoparms. And then if I right click and go to Hole, it'll give me the option to select sort of a ring around this, and I'll select this hole. And then I can scale it. Or I can just select the points at the bottom going into the side view. If I want to keep that top even, I can just select these new points at the bottom the kind of move them up. And if you add more isoparms, you'll get something that is even a little bit tighter than that. So I can now come in here, modify the shape a little bit, kind of smooth it out, come in here, pull this down a little, and just get a nice shape from front to back. And so you can come in there and modify it as well. I want to have that nice hump there on the side. So you can shape it based on the control vertex. You can shape it based on the hole. You can add resolution using isoparms. but you can't move the isoparms. You're going to be moving the holes or the points themselves. So once we've got thickness added here to our fuselage and we've got it shaped a little bit more, the next thing that I want to do is to build this bit of geometry underneath here. For that, we'll use polygons, which are going to be a little bit different than what we've looked at so far. So let's go ahead and do that in the next lesson.