Introduction to Maya 2013

In this lesson, we'll start to create the main engines. So for the engines, we need to start by building the body of the engine, so this round cylinder, basically. So what we can do is go ahead and create a NURBS primitive, and let's bring in a cylinder. Now we can move it over into position here. Let's go ahead and do that. So we'll move it over into position. And I want to rotate it in the x, 90 degrees, so it's facing forward. And then we just need to make it the right size. So we want to scale it up until it's in that outer rim that we have there, so that we get the size right. And then I want to actually modify the link, from front to back. And so I'll move it into position here, move it up a little bit. And it's actually rotated a little bit. So we're going to get it close but not exactly. I'm going to leave it at that level of resolution and then go ahead and grab the hole at the back and actually move the geometry back. And so let's go ahead and pull this back. And I want to move it right to this point here. Now, at this point, I'm going to go ahead and scale this down a little bit. And then I want to take this hole, move it back a little, scale it down. This one, the same thing, sot that we've got this tapered effect here. So once we have the overall shape of this, we can now start to add a little bit of resolution to it. Now, before we do that, I actually want to duplicate it. Because we also have an interior piece back hear that we want to create. So I'll go ahead and Control D to duplicate, move that duplicate back, and scale it down a little bit, until it is right where we have that back piece. So it's inside this piece. I want the seam to be on the inside, so I'm actually just going to rotate this 180 degrees. And the same thing with this, I'll go ahead and rotate this 180 degrees, so the seam is on the inside. So now there are few little details that we want to start to add. And we can do that using our isoparms. So we can start to go in here and add an isoparm right in there. And then we need to create some isoparms on the sides, so I'll come in and do that. Start to insert those isoparms. And then, when we select our holes, we can go ahead and scale out those holes a little bit. Now if we really want to get something nice and sharp, we can go ahead and add an additional isoparm, in there, or two. So coming in there and inserting an isoparm And now, maybe, taking those holes and scaling them out a little bit. Maybe we can add another isoparm on the other side as well-- and here. And let's go ahead and insert our isoparms. And then maybe we can take these and scale them out just a little bit, so we get this band around there, something like that. Now for this piece, we'll want to do the same sort of thing. But I want it to be a little bit more drastic, so let me go ahead and insert a few isoparms in here. And we'll just add some that are a little bit closer together. Let's go ahead and that. Let's add one in the center here. And then we can take this isoparm and scale it down a little bit, so we end up with something like that on the back of the engine. And we can start to take these and scale them up a little bit, so it fills in the back of that engine a little bit more. Maybe something along those lines. Now we can start to add some thickness. Now, if we want to add our trim in separate pieces, as we did up here, we can do that. But we can also come in here and add thickness in other ways as well. So we can take the isoparm here and extend that out and add a couple of isoparms right beyond this one. Go ahead and insert those and then take the hole, right at the end, and scale it down. And that's the same effect. We can take the next one and scale it down a little bit, maybe pull it back a little. And it has the effect of giving us that thickness there. And if wanted to add more isoparms in there, we could certainly do that. We can do the same thing on this one at the back here, just adding a few isoparms at the end and then grabbing the hole at the end and scaling that down a little bit. So we end up with something like that. And then we also want to maybe add some trim up here. So we can do this the same way that we did before, grab the isoparm. And we want to go ahead and go to Edit Curves, Duplicate Surface Curve. And let's go ahead and center the pivot. And so we've got a curve. Let's go ahead and duplicate our curve. Bring it forward a little bit. Maybe scale it down a bit. Duplicate that again. Forward and scaled down and then duplicate again, scale down. And this time, we'll start to push it back in. Let's duplicate it one more time and just push it straight back in. Now we'll select from here and just go back the other direction, here. And then our next one would be-- if I can keep these straight-- here, here, and then, finally, the last curve. And we'll go to Surfaces, Loft. And we can create that cap there. And at any time, we could come in and grab one of the lines there and just pull it forward a little bit to create a different effect. So maybe grab this middle one, pull it forward a bit to create a thicker line there. And we've got some trim now for our engine. So now that we have the basic shape of the engine, what we need to do next is to create these fan blades inside here. And it's going to be tedious to create each one individually, but we can use some duplication techniques to make this go a lot faster. So let's go ahead and take a look at how we can start to do that, in the next lesson.