Introduction to Maya 2013

In this lesson, we'll build the strut going along the front of the nose of the jet. So for this, we're going to start with a polygon cube. So we'll Create, Polygon Primitive, Cube. And let's go ahead and bring it up into position here. Let's go ahead and take the width, height, and depth up a little bit. And if we come up here to the top, we can kind of see the location of that. So I'm going to go ahead and bring it up in here, let's increase that height, width, and depth a little bit more. So something like that. And we aren't going to be smoothing, so we're not going to be losing any of that volume. So let's go ahead and extend out this cube. So I'm going to go and take the front and pull it all the way out here, take this and pull it all the way back. And then I want to start to add some divisions in here. Now before we do that, let's actually shape this from the front view. So we'll take the bottom and let's take this out a little bit. And let's actually move it up, so you see the corners of that here. OK. And let's actually extrude down the bottom of that, so we get a little bit of geometry down there. So we'll go ahead and take the face of the bottom. And let's go ahead and do an Extrude, and we'll just pop that straight down into the surface there. OK. So that's what we've got so far, this sort of rough shape. So let's add some divisions in here so we that we can start to add these details. So we'll go into our Insert Edge Loop tool, and I'm just going to make sure to reset it, just in case we've got that Multiple Edge Loops on. And then we can come in here and start to add edge loops where we've got these divisions. So coming in here, we can add edge loops right across there, and then one right in here as well. All right. So now we want to actually create a little bit of an extrude there, so I want to select the faces, here, here, and here. So we've got those faces all selected. Let's do an extrude, and we'll push this in, so something like that. OK. Now you can see that we have these faces at the bottom. If you ever want to look at something by itself, you can do a wireframe, and you can see here that I didn't have that bottom face selected. So if we ever want to look at something by itself, we can go ahead and do an Isolate Select, and that will allow us to see all around it. So if I go ahead and select those again and I check that, now I can look underneath it and see, OK, I've got everything that I need selected. So let's do an Extrude now, and do the same thing. We'll push it down so we get something like that. OK. And you can see that we're getting a little bit of an issue on the inside there. Let's undo that back. And I just want to check these faces here. OK. So you can see that because of the undos, there was an issue where we actually had some faces that were extruded, and you could see that based on the fact that I could grab one of those points and pull it off, and it wasn't connected like this. So any time you're doing an extrude and you undo it, you just want to make sure to go back and check and make sure that it's not extruded and it's just sitting on top of there. Because you know, when we do an extrude, it asks us to pull the faces off. If we just do an extrude and we don't pull those faces off, they're just going to be sitting there, and you're going to come up with some geometry that's not ideal. You're going to have some issues with it. So that was kind of the problem that we were having there with that strangeness. So again, let's try this one more time. And let's go ahead and extrude this in. And let me actually grab-- I don't want to get the faces on the end, necessarily, so we'll go ahead and delete those. So try this again. There we go, that looks much better. And you can see we can kind of match that up with the artwork on the side. OK? Now I'll select those polygons on the very end and delete those. OK. So once we've got that, I'm going to go ahead and take the front part of this, and I'll just grab the polygon at the bottom here. And I want to extrude it down. So I'll extrude it straight down to right here. We've got that line there. And then I want to repeat that extrude and then bring this down. And I'll actually bring it in and then we can activate our Transform tools and scale it down in this direction, and then also in this direction. So we get something coming down along the front. We can go ahead and turn off our Isolate Select, and you can see what that's starting to look like. So we've got that piece sitting up on the top there. Now the front is supposed to be angled, so we'll go ahead and take those points. And if you want to just rotate them and move them forward, we can do that. Take this and move it back, just so we have something that is fairly straight there. Now we're going to leave this as a polygon. And as we talked about before, you can see how the edges are really, really sharp. So let's add a bevel to this. So let me go ahead and freeze our transformations, and let's go ahead and go to Edit Mesh, and let's add a bevel. Again, we will go to the bevel and we'll change the offset amount until we get something that looks a little bit more like what we want. I think that looks pretty good. You might want to increase it a little bit. But you just knock off that really, really sharp edges, and you can see now we're getting kind of a highlight on the edges, which is what we want. All right. So now that we've got the nose-piece in here, the next thing that we want to do is start to detail this grille area. So we'll take a look at how we can start to do that in the next lesson.