Introduction to Maya 2013

In this lesson, we'll continue to use some polygons to create the grill. So there's some elements that we want to create on the front here. And the first thing that we want to do is drop in this piece right in here. That's going to mirror the piece that we created on the top. So let's go ahead and bring in a cube. And we'll go ahead and just bring it into position here from the front view. We'll move it down a little bit. Let's move it out from the side view so it's in the right spot here and so we can start to shape this. I'm going to go ahead and bring these points up and scale them in a little bit. Go ahead and bring these down and scale them out so it matches up with that bottom shape. Here you can see that we need to bring this point in, probably this point a little bit too. So we end up with something like that. The next thing that I'll do is go ahead and let's select his face. And we want to extrude it up to create this next division. So go ahead and say edit mesh, extrude. We'll pull it straight up to right about there. And let's go and pull this out a little bit. Let's do another extrude and you can repeat that tool just by hitting G. And then we'll extrude this up again. And let's go ahead and scale this relative to the drawing that we see. So go ahead and scale it down a little bit, move it down. And let's go ahead and scale it in this axis as well. And we'll just match it up with the piece that we have there. Now let's go ahead and bevel this to match the top piece. But I'm going to go ahead and straighten this out from the side first. So let's add a bevel to this. Let's actually freeze our transformations first and then we'll add a bevel. And then on the bevel offset, we'll increase that amount. And if you don't want to bevel all of the edges, you can select the edges that you want to bevel. Now we want to create these teeth-like pieces on the front. And one of the ways that we can do this is to actually just draw out a polygon from scratch, rather than creating a primitive and modifying the primitive. So to do this, we're going to go to mesh, create polygon tool. Let's go and open it up, and I'm just going to reset it. We'll use the default settings. And now I just want to place a point wherever we want a point on our mesh. So let's say we're making this piece right in here. So let's go ahead, place a point here, here. Anywhere we're going to have a change of direction. So maybe right in here. And we'll want to have the same points on the other side as well. And then I'll just hit enter to finish that off. We can take the points and move them around. And right now, this is n-gon, meaning it's got more than four sides. There's triangles, three sides. Quads have four sides, which is what you're typically going to be working with. And then n-gons have any number of sides over four. So I'm going to go ahead and turn this into a four sided piece of geometry. Right now it's just a flat n-gon. And we could see that if we move it up into position here. So just an n-gon. What we want to do is now create a connection between those points that we had to make this be a model that consists of four sided pieces. So what we can do is use the interactive split tool. And you can see we get a little indicator. We can click on that and then it'll give us a little indication of where that's actually going to create the next split. And so we can go ahead and split in here and create that split. And you can see that that didn't really work that time. We got a little extra point because of the mis-tries that I had before. So you just want to be aware of that. But there you can see that we've got now a quad on the top. And we need to do the same thing down here. And if you want to turn this on, go into your interactive split tool. You can change the number of magnets that you have-- which is how it pops-- and your magnet tolerance. And then you can also choose to constraint it to the edges, which I definitely want to do. So go ahead and drop this in. And now we've got something that consists of quads. So now we can add a little bit of shape to this. So from the front, it may look OK. Let me jump into the front here. We can take this down a little bit. But we want to actually add a little bit more shape to this. So let's take these bottom points and let's actually move them in here. We take these and move them in, and take these and move them in a little bit more. Now let's take these points on the sides and just move them in a little bit. Let's actually take these in a bit as well. So we end up with something like this. So now we just want to do the same thing on the other pieces. Now we have the pieces on the top and bottom. And I actually want to make these one piece. So you can draw them out as one piece, or we could take our top piece. You can see we've got the points here. Let me turn off the camera for a second. And turn back on our grid. So let's go ahead and just snap these points to the grid. So we'll take these points, I'm going to hold down x and snap. Now you can see it's snapping, but it's not really doing what we want it to do. So I'm going to go into the move settings. And we want to change the move axis to world. And let's go ahead and do that again. And now you can see it snapping right down. I might get rid of that extra point there. Now what we can do is go ahead and mirror this. And I'm going to go to mesh, mirror. And this time we're going to mirror it in the y direction. So minus y. Mirror that down. And you can see, we've now got that piece down here that we can manipulate. So we'll go ahead and turn off our grid, turn on the camera, and we can see where this one is supposed to go. So go ahead and pull this one down. And move some of these points over, 'cause it's not exactly the same as the top. And then we can clean this up, bring it down a little bit. So if you want to draw that out from the beginning, you can. Or you can draw the top part and mirror it over. It's up to you. So then we end up with something like this. And we can pull this-- obviously needs to come in in here. And then push that one back in, make that nice and straight. And then pull that in so it's at a little bit of an angle here. So once we have one of these, you can use this and duplicate it over to the other side, or duplicate it over for the next one. So you make this one, and then you can just Control D to duplicate, move it over. And then all you have to do is from the front and side, match up the shape of that. And then to actually add the thickness, all we need to do is do an extrude. Push that back a little bit. And rather than beveling, this let's say we're going to smooth it. So hit three and it gets really soft. So what we want to do is go ahead and use our insert edge loop tool to add edge loops anywhere where we want to have a sharper edge. So thinking about all along these lines here on the sides. Anywhere we want a sharp edge. In here where we've got a division. Down here all the way at the end. And then when we hit three, we get a nice, softer looking object. So you just want to do the same thing on these. So there's one more here, and one more in the corner. Just the same thing. So I'll let you go ahead and experiment with that. And then we'll come in in the next lesson and take a look at how we can build the back of the canopy. So just do the same thing here. You can draw it out and mirror it, or you can draw out the whole thing, or you can just use the duplicate that you have there and try to fill in these areas. So you can come in from the front and match the shape up. And then also match it up from the side. So you can tell, it goes along with this shape here. But use a little bit of artistic freedom and judgment to get it looking the way that you want. So we'll go ahead in the next lesson and finish up the back of the canopy.