Introduction to Maya 2013

Now, let's model some geometry for the back of the canopy. So now you can see that I've just finished those out, just as we did with the first one, and then the same thing with the second one. These are what mine look like, but yours don't have to look exactly the same. So what we want to do now is add some geometry back here on the end of the canopy. So this solid piece-- to anchor that. And so I want to use a polygon primitive cylinder this time. It's going to bring it up and bring it into position. Obviously it's a little too small right now, so we can either use the radius and the height or we can just scale it up. We also want to rotate it 90 degrees and the X. And then I want to get it into a little bit better position. So obviously now, the radius is a little bit too big now. So we can go ahead and bring that down. And I want the cylinder to be about halfway at this point. So it's actually not quite big enough. So I want it to be the half cylinder. So you see something like that. Now, the subdivisions you can change if you wanted to make those higher or lower. You could do that. I'll go ahead and leave those as-is. Now, I do want to create some subdivisions on the caps. Right now we don't have any of those, so I'm going to create a couple of subdivisions there. And, I also want to create some subdivisions on the height. So we'll create two, basically. Let's go ahead now and start to shape this a little bit. So some of these polygons I'll be able to get rid of, so let's do that in a second. So I'm going to go ahead and take these and scale them out, and then I want to actually scale them up a little bit. So I want to have this rim here. And if we have to scale the whole thing down a little bit to get that, we can. And a little bit of a bevel there. We can now get rid of the faces that are going to be on the interior of this, so go ahead and get rid of those. And then if we need to pull in-- pull down some of these points, we can do that. If we need to move this up a little bit, we can do that. We just want to try to match it up a little bit more. We could also add a little bit more detail here. So we could come in and bring some geometry from these and go ahead and extrude that forward. Give a little bit more detail there than just the edges. Something like that. We could also take the geometry from the top. Add a little bit of a detail there by extruding it straight up. Maybe something like that, something for that fin to go into. We can come in here and start to extrude in some of these areas down here to make a little bit of detail at the back. So if we wanted to come in and extrude those sections in, and then repeat that extrude and push them in just to add a little bit of interesting detail in here, we could do the same thing up here. I'll extrude that in and then repeat that, push it in. So you get a little bit of detail on the back there. Now, you can see we have our trim that's extending back along here. So if we go ahead and isolate that-- if we want to actually get rid of a portion of this. This is a NURBS piece of geometry so we can't just select these and delete them. We want to actually take the isoparms where we want to cut them. And I'll Shift-select over there. And then we want to go into Services, Edit NURBS, Detach Surfaces. We'll turn off View Selected, and now we've got these all separated. So I can delete those, and we're left with just the piece that we need. Same thing here. We don't need all of this geometry on here, but when it's a polygon, all you have to do is go in and select it, and then you can delete it. So coming in here, selecting those pieces that we don't need, allows us to save on polygons. We don't need all that detail in there. Same thing on the interior of this. You can see we don't need all these, so I'm just clicking and then Shift-clicking, Shift-double-clicking rather, to select that entire loop. And then once it's disconnected, I can just double click on this and it will select the whole connected piece and I can delete it. So just eliminating any of those unnecessary pieces. Now, you can see how some of this is a little bit soft. The normals are what tells Maya how smooth to make this visually. So you can see that even though this is a low polyfaceted piece because the angle between these faces is small, it tries to smooth between those, which in a lot of cases is what we want. But in this case I'm going to go and play with the smoothing, or the normals. And let's go to normals. And if we harden all the normals, you can see that it's very faceted. You can see where every face is. If we smooth everything-- Soften Edge-- everything is smooth. So everything is smooth between. There is really no definition. So what we want to do is set a particular angle. So any edge or any two faces that are within a certain parameter or angle value will get smooth, and anything above that will be hard. So let's set our normal angle. Let's just set it to three. What that does is harden some of the edges and some of the edges it keeps soft. Let's go ahead and decrease our angle a little bit. So let's set it to maybe 20. And there you can see that we get smoothness along the surface here, but these edges are hard, which is more like what I want. And if you want to bevel those, you can too. All right, so we also want to create some pieces here on the side. And I can do that just by either adding a cube or I can just take one of these polygons. And let's take maybe this one. Let's go ahead and duplicate the face, bring it off of the surface a little bit. And then we can come in here and shape it a little bit more. Bring this all the way back. We create our shape. If we wanted to add another edge in here with our Insert Edge Loop tool to give us a little bit more resolution to work with, we can do that as well. And then we can take this and add some thickness to it. Just like that. And then, using our Insert Edge Loop tool, knowing that we're going to be smoothing it, we can add a little bit of resolution to make it nice and sharp. And over here in the end as well. And then when we smooth it, it will be nice and sharp. And then we can go ahead and center the pivot, and duplicate it, and move it down for the one below that. And then just do a little bit of shaping to make that fit. So grabbing these points, moving those out, we get the shape that we want here. You can see both of those probably need to be pushed in a little bit more. But I think that'll be fine. So that's how we can add the back end of our canopy. So it's getting there, starting to look like something. The next lesson, we wanted to take a look at how we can start to build the fin. So we'll build a large fin on the back and then maybe a couple of fins up here on the wings. So let's go ahead and take a look at that in the next lesson.