Introduction to Maya 2013

In this lesson, we'll create the gun, using NURBS curves in a slightly different way. So let's go ahead and open this up. And let's create the gun slightly differently. So what I want to do is go to the Side View. You can really do this in any view. But the key is to have one of the axes available. So let's go ahead and turn off our cameras in that particular view. And then, what we want to do is come in and draw out a curve. So to do this, we're going to go to Create, the CV Curve Tool. And I'm going to go ahead and use Snapping to snap those points. So holding down X will enable the grid snapping. And I want to just draw out sort of a profile of what I want my gun to look like on one side of the axis, so just thinking about the right side. So I'll start in the middle. And then, I'll maybe come out here and add a few points. And if you want a piece that's a little bit sharper, add a few points in there and create kind of a barrel. And then, let's go ahead and create kind of a sharper line coming out here and snap that in, then maybe coming down here and coming down like that. Let's go ahead and continue down here. And then, I want to get a larger base coming out. So I'll start to bring this out. Let's ignore our piece here. And then, let's just curve this back in. And I want to end the last point on that axis. Let's actually go ahead and actually just move it up a little bit. So thinking about this. This is going to be kind of a cylindrical piece. Think about this like kind of a base or something like that. And so this is actually the profile of how that's actually going to look. So we can take these points and modify these, kind of pull this in a little bit, maybe bring this in a little. If this is going to be too wide, kind of bring that in a little bit. But right now, this is just a curve, a flat curve stuck up against a particular axis. So to create the geometry what we want to do is-- if we come to the top view, you can kind of see this here. We want to actually spin this curve around this axis. And as it goes, it'll create geometry. So to do that, we'll go to Surfaces, Menu Set, Surfaces. And want to do a Revolve. Well, let's open up the Options. So the first thing you'll see is the Axis Preset. So we want to go along the Y-axis. So that Y-axis is already selected. We'll go ahead and use the Object Pivot. And the degree of that just has to do with the NURBS parametrization. And then, the Start and Sweep Angle-- if we want to go all the way around, we want to go zero to 360. Or we want to have at least 360 degrees in there, whether we start or end at a different angle. If we want to go part way, we would change that to maybe zero to 180 or something like that. We can also change the number of segments. I'm going to go ahead and leave that as is. Everything else is fine. So let's go ahead and hit Revolve. So you can see now what has been created. We've now that used that curve to create a piece of geometry and spun it all the way around and created that piece. Now, we can come in here, because of the history connection. And we can modify the shape, just by moving the points on the curve. So if I move the points on the curve in, the whole shape changes. So I can narrow in the barrel here, if I want to make that a little bit skinnier. Let's go ahead and take this and bring it in a little bit. We'll bring this in a bit as well. Again, I'm not modifying the geometry. I'm modifying the curve that's being used to create this geometry. I can kind of pull this in a little bit, until I get something close to what I want. And if you want to kind of take that, you could look at it come from the side-- if you want to turn your camera back on kind of see how that compares. So this is kind of the look that we're going for. So I think that it needs to be a little bit longer this way. So we'll pull those points down a little bit. And it doesn't have to match exactly. But we'll just get it kind of close here. We can modify it more later. So once we've got it close, then we can come in and actually just take the geometry. We can delete our history. Let's center the pivot. And we could put it in position. But we don't do that quite yet because they're still some elements that we want to add. I actually want to add little cylinders coming around. So I'm going to go ahead and create a NURBS cylinder. And let's bring it up into position. And let's kind of move it off, enlarge it a little bit. And then, I just want to scale it up, so it penetrates in here. So we end up with something along these lines. Let's thin this out a little bit, something like that. So then, we can use our duplicate special to duplicate this all the way around. So we would need to come in. And we could move our pivot and snap that pivot and then use Duplicate Special, come in and reset our Settings. We'll create a copy. We want to rotate it around the Y-axis. And let's just create, let's say, 12. Or actually, let's create one, two, three, four, five, six, seven copies. So that's going to be 45 degrees of rotation, seven copies. We'll duplicate those. OK. Now, let's take all of these. And I don't want to select actually the curve, necessarily. We'll take all those, group them together. Let's center the pivot. And now, we can move it down into position. And the shape is probably going to be a little bit off, since we didn't build it to that. But we can always modify it. So we'll come down here to the side, kind of rotate it down a little bit, and get it in position. If you want to get it to match up exactly, then you can come in here and modify the shape a little bit. So we'll kind of get it close here with that back end and match up this part here. And then, we can kind of take these CVs. And I want to move them based on the object, rather than the world. So I can move along that axis. And then, we can do the same thing here, kind of move this up. And you can see this needs to be maybe a little bit smaller. So we can go ahead and scale that down a little bit. And we can do the same thing here, move it back along the object there. And then, you can add Isoparms in here to create kind of a band where this is being connected up to the turret. And so to do that, we could just go in here, add some Isoparms, add some here and here, and then add a few coming in here. Go ahead and insert Isoparms, take our holes, and start to scale those out, to add that sort of a band there, which you can kind of see. All right. And then, if you want to tighten up any of these areas, you can start to insert some Isoparms and do a little bit of detailing in there as well. So insert that Isoparm, take the whole. And you can start to sharpen that up a little bit. And then, for the turret that's actually attaching it, we can just do something really, really quick. We'll just go ahead and bring a Polygon Primitive Pipe. We'll go ahead and bring this down. Let's enlarge it a little bit. We can play with some of the settings. So you can see that actually needs to be a bit smaller here. And then we want the thickness to be a little bit less, so something like that. And then, we can create a sphere. And the sphere we can use as the pivot. So just bring this down, take this radius up-- so it fits inside of our pipe that we just created-- and move it into position. And then we've got a sort of pivot that we can use. All right. We can tweak the shape of this a little bit more, if we want to. That's kind of the main idea. The next thing that we want to do is to go ahead and add a gas cap here. And we'll also look at how we can start to get a lot of this stuff over to the other side. We've been concentrating just on building these things. But it still looks incomplete. And so we'll look at that and talk about that in the next lesson.