Introduction to Maya 2012

In this lesson, we'll take a look at how we can cut the flaps out of the wings. And we'll do this on one section. And you can do it on the other one. So we want to have basically two flaps coming out from here. We want these to be separate pieces. And having this as a polygon is going to help us be able to sort or extract those out. So let's hit one on our keyboard to just view this as a strict polygon shape without any smoothing on it. And then we want to decide where we want to actually bring out our flaps. So I think this section right in here is going to be good. But I don't want them to go all the way to the end. So I'm going to go to the insert edge tool to add some resolution here. OK. And then we can use this section as our flap. So we want to select the faces that we're going to be using. So top and bottom, something like that. And in this case, we don't want to actually duplicate them as we did before. We want to actually pull them out of the polygon shape. We want to extract them. So let's go ahead and go to mesh, and let's go to extract. We want to separate the faces. And we'll go ahead and extract those. You can see how those are now separated. If we go into our outliner, we can see that those are still part of kind of this hierarchy. So what we want to do is just hit shift-P to kind of pull those pieces out. And we can select both of those pieces and delete the history on those. So now we have two pieces. But when we work with 3D geometry here in Maya, these pieces of the geometry that we work with is going to be hollow. So that if I go ahead and center the pivot here and move this out of the way, you can see that the geometry has no inside. So what we need to do is now fill that geometry in. So I'm going to just move this out of the way real quickly. And then we can start to fill this in. So there are different ways that we can do this. One way would be to go ahead and just grab these three edges, and then these three edges. And we can actually create a bridge between these. So we go to Edit Mesh Bridge. I want to choose a linear path with no division. So I'll go ahead and bridge that. And that'll bridge that together. Each corresponding edge is bridged to the other edge. Now that closes off these ends, which we can now double click to select that loop. And go to mesh fill hole, and do the same thing over here. Double click. Now to repeat anything that we've done, we can just hit G on our keyboard, and that'll repeat the last thing that we've done. OK. So that closes that geometry off. Now, when we smooth it, it's not going to smooth correctly. So if we go ahead and smooth that, you can see how very smooth that is. So another way that we can start to sharpen up some of these edges is to use creasing. So let's go ahead and just hit three on our keyboard. And now I want to select the edges all the way around here. And we select these edges coming around the bottom. And I also want to select the edges in the corners. OK. So we'll select all these edges coming all the way around, including the edge in the corner. And we're doing this in a smooth mesh preview. OK. And now what we can do is go down to the crease tool. Click on that. And then we want to middle mouse drag to increase the creasing amount. So you can see, as we middle mouse drag, it's tightening up that edge. OK. So that's another option beyond actually just adding more resolution. You can see I had an extra edge selected. So let me make sure to de-select that edge. Make sure we only have those edges selected. Now this is a good alternative to adding all of those edge loops. Because we don't have to add all that geometry in there. Alternatively, we need to make sure that we carry this creasing all the way through. So if we were to transfer this object to another application, it may not know what to do with that creasing. So having the edge loops baked in there can help us with that. And we can also make sure that we've got quads here just by going to our insert edge loop tool, inserting an edge loop right in the center here. And then, using our interactive split, to come in at these points and connect them up. And click there, and connect it right to the end there. OK. And so we now want to do the same thing with this piece. So we want to select the edges. OK. And we can go ahead and bridge those. We can select the end caps here. Go ahead and fill those up. And we just want to do kind of a corresponding action that we did on the other pieces. So we can again insert an edge loop right here in the center. And then use our interactive split tool to come in and attach those, or just draw a line in. So make sure it hits on that point. And then come in and connect it to that point. All right? And we can use creasing on this, or we can come in and, as I said, use edge loops to come in and tighten up those edges if we want to. OK. It just depends on the type of project that you're working on. So now if I smooth that, I zero out our translate Z where we moved it out. And you can see that we now have a flap that we can use there, a separate piece that we can, if we put the pivot in the right spot, we can rotate it around. OK. So we just want to do the same thing over here on this section. Maybe do a small piece here. And just cut that out in the same way. All right, so we'll go ahead and do that. And then in the next lesson, we will come in and actually build some geometry to extend out beneath the fuselage here kind of main engine shape that we'll have some pipes coming off of. So we'll go ahead and look at how we can do that in the next lesson.