Introduction to Maya 2012

In this lesson we'll use polygons to build the engine. So let's go ahead and build a piece kind of extending out under here. It's going to be sort of this exposed engine with some mechanical pieces that we can see. And so to do this, let's go ahead and start-- instead of with NURBS, and instead of converting that to a polygon, let's go ahead and start with a polygon. And so again, we'll start with a primitive. This time we'll go to polygon primitive. Instead of using something like a shape, like a circle, we'll go ahead and use, let's say, a cylinder. We want to get it to be as close as we can to the final shape. Now you can see our cylinder located down here. We can again go into the poly cylinder create node here. We can increase the radius, so you can see that gives us a larger cylinder. We can also increase the height there, so we can change a lot of these different values here. We can also go in and just rotate this if we want to. And let me go ahead and just rotate it 90 degrees, and I'll just pull it back. And I wanted to kind of extend down a little bit, so scale it up and then let's go ahead and scale it back here-- so maybe something like that. I want to pull it in a little bit closer than what we have here on the back. And I also want to dial down the resolution here. So go back into our cylinder node here, and instead of 20 subdivisions, let's go ahead and take this down to something a little bit more manageable, maybe something like 12. So now once we have this base, we can start to manipulate this. Now one thing that I want to do is I want to have this sort of flat up here on the top, and then I want to angle this bottom piece. Now I want to be able to manipulate this back, and right now we have a pole. A pole is basically where all the edges come into one single point. Now we can redraw topologies simply by deleting edges and redrawing them back in. So I'm going to go ahead and just take all of these edges-- I'm going to leave the ones that are straight up and down and straight across, we can go ahead and delete those. Now the next thing we can do, you can see we have n-gons here. We can go up to our Interactive Split tool, or use our Split Polygon tool. Come in and add those edges in, and you can see we have quad, quad, here, here. You can do the same thing here. And now the end of this cylinder is much cleaner than what we had before with a single pole. It'll subdivide if we want to smooth it in a much cleaner way. So now I want to angle this in. The easiest way to do that would be to go ahead and take these points and just pull those in, and then pull those points in, and then this bottom one. We can make sure that that aligns by going into the side view here. And you can see how we can make sure everything lines up as much as possible. Everything is on a line there, so we have a little bit of an angle going on. Now also, I want to be able to smooth this, but I still want to have some of the hard edges. And you can see how this extends into the cockpit there. I'm going to go ahead and just move this down a little. And I want to add some divisions so that I can actually take out this geometry. Right now we don't have those, so I'm going to use the Insert Edge Loop tool. I'll just insert an edge loop right in there. And that will give us the ability to come in and select those faces and delete those. And then those two faces on the sides, delete those. So that just gives us room in here for our cockpit. We can also get rid of these faces on the end. So we're really only concerned about what we're actually going to be seeing. We can go ahead and scale this in just a little bit if we want to make it fit a little bit more within this piece. We can also grab the CVs of our object down on the bottom, and start to scale these out so that it will fit inside there. So we could modify both of these objects. Now if we want to smooth this-- right now if we smooth it, we just get kind of a blob. So we need to start defining some of these edges. I want this to be a hard edge here, so we'll use our Insert Edge Loop tool to add some edge loops to sharpen that up. I also want to have this end sharpened up a little bit more. So we can start to look at that, and see that that's starting to sharpen this up a little bit. I also want to come in here and take these faces, and I want to create a little bit of a piece that's sticking out, so we're going to use Extrude. We want to make sure that this Keep Faces Together option is on. We'll keep our eye on that as we go forward because we're going to be using it for something else. So we'll go ahead and extrude, and we can scale this end and create our base. Extrude again by hitting the G key to repeat that last command. Pull this out a little bit, and instead of inserting an edge loop, we can just do a very short extrude and then repeat that-- it has the same effect. You can see we have a line very close there. So we can do that, and then let's go ahead and repeat that. By doing these little extrudes again, same effect as we would get inserting edge loops after the fact. All right, so now we get something like that. Now if we want to kind of sharpen this up a little bit, we can add another edge loop right in here, it will help us sharpen things up. Now I want to add little holes here, and I want to do the same sort of thing we just did, but I want to do it on each individual face. And to do that very quickly, we can just turn off our Keep Faces Together, and that will extrude each face separately. So do an extrude, and now when I scale it down, it scales down each of those faces. You can see that they're all extruded separately. OK, we can now go in and do the same thing we did, but we're doing it now on four faces simultaneously, hitting G every time to repeat that. And so now when we smooth, we get these holes at the back. And we'll fill in this with more geometry coming in, we'll have some exhaust there as well. I think I also want to sharpen up this edge down here, so I'll just insert another edge loop. I can smooth it and see what that looks like. So it gives us a little bit more of an interesting shape there. You can do whatever you want on this piece to make it fit with the look that you're trying to go for. I'm going to add a little bit of detail up here. And to do that I need to add a little bit more resolution because we don't have it right now, so I add an edge loop. I can hit Face Selection with a right click. And then shift click on the next one, and then I'll just double click on that and select that entire loop, and then we can extrude that out. Now remember, you want to turn this back on. It's dangerous to forget that that's off, and then start extruding. And you start extruding objects based on the individual faces rather than the group as you would expect, and you can run into some issues there. So I'll just sharpen that edge up, a nice little edge there. And if we want to come in and squeeze that together to make it a little bit more flattened off we could do that so it's not circular. But that's kind of a starting point for the base. What we want to do next is actually add some pipes. So, some sort of external engine detail coming in here and connecting up with the engine. And so, let's go ahead and do that using some NURBS Curves, and using a NURBS Extrude as well. So we'll go ahead and do that in the next lesson.