Introduction to Maya 2012

In this lesson we'll combine polygons and curves to create an interesting piece for our jet. So this piece we want to have extends off of the front and has a nice, almost decorative, feel. But it could be functional, too, kind of helping us to cut through the air. So what we want to do is start with a polygon base and use a curve to pull geometry out from that. So to begin with, we'll use polygon primitive. So we'll go to Create, Polygon Primitives, and let's use a cube. So we haven't really used a cube yet. So go ahead and bring this up. And we want to scale it up, match the size of everything else. So we'll go into our create node, our polycube node there, and just size this up a bit. All right. Go ahead and bring it up here. Now I want it to follow the curvature of this a little bit. So I need to have a few more divisions. We can set those over here. Now if we know the divisions already when we initially create the primitive, we can go ahead and set those in the option box, as well. And so let's go ahead and set maybe four divisions. And we can go ahead and widen that up a bit. And let's do a little bit of shaping on this. So I want to be sure that I'm done adding divisions before I start moving points around. And so let's go ahead and add-- let's just add one along the depth. Now we can take the vertices on this side, take those points and we'll just move them down. Take those middle points and just move them up slightly, just so it follows along a little bit more with the curvature of our fuselage there. Now for the top, I want this to be a little bit more pointed. And so I'm going to go ahead and just scale all of this in. And let's take this center point, or this center line, and move it up a bit. Let's take these ones on the outside and move them down. So we end up with something that looks like that. And so what we want to do is take the front of this and extrude it out. But I want to have a little bit more control over the shape of this, the direction. I want to really not just extrude it out straight away. So we can actually use a curve. So we'll go into the side view. And let's use a curve to draw out where we want this to go. So we'll go to Create CV Curve tool. Let's start at the front face of this. And then we'll just start to pull this out. If we hold down Shift, we can constrain this to a straight line. And then as we come out here, maybe this is a little bit more of a curve to it. And maybe something like that. We can come in here and shape this a little bit so maybe move these points back in. All right. We curve that down a little bit. Let's move the entire curve up just a little, so it's kind of in the center of these faces here. All right. Let's move this out just a little bit. And let's move the whole thing. Give it a little bit more space out here. So once we have our curve, the next thing that we can do is actually extrude based on this curve. So we'll select these faces on the front. And we want to go to our polygons menu set. And we have Extrude. We want to make sure Keep Faces Together is on. Before we extrude, we want to Shift Select the curve. So now we have the curve selected. We'll go to extrude. And you can see now it's extruded based on that curve. Now, we only have one division, so it's pretty much just a straight line to the end of that point. So what we can do is go down to our Channel Box. Go down to or Extrude. And you can see that we have a Taper. We also have a Divisions. So you can choose the Divisions. Insert to increase the number of divisions. We can also taper this down. So we want this to thin itself out. So we can use Taper to taper that down as it comes down to the end. So we end up with something a little bit more like that. So maybe 0.3, 0.2, something like that. And so we can not only get the curvature of that curve with our extrude, but we can also taper it down from one end to the other. So we get a nice smooth taper down to the end. Let's try the same thing down here on the bottom. So we can either grab the geometry that we have here. We can go ahead and create a new cube. And this one we'll put down here a little bit further forward of this. And I want to give it the same resolution, so we'll give it resolution of four. And I want to shape it the same way, so I'll make this a bit bigger. So we'll select those vertices and move them up into the surface. We'll see it here. So just create sort of that curvature there. All right. So something like that. Take it down a little bit. so we get a very similar shape down here. And let's go ahead and create another curve. Now this one's going to be a little bit more complex. So let's go ahead and go to Create CE Curve tool. And so we'll come down here and start at this point, start to bring that curve. And then let's go ahead and make sort of a point down here. And then come up maybe here. Add a couple of points and then create a nice curve coming up and ending right about there. Now we can come in here and sort of sharpen up any of these areas. Or we can wait until we have our polygon shape to do that. So go ahead and just make this a little bit more smooth. Down here we can make this a bit sharper. And looking at this, I want to make this a little bit more-- extend out a little bit more. So we'll go ahead and just pull this out a bit. It will be easier on you when you get this shape the way that you want it before you go in and create your piece there. Let's go ahead and make this a little bit more of a smooth curve down to this point. So maybe something more like that. And then we'll just do the same thing where we take the faces and the curve. We go ahead and extrude sure that. We need to add our divisions. And we'll probably need to add a few divisions in there. And then we can taper it down, as well. And You'll notice that we have an issue down here. We can try to solve that by taking this curve and modifying the curve a little bit to clean that up. You can see where that sort of overlaps. So that's one reason why you may want to wait to get those tight edges. But we can fix that by just going in on the polygon state, with the polygons here, grabbing this vertices and sort of moving them out of the way. So you can see where this sort of overlaps. And we can start to bring this out. And you may need to come in and rotate that a little bit. But we can start to clean that up. You can see that there. So once we've got both of these done here-- we've got the basic shapes built out, we can combine these together. So to do that, you can see we have two polygon shapes here. So what we can do is go to Mesh, Combine. And now they're one polygon shape. Now we want to actually connect these two. So we can take these faces and these faces. There's a number of options for us here. We could bridge the geometry together, which would create new geometry between these. We could delete these and just merge the corresponding vertices together. So a number of different ways that we could do this. Let's try just deleting these. And then let's take each corresponding point. So this point's a lower corner. This point's a corner. So we'll go now to Merge and merge those together. And that just mergers those points together. And we can grab these and do the same thing. Now if we have points that are very close to each other, we could grab them all at the same time and just use the threshold number to actually combine those together. Here we can go ahead and just merge two points. And it knows that those are the only two points we have to worry about. And then just zip this up. Just a couple of more to go. And then now that's one piece. Now we can come into the side. And obviously we need to do a lot of tweaking of these points to get the shape that we want. So I want to have a nice sharp shape out here. So I'm going to pull that out. And so even though we've disconnected from using our curve, we still have the ability now to create the shape that we want here. And we can clean up these areas. Make sure we have a nice sharp corner in here. I'm moving some of these lines closer in. So we'll go ahead and tweak this shape just a little bit on this new piece of geometry that we have. And in the next lesson, we'll take a look at going ahead and finishing this, so adding a little bit of detail on the inside, and also adding some detail over here at the front of the canopy. So we'll go ahead and do that in the next lesson.