Introduction to Maya 2012

In this lesson we'll create some brackets on top of the piece that we just created. So again these are retro decorative pieces. And we're going to use this piece to actually create those. And so let's pick a couple of spots here. So maybe these two here. So selecting those faces, and then also maybe these two. So just dragging across and selecting those. Now want to do our polygons menu set. And let's duplicate those faces. OK and then pull them out in the z. So just pull them out a little bit so they're sitting off the top of the surface there. Could turn on our wire frame unshaded to see them a little bit better. Now we can shape these if we want. So assuming this is going to be the outer portion, we can come in and make them a little bit sharper. Change the curve a little bit, change the shape a little bit. Com in here and modify that. Now we want to add some detail coming down on the side. So I'm going to take both of these edges here on this one. Let's go ahead and extrude those down. We'll change our axis so we can just pull them straight down in the y. So they're almost touching with the surface here. Let's go ahead and extrude those again. And this time we'll pull them out. In the z, change the axis, pull them down in the y so that they're flowing along the side there. And then we'll take this back edge that we've created an extrude that straight back. So extruding that straight back, we can scale it out a little bit. Move it down into the surface. OK. And then we can take these points, modify these points a little. So you get a little bit more of a point there. Pull those back. And now I want to add a little bit of thickness to this. Right now it's just a shell. And so I'm going to go to extrude with nothing selected. And then push those back down and in. It's OK if it penetrates a little bit. Now smoothing that out, you can see that it is all penetrating down inside there. So send our pivot in, just move it up just a little. So we get something like that. We can also sharpen up those edges. You can see how that's flat, but it's not when we smooth it. So we'll go into insert edge loop tool. And start to add a little bit of detail in there to tighten up those edges. It'll give you something like that. If you want this edge to be really tight in here, can insert edge loops there. If you want this corner to be tight, we could do the same thing. We could also-- if we're going to be adding edge loops on either side of the loop, instead of doing that we can just use the offset edge loop tool. That allow us to, if I click on this edge, it will allow us to add edge loops on either side with one motion. OK, so we could com in here and add edge loops. And that will allow us to tighten up that edge there. And so it ends up with something like that. Now we can do the same thing here to create this piece. Again, do a little bit of our shaping if we want to add a little bit to this. We can take these points and move them around a little. Move those up slightly. And do the same thing here where we take our edges on the bottom, go ahead and extrude those straight down. And then do another extrude, pull that out slightly. And then down onto the surface. Take our edges back here, and go ahead and extrude those straight back. And we'll scale them out just a little so they're right outside there. Now for both of these we can go ahead and just scale those down. And then we want to give thickness to this. So extrude with nothing selected. Give it a little bit of thickness. We can go back in if it's too smooth, and again add those edge loops. Undo that. Go back in and insert our edge loops here. There we go. And then add edge loops on either side of here. We can use our offset edge loop on this if we want to, as we saw earlier. Let's take the whole thing and lift it up a bit, so center the pivot to move it straight up. Can hit three to smooth it. OK. I want these to overlap a little. So I'm going to actually take these points and move them straight back until they're underneath the one behind it. It just adds a little bit of detail to the jet. So it's not just one solid line, kind of breaks up that silhouette a little bit. Gives us these nice little jagged lines here that I think will help it look a little bit better. So use the geometry that we already had, we were able to duplicate those faces, bring them off the surface, and then go ahead and extrude some pieces out of that. And then add thickness to it. And that just helps so you don't have to come in and bring in a whole new piece and try to match it up with an existing shape. You can just duplicate the faces and you already get that sort of triangle shape that we have here that matches up with that. You don't have to worry about matching that up. So keep in mind that you can do that. You can use objects that you already have in your scene to create other objects that may have similar shapes. So the next thing that we want to look at is to actually add a little bit of detail down here on the bottom. Some sort of pieces coming up along the side. So we'll go head and do that in the next lesson.