Introduction to Maya 2012

In this lesson, we'll create some raised panels for our fuselage. So let's do this by taking the fuselage that we've got and creating a polygon version of this. We can do this by going to Modify and Convert. Let's go to NURBS To Polygons. And before, we tried to make a polygon object that resembled, as far as resolution goes, this object. But now we want to make one that is a little bit more high resolution. So let's actually change the number in the U and the V. We've got this set to Quads, General, Per Span Number of Isoparms. And so let's set this to three. So we'll get three divisions in there. Let's go ahead and tessellate this. So you can see here, we've got our polygon version of this. And you can see it's much higher resolution. So now what we can do is start to take some of these pieces and use these as panels. So the first thing I'm going to do is I want this to be symmetrical. So I know that I can come in here and delete half of this so we'd only have to worry about half of it. So I'll go ahead and select Faces on one side of the axis here. You can see how we've got a few of the faces up at the top we don't need. You can see where we've got some of the curves, how we've got a little bit of tessellation there where we've got end gaunts created. That's OK. Same thing down here. We don't need those. And so what we want to do now is define where we want our panels to be. So I think I want to have a raised panel down here, so I'm just going to select those polygons. And you can see that that's selected there. I'm just using this NURBS as a guide still. If you want to turn that off, you can turn off NURB Surfaces. And so I want to have a panel right down there, and then I also want to have one up here in the back extending back from the wing. And I wanted to extend up in this direction, so maybe something like that. So if those are the panels, we want to actually select the inverse of this. So a real quick way to do that is to just hold down Shift and drag across and that'll select the inverse, so basically everything but those polygons that we had selected. And now we can get rid of those by just hitting Delete. Now we can get our NURB surface back. We can take our polygon panels and go to our Polygon Menu Set, go ahead and extrude those to add the thickness to them. Something like that. If you want them to be really sharp, you can leave them like this. If you smooth them, you can see we get something that is a little bit smoother. So it all depends on the look that you're going for. If you want to sharpen up this, just as we learned you can use creasing, or we can come in and use your Insert Edge Loop tool to start to add some edge loops in here. And if you wanted to sharpen this up going around the side there, you can do that as well, and you get something more like that. And if you wanted to have it, this area, a little bit sharper, you can come in here and start to add some edge loops to sharpen up that corner. And same thing down here. If we want this to be just a little bit sharper, we can use our Insert Edge Loop tool, come in and add a little bit of detail to the edges to sharpen those up a bit. So that would give you something a little bit sharper. I think in this case down here-- let me undo that-- I actually want them to be a little bit softer, so I'll leave off a couple of those lines so that it's a little bit softer. Now, around the wing, if we go ahead and show the curves-- and I've just gone ahead in the outliner and just put everything, all the curves, into one group, so just selecting all the curves and in Control-G to group those. And you can see all those curves here. I want to turn on the visibility of those curves. And I want to get a curve that is close to-- or one of the curves that we used to make our wing. So I'll just use this curve here, this wing one. And let me center the pivot. I want to duplicate it, so Control-D to duplicate, and just scale it up. And I just want to scale it a little bit. I also want to come in and move some of the points around, so taking this point here and these points under the wing and just want to create a rim around the wing here. Same thing here. And so I want this to go along with the panels that we've got. I want to create a panel that goes around the wing area here. So what we can do is take this curve and this curve-- if we can get them selected here-- and go to our Surfaces Menu Set and loft that together. And then once we've got that, we can convert it. You can also, under Loft, you can choose to actually make it polygons from the start. If you know you're going to have it as a polygon, you can do that as well. We can convert this. And this time, I'm going to set this down to one. Let's tessellate that. Let's turn off our NURB surfaces. And this polygon, I actually want to go ahead and extrude out. You can give it a little bit of thickness. Since that curve is open, we may need to come in here and merge these together, which we can do very quickly by coming in and selecting those. And now let's isolate that. And we can come in here and start to merge these vertices together. So we'll merge that together. Merge that all the way around, so basically just zipping it up together. Do the same thing over here. Some of these might be fairly close together. And we'll just make sure we get them all. We'll merge that and that. And we still have an issue inside. If we take a look at this in our wireframe view, you can see we actually a face inside there. So we can select that face, start to get rid of that face. And there you can see we've connected that together. Let's go ahead and turn our NURB surfaces back on. And then we can just sharpen this up just as we would with any of these other pieces and move it into position. So take these points and move it down. Move this down just a little bit. And we can take the whole thing and just move it into the body just a little bit. And I want to have it overlap this piece here, so I would take these vertices and just move them in a little. And again, sharpen up those areas that we need to sharpen up, using our Insert Edge Loop tool, mainly, to add extra edge loops in there. I want to actually delete the history on this. I'm going to get rid of that NURBS piece there. So those are a couple of ways that we can start to add some panels on there. Remember, if you encounter any issues where you've got things that are disconnected because of the way the curves are built, you can see here how we have this curve that's not closed, and so that creates an issue where we do a loft and convert that where those vertices aren't connected, but that's easy to fix. You just go in and merge those vertices together. So the next thing that we want to do is to go ahead and build a glass canopy, so kind of a windshield look. And so we'll go ahead and do that in the next lesson.