Introduction to Maya 2012

Now let's build some pieces for the interior of the cockpit. So we want to have a little bit of detail in here to fill this out. So one of the easiest ways that we can do this is to use a polygon primitive in a slightly different way. So we'll go ahead and create a polygon primitive cube. Let's go ahead and scale it up. Now, looking at this cube you may, if you've not done too much modeling, not really see how we can use this. But we can actually use the inside of this cube. So instead of using this as sort of a positive shape, we can use it as kind of a negative shape. So all we want to do is select the top face here and delete that face. And now you look down inside this, and we have the cup that we want to use for the inside of this cockpit. Now one thing to think about is the fact that the normals, or how Maya tells us what's the outside and what's the inside, are facing out. And in this case, this is actually going to be the outside. This is going to be the area that we can't see over here, so we want to actually reverse those. So you can see if we turn off Two-Sided Lighting, we can see all the pieces that are reversed. And so we can go through and on the polygon pieces go to Normals, Reverse, and now you can see that the inside of this cube is the side that has the normals facing out. We can do the same thing over here on these, and then this we just copied so we need to take care that. Same thing with this, although this is a NURBS, so we'll go in and reverse the surface direction on that. So we want to have the gray facing us, so in this case it is. So go ahead and pull that down underneath the trim that we have, and get kind of a rough scale in there. Now, if we smooth it you can see we get something like that. So we need to sharpen it up a little bit, but not much. We don't want to add too much detail to it. So I'm just going to insert an edge loop, we select this piece, and we go ahead and just bring this up a bit. Try this again-- so just add a couple of edge loops in here, and then you can see how that's sort of sharpened up a little bit. And we don't have to be too exact, but we can come in here and grab some of these points and just kind of move them up. And if we want to scale it in a little bit so it penetrates in. The same thing up here, we just want it to kind of go up and behind that other piece. We send it a little bit more forward to the actual front of that, and that'll just help us to kind of close that off. We've got some geometry penetrating in, we can just sort of scale that in a little bit. Take those points and move them down, and then we've got that interior sealed off so we're not seen now the inside of that anymore from this angle. All right, we can add a chair to the mix. This will be something that will be pretty straightforward. So let's go ahead and get a polygon primitive-- let's get a cube. Let's go ahead and make this kind of a long cube, and let's actually do this with our width, heighth and depth. You can see I have a scale on it, go ahead and take that off. So I want to make it higher, and I want to make it a little bit wider, and not quite as deep, so maybe something like that. And now let's add some divisions. So let's add some divisions along the height. So I'm going to add maybe 12 divisions. Now, I want to make sort of divided cushions on this seat, so I'm going to select all the faces on the front. Now if we extrude these, we just get another big face. But if we turn off that Keep Faces Together option, and now we extrude it, we just extrude that straight out. You can see how those are all separate. So now if we smooth this we get something like that. Now you can see how we don't have any resolution over here on the side so you get this sort of overall shape. If you want to square that off, we can just come in with our Insert Edge Loop tool and start to add a little bit of resolution there on the sides, and it gives you something like that. Now this is just sort of a straight cushion. What we can do is actually use a deformer to deform this. Now if we were to come in here and grab these points and start to move and rotate them, it'd be very easy to get kind of a messed up mesh, and not something that's really a smooth transition. And so we go to our animation tool set, actually. Go to Create Deformers, and let's go down to non-linear, and let's choose a Bend Deformer. Want to make sure that deformers are turned on there. And now, we go into our bend in the input, we can change the curvature. Now you can see that it's bending it this way, so we actually want to rotate it. I want to rotate that bend 90 degrees. Now if we change that curvature, you can see how we can curve it the way that we want. Now, we also have the ability to only curve the top or only curve the bottom, so if want to just curve the top a little bit more, we can do something like that. So I think that looks good. To get rid of the bend, all you have to do is take your object, delete the history, and now that's baked in. And we can now rotate it, and let's try to fit it into our cockpit. We'll probably need to scale this a little bit, not too much. Now we get kind of a little curved seat there in our cockpit. We could also bring in a yolk. So again, let's start with a polygon primitive cube. Let's go ahead and bring it up. Now, I'm going to come into the front view here to look at it. Let's increase the size a bit. Let's add a few divisions, and I want to have a division right in the center because I'm going to build this symmetrically. So add a division right in the center. And then I also want to add some divisions here. I want to add five for the height, so we end up with something like this. Let's go ahead and take this and duplicate it, move it over to one side. We can take this one and scale it down. Now here on this one, we'll go to Component Mode and select all the faces on the left and delete those. So we end up with half of this cube, and a smaller version off to the right side. Let's go ahead and take both of these, go to Polygons Combine so that they're one object, and just so we can see what that looks like. That's what that looks like here. Now these are two thick, so let's go ahead and center the pivot, and just scale those down. Now I want to actually bridge some geometry between these. So I'm going to take this face and this face, and let's just do a bridge, and we'll continue to just do a linear bridge. Do the same thing here, and here. And now we can take the handle here, and just kind of move it in a bit. And if we want to add a little bit of a grip to the side, we can just take some of these and just extrude those out slightly. Now you see how this is very soft, so now we can come in with our Insert Edge tool, start to tighten up some of these areas. Coming in here, doing the same thing, kind of tightening that up. Now, to create the other side of this, we want to actually mirror this over. So right now if we hit Mirror under Mesh Mirror Geometry, we want to actually mirror in the negative x, so we can choose the axis that we want to mirror. You can merge with the original merge vertices, and you can see that will actually copy that over on the other side of the axis. We can take that now, center our pivot again, you can see that those points have been merged. We can do a little bit of shaping if we want to. We can also shape the whole thing using another type of a former called a Lattice. So if we go to Animation now under Create Deformers, and instead of choosing a non-linear deformer we'll choose a lattice. And this lattice, if we look at the settings, is 4x4x4, and this gives us points. So if we select the Lattice, right click on it, and this will give us the option to choose lattice points as our component. So now, instead of manipulating directly the vertices, we're actually using a lattice to deform this. And so we can come in here and shape this the way that we want it. So it's using this sort of low res lattice cage to deform a higher res model that's connected to it. When we're going to get rid of it we can delete our history. Let's go ahead and bring this down, and we don't want to add too much detail here in the cockpit, but I just want to give a little bit of detail to it. And then if we want to just add a cylinder, we can create a NURBS cylinder. Bring that up into position, rotate it down, and then make that the column for this. If we wanted to go all the way down we could do that. And if you want to add little controls to the side, you can use of the techniques that we've used up to this point to do that. But I'm not going to add too much detail to the interior of our cockpit. So the next thing that we want to do is to add the back in the engine. So actually the exhaust on the back where we've got the engines. And so we'll go ahead and start to do that in the next lesson.