Tools in Maya

Maya Projects

Theses pass 4 to 5 months or so I've been using the program Maya, Maya is a rather complex program with hundreds of tools maybe even thousands!  In theses past months I've learned about quite a bit of these tools and what they can do to make any model or animation even better.  I have made a series of projects that used different tools in general.

The Hammer

The hammer was one of the very first projects of mine that actually looked like something, not just a whole bunch of random shapes in it, it was also probable my favorite on as well.  Modeling the hammer had me use a series of tools.  It started off with the extrude tool which was a tool the essentially add faces to the rectangle so I could have a head for the hammer.

what I did then use the cut faces tool, well to cut the face that I needed to cut in half.  Cutting it in half made it so when I would extrude it out next it would back it look like what a back of a hammer should.  The next thing was to add the head of the hammer.  All  I did there was extrude on the opposite side of the back a couple of times.  I shrank one of the faces in to actually make it look like a head of a hammer.  The final tool that was used was the edge bevel tool.  What that did was basically round out the corners of the hammer so that way they weren't bad sharp looking edges.  I'm not really sure why I liked this one a lot, I think I just like the way that it turned out.

Ice Cream

The next project I work on was modeling some ice cream in a bowl, cup, cone, container, and a scoop.  It was all made on a Lazy Susan that I animated in Maya to spin around 359 degrees (I'll explain why not 360 degrees later in the paragraph).  I started out by modeling some rather simple shapes like a cone and spheres.  Although ice cream and the cone is not all just the same color.  You have to add different colors to it.  Well what I did for all the ice creams is I made a separate lambert for each of them and made one the color of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry.  Ice cream also has some textures to it as well.  I made a bump mapping and found the cloud bump map which actually gave it a very nice ice cream look to it.  You can mess around with the bump mapping so that way you can get the texture placed just right.  I did essentially the same for the cone except instead of adding a color to the cone I found a texture online that I could use for the cone.  The bump mapping made the cone able to look more realistic by adding bulges that go inward to make it look more like a cone.

The animation part of this project is pretty simple.  Before you start animating the Lazy Susan going around you need to make sure that the textures are grouped with the object or else the texture will move with it.  You will see in my first example that I ran into this problem.  The next thing you would need to do is add a key at key frame 1, then I went to frame 120 and rotated it 359 degrees, I did not do 360 degrees because then the object would not have moved. Then to make it to a look you go to the graph editor and changed the curved line to linear and it is in a loop and you are done.

Bouncing Balls

Animating the bouncing balls was similar to animating the Lazy Susan.  Like using the key frames to animate each of the balls bouncing.  If you watch on the video when the balls hit the ground it squishes down to give it the more natural effect.  You also had to go into the graph editor and change the curved lines to linear lines.  It makes it so that way when the balls hit the ground it would make it look more real.  If it had the curved lines then it would look like it was gliding off the ground instead of bouncing.   In my use of the graph editor it has been very helpful to almost get more control of your animation, it enables you to have more freedom in animating.

The Cup

The cup was a pretty simple project in my opinion.  It had you work with more different tools in Maya in order to make it.  The term is NURBS modeling.  It is a lot different from polygon modeling because you start by drawing something 2D then making it 3D.  You start buy going into front view in Maya.  Then you go to the curves tab and draw out something, in this case I drew a wine looking glass.  Ne
xt if you select the 2D shape you made and click the revolve tool it makes it become a 3D shape.  I made only half of my 2D wine glass because that way it is symmetric all the way throughout the shape.

Saltshaker

The saltshaker is very similar to make like the cup.  You still do nurbs modeling.  The difference is that you use multiple shapes to make the saltshaker.  You draw a circle nurb
then you can make a second one move it up and make it smaller and the use the lofting tool and you have a different shape.  You can essentially add as many shapes as you want.  The lofting tool is similar to the revolve tool except it uses actual shapes.

Polything

The polything is an interesting project of mine.  It involves lots of lighting.  The polything is basically a sphere with holes in that you difference a cylinder in different places in the sphere.  There are four types of lighting that you use in the polything Spot, Point, Area, Ambient.  Spot light is well a spot light. It shoots the light in the direction you point it.  You can have three point lighting which is putting 3 different types of lights that help make the scene tell the story better.  Ambient lighting is light with color in it.  Area lighting is similar to spot lighting.  It's could be used as maybe a street light or a lamp.