Introduction to Maya.

When I first opened Maya it was very confusing and almost intimidating; every button lead to another and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. After experimenting with the layout as well as having lessons on the programme I slowly learnt how to use the programme to the point were I feel moderately confident using Maya (even if that is to create fairly basic models). 

When first using Maya I had to know what a polygon was and how they’re used. Polygons are similar to “faces” on a shape, however a face can have multiple polygons. Polygons within Maya are either comes as Tri (3 sided) or Quad (4 sided) this as polygons with more than 4 sides create problems when rendering. Similar with geometry, polygons have vertices and edges.

Once I understood this I had to learn how to create shapes and scale them. The first thing I did was set “Interactive Creation”, with this I am able to create shapes by selecting a “polygon primitive” using the mouse and scaling them by dragging the mouse cursor for width and height. Before moving the shape I have just created I am also able to change the height, width and number of divisions for a more exact shape or to save polygons.

Before changing doing any drastic changed within Maya, I needed to know how to move and change something’s basic shape. Once a shape is created in Maya, first hold the right mouse button to bring up this toolbar. By holding the mouse over the different functions this can select many different things such as faces, vertices, edges and an overall object mode (to simply name a few).

Once I had selected object mode I select my object and then by pressing “W” or “R” I could change the placement or scale for each one respectively.

Another useful feature within Maya is one of its tools called “Extrude”. With the extrude tool I am able to pull shapes, edges or even vertices to make even more complex shapes. There are 3 ways to get to the extrude tool; first select the place you want to extrude, then either go the one on the toolbar, under the “Edit Mesh” taskbar, or under the modelling toolkit. To begin this process I selected the faces I wanted to extrude, then proceeded to hit extrude.

Once the extrude button is pressed, I press “W” on the keyboard to bring up the arrows that let me move along the X, Y, Z axis and I can create a more complex shape. This is very useful to be able to change shapes and essentially add faces to your models.

This is what happens when faces are moved without and extrude, although there may be a situation where this is needed or in fact some faces can be moved without an extrude, in this instance this is not what I wanted. This is what happens without using extrudes this is what will happen then you move the same faces. As u can see the when moving the faces without this the shape becomes warps instead of creating sections. 

The next thing I learned to do was called “Snapping” two objects together. Although within Maya objects can be simply pass through one another to give the illusion of them being connected, snapping simply makes this process a lot cleaner.

To being snapping first the pivots of each shape must be moved. To do this first click the shape, then hold down “D” and “V” on the keyboard. Once the sphere has appeared drag it to the place that you want to snap, for me this will be the middle of both cylinders.

Once the pivot has been moved I simply selected the object I wanted to snap, and used the arrow to move them together. As you can see now the smaller cylinder is completely flush with the larger one, this is also important when UV mapping much later on.

Although there are many more ways to use Maya to create much more complex shapes as well as all the different modelling materials, I feel this is was what I needed to know most about first using Maya. These were the first things I learnt when using Maya and after some practice it has started to become second nature, using these basics to start doing more advance modelling.