Sunday, November 30, 2008
Tip of the Week: Snapping
Use the snapping shortcuts in Maya for precise placement of objects and components in the viewport.
x to snap to the grid
c to snap to curves
v to snap to points or vertices
j to toggle snapping for the Move, Rotate, and Scale tools
shift + j to toggle relative snapping for the Move, Rotate, and Scale tools
For more control, you can tweak a variety of snapping settings under preferences and in the tool editor.
Labels: Maya, Modeling, scene layout, Tip of the Week
+ posted by Paul @ 1:56 PM 0 Comments | Links to this post
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Saturday, October 4, 2008
Tip of the Week:
Insert Edge Loop
The modeling tool set in Maya is impressive, and if you take the time to familiarize yourself with all of the tools and commands, you can really speed up your modeling.
Different people swear by different methods. I'm a huge fan of the insert edge loop tool, (previously referred to as the "split edge ring tool" prior to version 8.0-ish). It's extremely useful for rapidly adding detail to your mesh, and it's great for both organic and hard surface modeling.
In the example below, I used the split edge ring tool to add detail to a poly cylinder, and reshaped the mesh by scaling the new edge loops as I added them:
You could use this method if, for instance, you wanted to model a tree. You could start with a basic cylinder for the trunk and extrude out some branches. Once you have the basic layout, you can model the trunk and branches it into more organic shapes by adding edge loops. The strength of this type of modeling is that it allows you to rough the model in at a low-poly level and then go back to add detail.
Labels: Maya, Modeling, Tip of the Week
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Sunday, June 1, 2008
Tip of the Week: Think Local
Here's a marking menu that even many experienced Maya users miss, but it's great for speeding up your workflow. If you hold down W, E, or R, and the left mouse button, a menu pops up to allow you to rapidly switch between Object, Local, and Global space. It keeps you from having to transform along an awkward axis (or from going to the Tool Editor every time to switch back and forth between modes).
While we're at it: also notice the "Align Along" option. It opens up a submenu with some useful features that allow you to do things like align the axis with a selected component, or manually type in a custom axis. Very useful for modeling and placing objects.
Labels: Hotkeys, Maya, Modeling, Tip of the Week
+ posted by Paul @ 8:11 PM 1 Comments | Links to this post
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Monday, May 12, 2008
Tip of the Week: UV Layout Made Easy
UV layout can be frustrating. Here's a trick to speed up unwrapping UV on a character's head or on other challenging pieces of geometry.
Doing a basic cylindrical projection on a head is a good start, but you wind up with overlapping UVs in areas such as the nose, mouth, ears, and chin. You can clean it up by hand, but it's not easy, and it doesn't always turn out well.
One solution is to start by duplicating your model and performing the "average vertices" command on it until the mesh is nice and smooth. This reduces the amount of overlapping geometry. Do a cylindrical projection on the smoothed-out model, and you'll have a much cleaner UV layout. Since the averaged mesh has the same topology as the original model, you can easily use the Transfer UV Set functions to copy your nice clean UV from one to the other.
Labels: Maya, Modeling, Tip of the Week, UV