From the course: Maya 2022 Essential Training

Create polygonal objects - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya 2022 Essential Training

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Create polygonal objects

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- [Instructor] Now that we understand some of the basics of Maya let's go ahead and start creating our own objects. We're going to start off with creating some polygonal objects. Now, most of the modeling that you will do in Maya is based off of these polygonal primitive objects. Now we can create objects in Maya, under create menu and you'll see we have a bunch of different options here and the one we're going to look at is polygon primitives and one of the nice things about Maya is that it doesn't allow you to tear off menus. So I'm going to highlight this double line here at the top of the menu left click and that tears it off so I can actually see the menu. Now, one of the most important items on this menu is this one towards the bottom called interactive creation. This will allow you to create your objects interactively. If this is off, it will create the objects based upon the options that you set. Now, the default options are all set for these objects but if you left click on the right side of the menu you'll see this little box and that gives you the size as well as the number of divisions and so on for each of these objects. Now, the actual options for different type of object will be different. So if I were to just left click on sphere, I would get this basic sphere with those options. If I turn on interactive creation, select sphere, notice how it gives me a hint drag on the grid so I left click and drag and I can create that sphere as well. Now, when you create an object in Maya, you're not exactly done with it. You can actually change it later. If I left click on this sphere that I created and go over to the channel box you see under inputs we have polysphere and this allows me to change things such as the radius as well as the number of subdivisions. So if I were to say type in three for radius, you could see I can make it bigger. Now I can also change this in what's called the attribute editor. So if I open up that, you'll see that we have all of these different tabs along the top. I'm going to look for the one that says polysphere and when I click on that, you can see I have the same options here so I can change the number of subdivisions, I can change the radius. Now, each of these primitives will have different options. Now I'm going to go ahead and shift select both of these and delete it and let's go through some of these other primitives that we have. So I'm going to keep interactive creation on and let's take a look at the cube. Now this is essentially just a box. It doesn't have to be a cube. All I have to do is left click and drag the base of it, left click and drag again, to set the height and then in terms of subdivisions, we can subdivide by width, height or depth. Now another one would be the cylinder and again, we drag out the base, drag up the height. We have a lot of options here for the radius, height, as well as subdivisions. A cone is very similar to a cylinder except it has a pointy top. Now the torus is interesting because what we do is we've dragged out one radius to determine the outline of it and then drag again to determine the thickness of that outline. Now, the other two are fairly straightforward the plane and the disc. So if I left click on disc, you can see I get this disc. Now, if I go over to polydisc, you can see we can have any number of sides or subdivisions. Now, one of the nice things about this particular disc is that it does create a disc that is what's called quadratic which makes it very easy to model. So those are some of the basics of how to create polygonal objects in Maya.

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