DAY FIVE – 10/05/2020
Back on the horse after a weekend visiting my wife’s parents and grandparents. Something I appreciate about this instructor consistently is the emphasis on best practices – Maya saves the history of an object as you’ve been editing it, both in terms of commands executed upon it (so for instance I can roll back a bad bevel, or look at the parameters of a bevel I did on another poly) as well as the transformations it has undergone. Something the instructor recommends is using this to move an object back to the origin if you want to edit it later so you can take advantage of all three axes of symmetry. This is a great example of best practices – it is totally possible to model in place simply by doing math in your head or by using the objects axes instead of the world axes for symmetry, but moving things back to the origin is simpler and more reliable.
Something quite lovely in the modeling toolkit panel in Maya (that the instructor calls out as extremely useful in hard surface modeling) is a control for transformation constraints allowing you to only move verts along edges or along the normals of adjoining faces. Incredibly exciting – I’ve spent a LOT of time in recent Wings3d projects constantly defining normals I’d like to be moving objects along to ensure that the geometry remains consistent. Also Maya’s boolean operation is so unbelievably, heartbreakingly easy and good. Do you have ANY IDEA how long I spent hunting and killing verts when merging everything back into one shell for UV mapping? There’s three boolean operations… you know what I’ll just quote my discord ravings about it, mildly edited for readability:
Maya’s boolean operations may be worth the price of admission all by themselves. You’ve got three and they are excellent and simple.
1) Union. It’s what I’ve often wanted “Combine” to be – just make one mesh lol. Finds all the intersections and puts verts there and makes one poly out of two.
2) Difference. HOLY SHIT. YOU EVER WANT TO DO BATTLE DAMAGE? It’ll subtract the intersection of one poly with another – we’re working on lumpy rocks right now and it’s amazing.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxrszfbgvsqgyzp/maya_diff_1.png?dl=0 doesn’t look like much, just two lumpy rocks kinda on top of each other
BUT THEN! Look at that awesome crater!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mrj8qco2r3pjy3y/maya_diff_2.png?dl=0
3) Intersection. The remainder after a difference operation. Great for little chonks of debris, or getting nice dynamic angular rocks.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yh3ieabn4fsmsdb/maya_diff_3.png?dl=0
I continue being ebullient about the boolean operation and all of its incredible, wonderful implications. To summarize, Maya’s powerful object history lets you move surfaces around after applying a boolean operator to them and it will update in realtime. This essentially allows you to move an arbitrary void through your geometry if you want to do things like model an asteroid or apply damage to a spaceship, ugh it’s just incredible. The “multi-cut” tool is useful for making arbitrary edge loops and can be set to snap as well, super useful for quickly defining geometry.
The sculpting tools are even nicer for rapidly banging out plausible rock geometry
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vfqi3gwvxd9yfmj/maya_sculpt_1.png?dl=0
But I rapidly created a horrifying lump when attempting to make something with a bit more purposeful structure.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/486k6r6ajv4su8i/maya_sculpt_2.png?dl=0
Working at that a bit more, Sculpt is… probably something I need to get my tablet and stylus connected for. Definitely very interesting to be sure but tricksy for uniform hard surfaces.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i61lwor37vk2hbo/maya_sculpt_3.png?dl=0
One of the other really cool things we’ve worked on today is the ability to have the same shape within multiple transform nodes. https://www.dropbox.com/s/tj4vuyx5nqdj0rx/maya_shapenode_1.png?dl=0 Without claiming any brilliance here, I’m just following along a tutorial here – I have multiple named transform nodes all incrementing as one would expect in any 3d modeling program’s outliner. However beneath each transform node I have the same shape4 geometry and as you can see in the perspective view, selecting faces on one of those geometry nodes selects them on all the others. This is a really, really powerful piece of capability. I have NO IDEA yet how it’s going to work with export to more mundane file formates like .obj, but it’s definitely a really fun way to do detail panels like I was talking about at length last week. Another fun note, transform nodes contain movement, rotation, and scaling data so I can keep consistent geometry on a consistent piece of detail (Say a radome, or a panel or a hatch) but if I move rotate or scale them they will retain that distinctiveness. That’s all available through the Duplicate Special command which allows the creation of duplicate objects as I understand them from Wings3d or a duplicate instance, which is a separate transform node for the same geometry.
I’m definitely still struggling with my instincts – I did a little excursion with a poly primitive and didn’t get too far. I kept wanting to use the Wings3d approach, grab and extrude faces to get a single ever more complicated piece of geometry. I think I need a little more before this stuff starts really clicking.