10/01/2020: Day Four! Right off the bat I really appreciate the approach of the instructor for the Gnomon Workshop Maya 2019 tutorial, as the various project files have been impressive demos of what Maya is capable of and now we’re actually going to start adding stuff to it in a guided fashion. The project that came with the tutorial is a house, and so today theoretically we’ll be making some porch furniture. We’re finally getting into a paradigm I’m pretty comfortable with from Wings3d – creating polygons and moving edges and verts around to define shapes. A nice little tip the instructor provides is that if you have an edge that intersects multiple other edges you can use ctrl+del to remove an edge and all of the verts where it intersected other edges.
Another interesting difference as we get into modeling with polygons is that in Wings, one of the most important uses of the Bridge operation was to turn two polygons into one polygon with a tube connecting them. In Maya, Bridge operations can only be performed between polygons that are already combined. Now that the instruction has switched from a lecture over various functionality into actual guided modeling.
BEHOLD, MY CHAIR:
I’m getting a bit more comfortable with the Maya workflow of pressing and holding spacebar to activate various tools. It still feels a bit clunky to try and hunt down specific edges compared to Wings, but that’s likely the years of familiarity with Wings speaking. My instructor certainly moves with ease from view to view or function to function so it’s not like it’s impossible to even with practice.
As far as the chair goes, I’m interested how object cleanup is done. There’s a handful of unnecessary edges on the cutouts around the chair arms, for example, though I’m given to understand that these days as long as you’re under like 10k polies your objects will work just fine even in a videogame. I also note that face selection works just like bridging – the objects need to be combined before you can select faces across multiple objects. That ought to make it a bit more interesting, my workflow in Wings was always working with one object as much as I could to, in theory, make UV Mapping and such simpler. The porch chair was a great piece of practice to break that habit as the instructor easily guided me through the process of using a Maya function for duplicating objects with a common displacement to quickly make the boards making up the seat using shift and D along with a single move. It definitely got me thinking about the detailing workflows I was talking about yesterday, kitbashing, that sort of thing.