10/06/2020: Late post today – got a late start this morning. After five days of largely following along the tutorials, today I tried the traditional first step of getting used to a modeling program – sketching up a Taiidani fighter of course. This one is obviously pretty far from done so far, but I like how it looks. I was able to use the instancing stuff to perfectly position the six muzzles in the gunpods below:
For a few hours I’m honestly quite pleased – I was definitely able to push past what I tended to use in Wings and really lean into multi object geometry (with the intention of booleaning things together in time). There was a particularly poignant moment working on the midsection where I found myself longing desperately for anything like the ability to precisely scale an edge with numeric input like in Wings. It gave me a monster headache as I looked through all the documentation I could trying to figure out why redo, recent commands, ctrl+Y, or G didn’t seem to let me repeat the command when I realized the problem was that I was trying to modify a 4-fold symmetric poly – when what I needed to do was recreate the poly the way I wanted it and duplicate it out four fold.
The plain cube sitting in the middle of the ship is where I’ll be picking things up tomorrow. Another success story was the aft of the ship here:
The engine nozzles are instanced as well, and that little detail panel (or rather, the space where a nice and fun detail panel might someday live!) are also attempts to really lean into what Maya can do. I think I’ll see where I can get this guy after a day or two more and then continue with the tutorials, but for now it’s exciting to start making stuff more earnestly with a new program.