The MAYA Tools

Hello dear readers,

       In this post I am going to go over all of the tools we have learned about in MAYA. During the first project, the Polything we learned about how to light an object  in order to show the most of it. Usually it doesn't just take one light, most of the time at a minimum you need to use two or three. In this particular project I used three lights. Two of them were directional lights that simply work just like a flashlight, just point it in the direction you want and behold, you have light pointing in that direction. The other light was an ambient light which I placed in the center of the Polything. The ambient light is just a ball of light wherever you put it.

       The next project we did was make the hammer. During that we learned how to extrude certain parts of an object and make another shape come out of the original. That was used to make the claw and the blunt part of the hammer. We also used the cut face tool to make the certain polygon shapes that we needed. The bevel tool was also used on the blunt part in order to make it look round after shaping it from a square.

       After that we did the ice cream project where we learned the bump map tool in order to make an object look 3D using a 2D texture. Another thing was to make a looping animation so it looked like the ice-cream was spinning around and around. In this particular project I decided to have a little fun with it and made a snowman on top of the ice-cream cone. Later when we were actually animating it I made him wave when he came near the screen.





       After that we made couple of bouncing spheres to sharpen our animation skills and get timing on keyframes correct. We also used a graph editor which is basically just a timeline of the animation itself. We used that to make things more accurate and we could place the keyframes exactly where we wanted them.

  

Next was the cups that we made, during that we learned about NURBS. NURBS stands for Non-uniform rational basis spline. Instead of using a polygonal surface on the 3D objects we used the NURBS instead. We had to use them in order to use the revolve tool. The revolve tool lets you take a line that you have shaped and revolves it around a center point until it makes a complete 3D shape.










Finally in the latest project we made salt shakers and in that we used a circle and simply shifted some of the points to get a basic shape for a salt shaker. Next we used lofting where we took a couple of the same shapes with different sizes and then put a skin around it. This is called lofting, where you make the curved part of the inside of a shape. The idea of it is basically just like a skeleton.

Until next time readers,

This is Jake Smith