Problem

For this exercise, I had to watch 10 Pluralsight lessons from the Automotive Modeling in Maya course, and write a few of the takeaways I had for each one.

Solution

Setting up Reference Images

When setting up both a front and a back reference image, you need to add a new orthographic camera with the Panels menu in the Viewport. Also, to keep the reference images from getting in the way, place them behind the cameras, so that each camera only sees the proper image. You can also change the size of the grid in the Display menu, under Grid options.

Drawing Out the Wheel Arches

You can use the Show menu to toggle the visibility of a lot of different things (including cameras, if they’re in the way). When starting to model the car, the instructor started with the wheel arches, because its geometry needs to be round, and will take a lot of edges. This takes less time than adding it by hand later.

Connecting Wheel Arches to Create the Side

Matching lines with the panel cuts is very useful. Also, make sure to match the number of lines between separate geometries when attaching them to ensure good topology. Using movement along the normal is useful for moving vertices around, prevents you from messing up the vertex’s alignment with the reference while you move it.

Extruding up the Side of the Car

Working consistently with multiple perspectives, especially with accurate, orthographic reference is very useful: it helps you line up every vertex to the model as you go, quickly giving you the shape you want. Multi cut is useful when you want to define each vertex of an edge loop you are adding, helps to control edge flow.

Drawing Out the Side Panels

Make sure you have edges following the boundaries of your panels. This will help immensely with extrusion and edge flow later. The instructor adds extra edges for sharpness early on in the model. I always assumed this should be done late in the process.

Extruding the Door Scoop

After an extrude, you can either snap to point and merge or target weld one side to get rid of some of that geometry (useful for making a gradual insert on one side). Also, be careful with face density: having too many/too small faces in an area can affect details in smoothed mode.

Bridging Across the A Pillar

The instructor uses bridge with smooth path to get the A pillar shape of the car door. Very cool way to get the basic geometry of the car. Also, take advantage of natural breaks between panels to remove/add more edge loops: you don’t need to connect everything, especially if it will ruin the edge flow/density of your model.

Extruding Across the Top of the Car

Snap to grid is actually really useful for setting up symmetry; I didn’t think about that. The instructor uses extract and delete history to break each panel into a separate mesh. Interesting, I would’ve kept the whole “body” of the car as one object.

Building Out the Front of the Car

Making decisions based on edge flow is important, and while you can do different things, keeping in mind what it does to the edge flow is important. Also, append polygon is a really useful tool for fixing holes and adding geometry between edges (I almost never use this tool, but this seems really useful).

Extruding the Hood

You can insert more edge loops when you need more geometry (just be careful with face density). Selecting one edge and beveling it does this too (one edge loop on either side). When he actually adds a large portion of geometry, he extrudes once, realigns the new vertices to the reference, then extrudes again, etc. (useful for workflow).

Problem

For this exercise, I had to create a lamp model from reference using only NURBS curves and surfaces tools in Maya 2019.

Solution

To start with this model, I began by creating the base using two NURBS cube primitives. I scaled them both down ,with the upper one smaller than the lower one to create the shape of the base. Then, I created a NURBS square, scaled it to fit the lower cube, then duplicated the square, scaled it down, lined it up with the upper cube, then used the Loft tool to create surfaces that connected the two cubes, finishing the base. I realized after this that I could’ve just used a third cube and scaled down the top face (but at least this gave me an excuse to use loft).

For the main shaft of the lamp, I began by experimenting with both the EP Curve Tool and the CV Curve Tool. I decided to use the CV Curve Tool, as it felt faster for getting the shapes that I wanted for this exercise. I began creating the main shaft by loosely creating the shape and all of the necessary control vertices for the hard edges along the model. Once I had made it halfway up the shaft (to where the spherical part of the shaft is), I completed the curve, then made sure the scale and size of each section of the shaft was about right. During this part, I also cleaned up a lot of my lines (scale while selecting single edges/CVs was really useful here) so that each section more closely resembled the reference image. Then, I used the Revolve Tool to create the actual surface of the shaft. After that, I continued editing the curve until I was satisfied with its similarity with the reference image.

After this, I created a NURBS sphere and placed each piece (the base, the lower shaft, and now the sphere) into position. Next, I created the upper shaft in much the same way as the lower shaft. Once I had finished editing it, used the revolve tool, and placed it into position, I moved onto the top of the lamp.

The lampshade was fairly simple to create using the CV Curve Tool and Revolve (I had gotten much faster at this by now). However, I decided that I wanted to create a light bulb and have the lamp shade realistically attach to the rest of the lamp. To do this, I needed to look up reference for lamp shades, lamps without their shades, and incandescent light bulbs. The light bulb was the easiest. I was able to create a quick curve with the CV Curve tool and Revolve to create the surface. The wires used to connect the top of the lamp to the shaft was more difficult. I decided to create a NURBS Cylinder primitive, and I added more control points along its length. Then, I moved each control point to create the general shape I would need for the wire connectors. Once it looked about right, I duplicated it to create a replica on the opposite side of the lamp. Then, I did a similar process to create the wires that attach the lamp shade to the lamp itself. I also added a NURBS Torus around the top of the lamp for the wires to connect to. After that, I spent some time adjusting everything so that it looked about right, then I deleted the history of all the objects, so that I could prep the scene for screenshots.

Pictures

Challenges

Overall, I struggled more with this exercise because I had no previous experience with NURBS. However, after working with them for this assignment, I feel that I have a much better grasp of how to create and manipulate curves. Overall, NURBS seem really good at quickly prototyping a shape and getting the basic form of an object, especially if it has radial symmetry (wow, Revolve is a powerful tool!).

However, it is a bit more difficult to get a lot of hard edges with NURBS, and I feel like getting a lot of detail would be more difficult than it would be with polygons. Of course, that could just be personal bias, since I have only used them once so far!

Problem

For this exercise, I needed to create a desk model from a reference pictures using many of the modeling and mesh editing tools in Maya 2019, including extrude, bridge, insert edge loop, multi cut, etc.

Solution

I initially started modeling this desk all as one piece, trying to extrude it out from a single cube primitive. However, I soon ran into issues with applying details to the model without ruining the overall topology. So, I decided it would be better to divide the model into smaller tasks that were separate objects.

First, I modeled the table top, which was relatively simple, starting with a long flat rectangle and extruding the edges a little to give the edge of the table a more correct shape. I also made sure that the table top was the proper scale for the rest of the objects, and the other objects were aligned with this object first.

Next, I worked on the drawer part of the desk, which took a majority of my time to complete. This object is the main reason why I made each part of the desk a separate element. I started with a cube that was about the right shape, then began adding edge loops with both symmetry and the multi cut tool to set up the various detailed elements I would need to add to the model. This included the edge on the inner and outer faces of the desk, the detailed woodwork on either end of the front of the desk, the drawers themselves, and finally the lip that went around the bottom of the desk right above the table legs. I later realized that I wasn’t careful enough with my multi cut tool, and I needed to redo this step a few times (and it caused me a massive headache later, see Challenges).

Once this was done, I needed to spend a lot of time cleaning up my topology before I could actually do any of the extrusions for the detail work, let alone adding the edge loops to make the model look right in smoothed mode. After I fixed everything, I was able to make the details with a few simple extrusions, then added the appropriate edge loops to make the model look correct in smoothed mode.

After this, I duplicated the side desk and moved each of them to the appropriate location, lined up with the desktop we made earlier. Next, I worked on the table leg, which wasn’t very difficult. I started with a small, long cube and moved it to the location where I would need it later. Modeling the leg didn’t take long at all, as it involved adding a few edge loops with multi cut and a few simple extrusions to get the basic shape. As a side note, I actually learned about the settings for insert edge loop to add multiple equally spaced edge loops to the model (which was a godsend: I had been slowly using multi cut for this before). This really helped when I was adding the vertical channels to the table legs. Once I was done with this, I added edge loops for smoothed mode, then duplicated the leg seven times and placed it to create the table.

Lastly, I needed to create a few smaller pieces, such as the keyboard shelf, the back of the middle of the desk, and the handles for the drawers. The keyboard shelf and the back of the desk were fairly simple, only needing a rectangle (and a few really simple extrusions for the keyboard shelf). The upper drawer was simply a sphere that I deformed a bit to get the right shape. The lower drawer I was able to get with a torus that I shaped to match the handle in the reference photo. I didn’t decide to even try with the attachment on the desk (too much filigree, I didn’t even know where to start), so I just made a makeshift one.

Overall, I think this was the hardest and longest exercise so far, but I’m really proud of the result! The model has a few problems, but the overall topology is better than I thought it would be, and each part of the model is relatively clean.

Pictures

Challenges

This exercise was a challenge for me, mostly because of how I decided to approach things at the beginning.

First, since I was using the multi cut tool and not thinking about my topology or edge flow, I ended up breaking the model’s topology, preventing me from adding edge loops when I needed hard edges in smoothed mode. This caused me to revert to my last save more than a few times, and I ended up fixing the topology later by hand.

Second, I wasn’t very cognizant of when I was extruding that some of my extrusions lay on top of each other. Later in the process, when I wanted these extruded pieces to connect (especially when adding edge loops for smoothed mode), I noticed the sets of extra faces that were lying on top of each other, which broke the model quite a bit. This was a pretty easy fix, but it did require me to delete all of those faces, then remake a single face that connected to both extrusions using the bridge tool.

Third, I wanted to use symmetry for as much of the model as I could to lessen my work and keep certain things consistent. However, this ended up backfiring a couple of times. Notably, Symmetry doesn’t always play nice with multi cut and insert edge loop, either preventing me from creating an edge loop that I wanted, or failing to symmetrically add the edge loop (and breaking the topology in the process). This caused a few headaches, as my go to solution was to turn symmetry off, do the operation, then turn it back on. However, sometimes I forgot to turn symmetry back on for some operations, and I forgot to turn it off for others, causing a number of problems that I only discovered later in the process. Some of these required me to undo or lose ten minute’s of work, while others required me to spend twenty to thirty minutes fixing the mistake it caused. Yikes. Fortunately, I got it all (mostly) worked out in the end.

Problem

For this exercise, I needed to create a lemon squeezer from a reference image. I was supposed to start with a primitive shape, and end up with a detailed model of the lemon squeezer.

Solution

I started modeling by taking a cylinder, and using the universal manipulator tool to give it a radius of 2, a height of .2, and giving it 5 cap subdivisions. Then, I added a new edge loop around the top edge using the multi cut tool, and extruded the outer face loop by 0.5 to create a bowl. I did this 2 more times to get the height I wanted.

After that, I moved up the center point of the top of the cylinder past the edges, beginning to create the center part of the lemon squeezer. I moved up the next two edge loops to create a rounded central shape. Then, I selected every other line around the central shape, and scaled it inwards to finish the basic shape of the lemon squeezer.

Lastly, I began adding edges and moving vertices to create the spout at the edge of the bowl, and then I changed the model to smooth mode and added several edge loops to make the bottom and upper lips a little sharper.

Pictures

This exercise required me to create an animation of the solar system, going through the various considerations of the visual development pipeline. I started by creating primitives to represent the sun, each planet, and several moons. Non spherical primitives were used so that it is easier to see the rotation of the objects in 3D space for the purpose of the assignment. Each model rotates about its axis, each planet revolves around the sun, and each moon revolves around its planet.

Below, you can see a view of the hypergraph editor that shows all of the objects created within the scene. Also, a video of the animation is available below (sorry for the low quality).

Problem

For this exercise, I needed to build a robot model in Maya using only the built in primitives objects in Maya (consisting of the cube, sphere, cylinder, torus, etc. models). Additionally, I was only allowed to scale, rotate, translate, and use the universal manipulator to these primitives. Because of this, I was unable to use any extrusions, or manipulate the vertices, edges, or faces in any other way.

Solution

I approached this problem by messing around with the primitives to see what options I had at first. Once I had a good idea of the tools at my disposal, I began to put pieces together in my head, and started drawing out a concept model on paper. I wanted the design to have a decent amount of asymmetry to keep the front and side profiles interesting. I also wanted to come up with creative ways to use many of the primitives so that they would makes sense for the robot. Once I had completed my concept and knew how to build each part of the robot, I began to work on the robot, beginning first with the torso, then building the legs, then the arms, then the head, and finally the back of the robot. While building the model, I made use of Maya’s duplicate special tool to save a bit of time in building the identical parts of the model, such as the other three legs and the second arm.

Pictures

Challenges

This exercise wasn’t too difficult, but I did end up having a number of issues getting access to Maya 2019, so I ended up completing this exercise in Maya 2018 (so if there were any new primitives that I missed, sorry!).

Beyond that, I thought it was a fun challenge to try to use every primitive, and I think I did a good job incorporating most of them in the design in an interesting way.