Week 1 Class Practical: Getting Acquainted With Maya

This week I will be working through an tutorial to help me navigate my way around the Maya 2017 interface. While working through this tutorial I will also make some notes on some of the tools that I will be using, what they do and how they work.

To begin with, this menu (called a "Shelf" in Maya) is used to create the primitive objects we will be manipulating into more complex models. Double clicking on one of these primitive objects will also open an options dialog in which you can set more advanced creation options for these objects, such as the width, height, depth and amount of section divisions present during the creation of the object.

Underneath this menu is the viewport, this is where the models will be displayed to work on. Here you can also use the menu at the top to select things such as different camera angles (perspective, orthographic cameras etc) and also adjust the shading/texture settings for the current scene, such as using wireframe instead of flat colour.

To the right of the viewport is the channel box, modeling toolkit and the attribute editor. Using the attribute editor is important as in here you can name each of your objects, this allows you to refer back to them much faster than if they were all called "pCube". In this instance, I have renamed the cube to "Initial_Cube" to differentiate it from any cubes I create in the future.

The tool box is another super important tool, used to select, move, scale and rotate objects in the scene. Selecting an object in the scene and then selecting one of these tools will bring up an icon called the "Manipulator" that will allow me to adjust the object. For example, below I have rotated the object around 45 degrees on the Z axis using this tool.

Finally in this exercise, I will be making a ship wheel using basic primitive shapes, without worrying about curving handles but just achieving the basic shape. To start with I attempted to create the side shape of the ship wheel by extruding faces on the inside edge. While this does somewhat achieve the desired result, it doesn't quite feel like the correct method.

After talking to our tutor about the best way to go about making this model, I changed my original method of extruding faces and instead used cylinders to create the middle shafts of the wheel. This allowed for a smoother look to the model that closely resembles a real ship wheel, instead of the blocky shape of the original attempt.