Welcome to this three modeling class where we will create a Ghostbuster trap so we can start to learn
the three modeling tools inside of Maya, any time you start modeling something, you want to look at
reference in case you don't know what a Ghostbuster trap is.
You can just Google it and find some images.
And we're going to use this just as a template, not really as an exact match that we're going to try
to get.
But just, you know, there's a kind of box here that has different knobs and a handle on it and that
kind of a thing.
And that's kind of the general kind of direction we're going to try to model this object in so we can
start to learn some miah.
So I'm going to switch back to Maya.
And any time you start using Maya, you want to set your project.
This is something to remember from here on out.
This isn't just some thing that, you know, you want to do sometimes.
This is, you know, from day one when I was learning Miotto, you work in a big studio.
You want to set your project actually.
Well, big studios have their own way of doing stuff.
But a small studio, maybe you want to set your project file, go down to set a project.
And the reason this is important is because any time you have, you know, later down the road, you
have texture's say you're doing a Closs simulation and you want to cash that out or all these other
technical things that we'll get into later.
We need somewhere for Maya to save all those things to reference into the scene.
So in my directory, I've made a Maya folder and I'm going to set that and it will ask you to create
a default workspace.
And typically this just means, you know, it's going to save, you know, kind of unimportant stuff.
Like what kind of view did you have open?
Was it a perspective or a side view?
And you know, what kind of preferences maybe you had for that workspace.
So you can just say create a default workspace and you won't have to do that again.
You'll have to do the first time you set a project.
We're also going to go to the project window.
The other option here under Project, you can see Project Ingrey, we only have two options.
We've already done set project.
The project is set.
So let's go to a project window and we get all of these different folder options here.
And if you don't see these names typed out here, you can go to edit reset settings and it should fill
all of those out for you.
And this will create folders, like I mentioned a moment ago, for caches, for images.
And mostly we're going to be using for scenes because when we save a Miah file, if we just hit command
s like you would in a word document or whatever, just to save the file, it's going to save a dot m,
b or a dot in A and that's M for Maya and A or B depending on if you save an ASCII or binary file.
But that's not that important right now.
Let's just accept and we'll make all these folders.
So when we go to file save sko file save scene and because we haven't done it yet, it'll open up this
dialog box.
And now we have this current project.
It knows where our current project is and we have all those folders that it had listed it out.
And any time we're saving a scene, we want to save in the scenes folder.
And you can see that it is under our project that I defined as Maya and now I can name it whatever I
want.
And I can choose to be an ASCII or binary, and it doesn't really matter, to be honest, for our purposes.
So I'm going to name that Ghostbuster trap.
And it's safe, so now we have the project saved and that way, if we need to move the project to another
computer, it will have reference a path to the project settings so it will know where the textures
are or or anything else like that.
So let's get started and model this Ghostbuster trap.
So let's take a look at this reference.
And we basically have a rectangle with a hint, a cylinder handle.
So let's start with the most basic elements first and then we'll add detail later, because any time
you do modeling, whether it's hard or organic, let's start with the simplest shapes first and then
add detail later.
We don't want to start with the detail on really anything.
And that goes the same is true for animation.
Most art, you know, you start with the basics first, so let's create the rectangle and the handle,
because those are the biggest, most obvious things.
So in Maya, there's a couple of different ways we can create things.
You know, we have this shelf here, the poly modeling shelf, and there are curves and surfaces here
which, you know, it looks like they have similar things.
But these are called nerve surfaces.
And these aren't very useful for modeling and animation.
They sometimes are used for kind of just to create controls on rigs, to create paths, to revolve a
shape around or constrain a camera to a path or fly a plane down a curve path, something like that.
But for our purposes, we're not going to be using nerve surfaces.
We're going to be doing poorly modeling where we have vertices, edges and faces.
So let's create the rectangle.
We can click this rectangle right here and zoom in by right clicking and holding down alt and left clicking
to rotate around.
If you remember, we could also create that by doing the polygon primitives and we could pop this off
if we wanted to and create a bunch of these cubes.
That's another way to do it.
But now that we have this, we can go over to our channel box here and we can see we have a poly cube
one and we can see it's called P Cube one here.
And it's also called Cube one here and it's highlighted.
So we know this is what's highlighted.
And I point out these things because, you know, we can translate this thing around different ways
and that's reflected here.
But there's also other options.
When we pop this down, we can get subdivision's.
So every one of the more subdivisions, we can go to subdivision with height and depth and those will
do different kind of dimensions on this, depending on if we need more geometry.
We'll get to that in a minute.
Let's first make the basic shape.
So I'll go to with and I'll make this a little longer and a little wider.
And until.
So now we have something that approximates the size and I'm going to go and turn on the anti aliasing
and the ambient inclusion to help us visualize this most going to lift this up and we can see depending
on the width, height and depth, if I just change this to five and knees to two, that I know the height
is two, that this needs to the top one to be able to be sitting right on the floor.
Right.
Because it's measuring from the center, wherever manipulator is, that's where it's measuring from.
So if it's a height of two and this is in the middle, then it's one to the floor right from where the
manipulator is.
If we bring this down to the floor, it's going to be at zero.
So that's one way to kind of know how it's calculating what these numbers are.
Exactly.
So we have that rectangle now.
Let's create the handle.
We can click the cylinder here and drag this up.
You can hit W if you don't have the manipulator selected yet, you it e to rotate this over and to get
it exact, we can just type in 90.
You can do negative 90 or 90 for us.
It doesn't really matter right now.
And we could scale this down or we could use similarly these types of attributes over here so we could
reduce the radius or we could, you know, just scale it down the scale tool by hitting R.
And let's move this to one side.
And move it up.
And then we can make another cue, a couple of different ways we could duplicate this one, we get it,
Kamandi, and now we have another one that we can scale and do all these things, too.
But you can see when you duplicate just what the shortcut, you don't have that option anymore, right?
We don't have that poly cube input that we had here.
So sometimes it's nice to just use the basic tools to make sure that we have this history here, that
later we can go back in and change if we want to.
So let's bring this here and scale it down a little bit and let's talk about some ways to align things.
So, you know, if we wanted to get this to be exactly on this edge, it might be kind of hard to use
the manipulator, you know, back and forth.
There are a couple of different things we can do to move things around and be very specific.
Of course, we can go up here and type in a number, but we could just be typing all day.
And, you know, we might not get exactly visually what it looks like.
So to know that we have snap to that, we can use the snapping tools, but the snapping tools go based
off of where the manipulator is.
So, for example, if I hold down V on the keyboard, that means vertices.
It's going to snap to vertices.
And just to show you what were the components that we're dealing with to know what a vertices even is.
Let me break this down even further.
So if we take this square, I'm going to isolate it with this little button here.
Isolate, select I right click.
Now I can see and change my selection mode to edge, vertex, vertex, face, face or back to object
mode, which is what we're currently and where an object mode.
And it's also denoted by this little button up here in the top left.
I'm going to go to component mode.
We can click on this button and again, you know, it'll show that if you hold it down or if you hover
over it, rather, and you can see the different kind of components that we can select here and we can
isolate those.
So now we're selecting the lines.
Or if we go back to this one and dislike the line, we get the vertices.
So now we can edit the basic components of all the polygons here.
And if we want to do this quickly, we can right.
Click and hold, drag up and go to edge mode now and now we can adjust the edges.
So that just gives you a quick idea of of what the components are that make up a polygon.
So I just went to object mode to get back in so I can select the whole thing.
I can also go up here and click this middle button to go back and object mode.
I'm an uneasy slate this now so we can go back to our model.
So the next thing we need to understand is how to change where the manipulator is.
So if I hold down V like I was describing earlier and I middle mouse drag, if we click and hold middle
mouse, this is going to snap to vertices you can see is trying to snap to the corners of the box or
the vertices of the cylinder.
So but we don't want the Senate to snap to it.
We want the edge to snap to it.
So we're going to need to change where this center pivot is.
To do that, we can hold down D and now we get a different type of manipulator here.
And if we hold down V while we're holding down D, we can also snap the pivot to avert a C without the
object moving because we're just changing where the pivot is now.
So if I let go of both now we get the regular manipulator.
If this doesn't come back, you can hit W to make sure that pops back to the B, the manipulator.
So now we move this, the whole thing moves around.
Now what we can do is go and hold down V and middle mouse drag and isolate the up value.
So we're only going to go up and you can see it snapped upward.
Now we can hold down the x axis and it will snap to the back side, which it seems like it has.
So now we don't want this pivot here anymore.
How do we get that back?
That's not a big deal.
We go to modify and we go down to center pivot.
We click this.
Now, the pivot is back in the center and we can move the pivot around later again if we want to.
But now it's there.
Also, remember, you can see that the axis here is yellow.
So if I was to start middle mouse dragging, it's going to be isolated on this no matter what I do or
where I move my mouse if it's middle mouse dragged.
So, you know, just want to make sure that you understand how it's isolating these axes as you click
them.
That's one thing that, you know, stumps a lot of people when they're just starting out, like, why
can I move this in a different axis?
It's because we selected that one and now it's thinking ought to isolate that.
So this looks very basic right now.
But I want to give you a quick introduction into how to create things, manipulate them, snap thing.
Around and in the next lesson, we're going to take this further and start adding details and learn
a few more modeling tools inside of Maya.
So thanks for watching and I'll see in the next lesson.