Maya Project - Pillar

Vadien

Well, I wrapped up my work on Warhammer. 3 long years and its finally out. I'm relocating to another company and they use Maya so I'm teaching myself as much as possible. I will be doing terrain with them much like Mythic but I will also be modeling.

I have a lot of free time right now since I still have 3 weeks until my start date at my new job and my last day at Mythic was Tuesday. So I'm going simple first just to get the hang of this program and maybe get some helpful hints from other Maya users. So here comes a pillar! yay. Starting with a rough concept.

Vadien

OK got started on the head part. Figured that's the hardest thing out of all of this. Modeling in Maya is slow right now. Haha.

ericleekessler

to be honest, i find modeling in maya to be faster than max, but one thing to remember with maya, remember to delete your history! history in maya = large files and may result in crashing

rhoymand

a lot of things will cause your maya to crash. but yes, deleting your history (just like saving) should be done often.

Aldo

There are quite a few plugins/scripts for maya that make it more (max) user friendly...suck as the ability to shift clone edges and such...kinda like in max. I don't know any or where to find them off the top of my head, but maybe someone else does. (figured I'd mention it).

SHEPEIRO

start loving the edge loop tools,

i hotkey edgeloop selection, insertion and deletion(i made a word up) to the keys around E, makes for fast quad modelling

looking good

Mark Dygert

Looking great.

http://draster.com/nex-1.5/
Nex, its great. One of the biggest things it features is the ability to preview. And the tools it adds are great. Its no polyboost but it made maya much much easier to use.

http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/misc/bonus_tools/
Also check out Maya's Bonus Level Tools, lots of great tools for placing instanced objects, joining objects, aligning objects... bla bla bla

Keep it up, looking good so far

SHEPEIRO

get used to customising maya, its much more powerfull than max in that respect,
if you do an opperation all the time stick it in a custom shelf, if your used to working on a grid, you can have a load of instance and move buttons set up, so that placing objs becomes a case of click click click.

Vadien

Thanks for the replies so far guys. There are a lot of quick things I can do in Max that I miss in Maya but I can see it is still a very good program. Here's a silly question... how do I edit hot keys? I've been using the menu system for everything. I'll check out those plugins though. Thanks a ton guys.

Illusions

Window > Settings/Preferences > Hotkey Editor

ericleekessler

also while modeling, these 3 keys can be key, x c v , x = snap to grid, c = snap to edge, and v = snap to vertice, very helpful for fast modeling.

rhoymand

you'll also use the hotkeys Q, W, E, and R a lot. select, move, rotate, and scale in that order.

I've bound my extra mouse buttons to toggle btwn component/object mode, select vertices (component mode), and select faces (component mode). makes it waaaay faster for me.

Kawe

Right mouse button menus are pretty neat. There are even more menus with ctrl or shift combos. I guess it depends on how you want to work but most of the stuff you can find in the dropdown menus/shelves can be found in these menus too and it is just way faster when you get used to flicking your mouse around.

I believe you can alter the menus too in the UI editor thingie so you can really customize it.

Vailias

Also if you hold down your tool hotkeys (ie w for move) and the left mouse button you get the tool's options as a hotbox. Super useful for switching your move modes from global to local to custom axis without navigating menus.

Vadien

Thanks a ton guys. I'm starting to get the hang of it. It's really just changing the way I think. I've been so used to max and hot keys for so long. Not sure how many I'm going to remap now. Thanks a ton for all the tips. Keep em coming!

I've been setting up for our going away party but I've done a little bit more...

kary

I'm making the same transition myself, so I'll be following how it goes for you

It'd be interesting to hear how people hotkey Maya. I'm tempted to mimic Silo as much as I can, how possible is that? Was surprised to see that they have a tweak mode (seems to be a bit more pixel perfect then Silos, but nice to see), double click edge loops, etc so it seems like some of the core functions are there.

Kawe

the dbl click edge loop was added in that second bonus pack for maya 2008 I believe so ya. you should be surprised. haha.

personally I'd actually recommend trying to do it the "maya way" before remapping like mad. why? cause trying out new ways always teaches you something new. I guess if you're in a hurry you should remap but ya.

another thing to try is the artisan tool for poly sculpting (and weight painting and whatever else it is used for). it is pretty neat to do large scale adjustments to fix up proportions. just suggesting it cause I dont remember if max got it or not.

Vadien

That's kinda what I was getting at in my previous post. I want to learn Maya fully instead of trying to slap a 3D Max face on top of it. I figure if I learn Maya for what it is then that's another skill set. I can sit down my first day and model right away instead of taking hours to download plugins and map hot keys.

SHEPEIRO

also learning mayas workflow will help you improve maxes if/when you return.

you wont need to re-map your hotkeys on your first day, just take your preferences folder (here abouts-Documents\maya\8.5\prefs) to work on a stick, copy them onto the machine there and you'll have all your hotkeys and custom buttons

Vailias

my current hotkey set is a mishmash of lightwave (where I started) and maya, and I've brought some of that (what I can) to max when I use it. Thankfully since they all have similar functionality the keymaps can share a lot.

Vadien

Finished the head. Set up the smoothing groups and unwrapped it. That was the hard part really so the rest should come quickly. There's some strange stretching on the side of the face so i need to tweak that a bit.



You can't see it because of how I cropped the image but I left space at the top for a few trims if I run out of room on the second texture sheet.

Vadien

Did a bit more. My eyes need a rest so I think I'm done for the day.

SHEPEIRO

i preffered the thinness of your concept, this is a bit squat for the shape of the head

Vadien

I was thinking exactly that as I was stopping for the day. I'm going to re-work it a bit. because the thin look is part of what makes it look like a creepy Gothic kind of deal. As it stands now it looks a little too much like the pillar styles you find in every unreal level.

Vadien

Alright maybe I wasn't done for the day hehe. Made the pillar thin like the concept.

dbreak

Pixels are strange arnt they

Vadien

Alright last one. Started the tongue stuff.