Megan Bednarz

Well, this summer I had started playing around in Maya, beginning with their polygon modeling tutorial. It covers most of the basics, but what I really wanted to do was get up to speed with Maya as far as to duplicate my level of proficiency with poly modeling in 3D Max. Needless to say, that didn’t happen and I dropped the tutorial as the lack-of-obligation summertime set in and I didn’t feel motivated to continue.

So, the first thing I did in this assignment was to pick up where I left off. I’m still not at the level of proficiency I was with Max, but I’m getting a few steps closer at least. The hotkeys still make it feel like my hands have been chopped off and glued on the opposite arms, but that frustration will pass with practice. Maya has so many more useful things. You can middle-click on a point while you are still creating something and move it around. For the split polygon tool, it even tells you the percentage along the line your point is! Pretty amazing! I still haven’t figured out how to do a slice plane if there is such a thing in Maya, which is very useful for creating straight cuts all the way around an object. Alternatively, you could do a duplicate edge perhaps, and move it further down… anyway, I don’t know quite how to do those things. If anyone has any hints, please let me know. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshots of the hammer in progress… the tutorial is the basic poly modeling tutorial in Maya itself, though.

Once I finished the hammer, I decided to delve into NURBS modeling. First I had the idea of extruding a seashell section along a curved path… to make sort of a nautilus.

So there are my starting curves… and this is how it ended up.

That seemed to work ok. I don’t think I’ve quite gotten the hang of the dimensions yet, and the level of detail seems to be a bit… crazy. But that’s probably because I chose to pencil in my curves rather than use the CV curve tool.

Well now that I had something interesting, I had to play with Mental Ray as was demonstrated in class. Still a bit bland at this point…
The next thing I tried was a birail curve. All I have to say is that that is really a neat tool!

Took me a few tries to do it right, you have to select your curve first and then the two rails. The two rail curves also have to be connected to the curve you want to birail extrude. I did that by holding X (or was it C?) to snap the endpoint to the curve. My curve was a little squiggly extruded along two expanding curving lines… the result looked like a wave!

I had to add some materials and spiff it up. I brought together the shapes around the hammer… so now it is the magical hammer of ice.

Voila! The “finished” product!