Alrighty I’m prepping for doing an honors thesis short film in Maya and want to take some time to get more aquatinted with the software. So we’re back to blogging woo woo!
Today I started a tutorial on modeling a steampunk firefly.
I learned:
- Put reference images in ‘source images’ folder so it will automatically show when importing an image.
- One cube has a width of one centimeter
- Set reference image alpha gain to 0.5 so it’s less visible and distracting
- When parenting, remember to freeze transformations (although I still have some weird issues with warping despite this)
- As a general method to model a complex object, roughly block out the shape in 3D before going in and doing the detailed version. This way one can see the way in which the object will fit in 3D space (and not just on the 2D reference image)
- While selecting object, hold E + right click -> select ‘discrete rotate’… this will have the rotation click into place (very useful!)
- Press B for soft select
I will learn:
- Why the objects morph weirdly when parented object moves (despite freezing transformations)
- Why mirror object doesn’t work completely for selection of objects that are parented
Isaac Gazmararian 