Maya Help

[Nick Garland]

Right I am modeling a bike for my computing course, it needs to end up being rendered in 3d etc, however I first need to make the model useable.

How do I modify the polyons so that they merge properly and do not protrude?

How do I texture them?

How do I cut holes in them, such as the BB, or general manipulation of the polygons?

Here is what I have done, its not fab but it will be good enough.

Also if anyone knows of any good tutorial sites that would be good, I have found a few but none seem to be of much help with hard to follow tuts.

Cheers, Nick

[poopipe]

How do I modify the polyons so that they merge properly and do not protrude?

don't bother at the tube junctions. with the forks you're better off extruding a circle along a curve than building it from cylinders

How do I texture them?

quickly and simply?

select a tube

set main menu to Polygons

go to Create UVs menu

Select Cylindrical Mapping - this'll allow you to wrap a image file around the cylinder.

Do that for all the tubes.

to apply an image to the tube

Make the image you want in photoshop

select the object,

get the attribute editor open,

find the Material (lambertsomething),

click the little chequered button next to color,

choose file from the dialog that pops up

browse for the file

make sure you turn on hardware texturing in the viewport or you wont see it. if the image is in the wrong place then mess with the cylindrical mapping gizmo

There are better ways but I'm guessing you won't have the foggiest idea what I'm talking about

How do I cut holes in them, such as the BB, or general manipulation of the polygons?

to do the BB shell

make a smaller cylinder thats the size of the hole you want and run it through the middle of the BB shell

select the BB shell

Shift select the smaller cylinder

go to the mesh menu

choose Booleans

choose difference

it'll cut you a hole

you could do that for the tube junctions too but theres not much point

also, you could just have made a tube rather than a cylinder

General Polygon manipulation ...

select the object

right click

choose vertex from the stupid messy menu at the top

select the little dots and move then - you can also do that with faces, edges etc.

There's a bunch of tools in the Mesh and Edit mesh menus that you can piss about with too.

tutorials?

they'll be hard, Maya is complicated and a turd to use. start at Highend3d.com

or if you're on a legit version of Maya you should have access to the Maya online docs - which are good

edit:

oo, looks like you're on 2008 - I'm on 8.5 at the moment, we aren't moving up to 2008 till later in the year. Some of the menus might have moved n stuff but I doubt much has changed

Edited September 20, 2007 by poopipe

[Nick Garland]

I am indeed on 2008, thanks to uni get it free Well ish, whilst I am here anyway were allowed to run it off the network.

Thanks for the help, I could not work out for the life of me how to texture things, I just need simple textures.

Next question, with XNA you need to have the model and the textures as seperate files, the way I am doing it anyway. How can I export the model as .fbx and have the textuers as .tga???

Update: Quick update of the model, its not fab but heh I have been using this program since last night.

Edited September 20, 2007 by Team War Rider

[poopipe]

that'll just happen - unless you choose the embed texture option on the FBX export dialog it'll just reference the .tga files from wherever they live on Disk.

To make life easier for yourself, put the textures in the same folder as the geometry, it'll save you pissing around later.

i get 2008 free with the developer licenses at work they just won't let me use it for anything yet (I've got a full licensed 2008 box under my monitor that nobody knows about though .. )

I'd take it home but I hate Maya (edit: that's a bit harsh, I've just been arguing with it for the last straight week)

Edited September 20, 2007 by poopipe

[Nick Garland]

What do you use instead? I have heard 3D Studio Max is good but they have not got that available here. Seeing as its free I am not going to argue, especially as I can just use the models they provide, but I felt like making my own, be original.

[poopipe]

Max is king. I'm biased cos I've been using it since v1 and was using 3dstudio for DOS for a couple of years before that but it's still got the most comprehensive set of polygon modelling tools available.

Lightwave and Softimage really piss me off but they're very good - I believe there's a free version of Softimage available (there was)

Free ones?

Blender is about the only one that's capable of producing finished movies but it's beyond nasty to use and because it's open source it doesn't work properly (fbx export in particular)

Wings 3d is a very nice modeller but the last version I unused was a bit limited apart from that.

What you use these days is pretty irrelevant since Autodesk started taking FBX seriously. Transferring stuff between Max and Maya is pretty well seamless (barring a few idiosyncrasies) and as far as I know Soft and lightwave have acceptable FBX support available.