Daily Blog

I started work on the Star Trek Phaser today. I am making what I assume is a magazine for the weapon. Here's what I've done so far:

Bevel Minilesson

I learned to bevel today. Beveling, I have come to understand, is crucial in controlling the geometry of smoothed models. The following images show eight beveled cubes, the top four show the amount of segments, and their effect on the bevel. The bottom four show how offset affects the bevel.

 The next two images show how beveling certain sides can have an effect on the geometry of the shape.

Helmet

I finished the Polygonal Helmet MAYA tutorial. I learned how to use polygons to create complex models and how to make hard edges and creases in a smoothed model. This is the finished product:

the right side is low resolution, the left is high res.

Cloth

For this project I had to make a cloth collide with a passive collider. I decided to make several passive colliders with toruses and a pipe modified to make a funnel. Then I gave the cloth a water balloon property and got this:

Daily Blog + Error Rage

Today I continued work on the Polygon MAYA tutorial. I made some progress, but I've run into a snag. The step I'm at in the tutorial involves using the select border edge tool to extrude edges of the mesh for the helmet. I performed the first extrusion fine, but the problem happened with the border edges shown in the picture below:

MAYA will not let me select that entire border edge for some odd reason. Every time I click on the topmost part of that edge MAYA gives me:

when it is obviously a border edge. Hopefully, MAYA will stop being a jerk next time and let me select that particular edge

Re: Temple

I perfected the design of the temple. It now features steps, a second emblature, and a steeple. To make the steps, I made one set of steps, grouped it, and then duplicated the group three times. The second emblature was made by duplicating the first and shrinking it. the steeple was constructed with a torus, sphere, and a cone. This is the final result:

Also, here is a side by side comparison of old vs new:

Salt Shaker

I finished the final part of the NURBS tutorial in MAYA. This tutorial involves lofting curves to create a surface. The result was this salt shaker:

It looks more like a dart or a Badmitton bird in my opinion...

Tentacles

Today we learned how to extrude along a curve in Maya. We were told to be as creative as possible, so I made a Chambered Nautilus (A type of shelled cephalopod) from a simple cube:

Both the tentacles and the shell were made by extruding along curves, the front of the shell and the eye sockets were made by generic extrusion.
The Nautilus looks even better in smooth graphics:

Egghead/Egg cup

Today I finished part of the NURBS Maya project. This is the result:

It's gaze shall pierce your soul...

Temple

I finished the first Maya project we had in class. I'm now posting the result.