Technical Notes Week #8 - Maya Modelling Notes

 

Technical Notes Week #8



Custom shelf in Maya:

You can add to the custom shelf by cntrl + shift + left clicking on any tool/function in Maya's menus. By simply copying the .mel file containing this user data info (should be in a path like Documents\maya\<version>\prefs\shelves), you can import and use your custom shelf on other computers. You can also drag and drop icons directly into the shelf.

It is useful because it saves you a lot of cumulative time navigating drop down menus in Maya and allows you to work much more concisely/efficiently.

To rip a menu off Maya's interface, you click and hold on the dotted line at the top of a menu, and then drag it away from the menu bar to make it a floating window. Below you can see my custom shelf and some of the tools I appended to it:




Further technical notes:

  • Hold D while using move tools to move pivot point

  • Group or ungroup objects by selecting multiple objects in your scene and pressing Ctrl + G on your keyboard. You can also find this operation under Edit > Group or Ungroup. 

  • Remember using layer groups can be helpful for organisation

  • If you accidentally double extrude something then if you try to extrude faces together they will be split and not together as intended

  • Under the ‘edit mesh’ menu you can merge vertices just like in Blender to fix overlap issues

  • Under ‘mesh’ there is a ‘fill hole’ option to fill in an edge ring with a polygon

  • Click ‘Q’ to escape from current tool and cancel it (very useful cause there are lots of STUPID tools which remain active forever in Maya, even when switching between objects)

  • W to select ‘move’ tool/gizmo

  • B enables/disables some soft selection/proportional editing stuff

  • Remember to use rule of 8 for connecting character head to body and such <- lowpoly subdivision workflow

  • Default behaviour of ‘insert edge loop” is stupid in Maya and not centred - tweak the settings from the drop down menu (make it ‘multiple edge loops’ and then set the default number to 1 to make it create edge loops in the centre)

  • When lining up vertices between both side and front orthographic views, remember there’s always a “free” 3rd axis in play if they don’t quite line up (a transform value you can edit without impacting the output on one of the orthographic views, so you can use that to help a bunch.

Additional Info:

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