Technical Notes Week #9 - More Maya Modelling

 

Technical Notes Week #9

The '8 Side Rule':

This rule tells us a polygon should have 8 edges or more whenever we are working with a cylindrical or spherical shape. This gives us the best of both worlds when it comes to defining shape as well as remaining lowpoly enough that it is easy to work with. 

Better edge flow and thus deformation arise from this too: if we are consistent it means different mesh parts can be connected seamlessly (e.g. the bottom of a head with 8 sides connecting to a pair of shoulders and neck with 8 sides. Consistency is very helpful.

Within Maya, when you add a sphere or cylinder you can control the subdivision count easily using the attributes window to the right (you can drag the slider or enter a number).

Further modelling notes:

• Maya keybind - hold V while in vertex mode to snap to nearest vertex (useful for merging with a low enough threshold that other stuff doesn’t break)

• You can not merge vertices between two separate meshes, even if you are editing them simultaneously in vertex view

• If basic functionalities such as shift + click to select meshes or drag select are not working, just reboot Maya, it’s probably died

• Hold B to enable soft select mode (proportional editing). Hold B and scroll to change AOE