Maya 2015

Lecture Details

Maya’s Modeling Toolkit contains a very powerful set of tools that can allow topology to be easily created. We will begin to take a look at using Quad Draw. The Quad Draw tool will allow us to literally draw out our topology one face at a time directly onto the body base that we have created. We will first need to set our body base as a live surface. Making the body base a live surface will work much like snapping to grids. Instead of our geometry snapping to the grid points it will snap to the live object, in this case our body base that we created.

Quad Draw is very simple to use and we will cover the keyboard and mouse commands used with it. Autodesk was very clever when creating the Quad Draw controls for the Modeling Toolkit. Left clicking anywhere on the live surface will create a point. As the name implies we will need to create four points before we can move forward with creating a face. To create a face all we have to do is hover the mouse between any four points while holding down the shift key. You will notice that a yellow surface appears between the points. With the shift key held down we only need to left click where the yellow surface has appeared to create a face.

As we continue to shape our topology we will take a look at how we can use relax to clean up our edge flow. Just holding down shift and left clicking while dragging across edges, faces or points will relax the model so that it flows better across the live surface. We can also delete a row of edges by holding down control and shift then clicking on that row of edges. Then we can add the row of edges back by holding down control, hovering over an edge and left clicking where we want to place the row of edges.

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