Maya Tutorial: Basics (HD) part 5 of 5

In our last video, we added an FFD Lattice deformer
and now we're ready to use it to change the shape of the ice cream.
I want to get at the individual points on this Lattice and move them around
to change the shape of my ice cream.
The best way to do that is through Maya's Marking Menu.
The Marking Menu is a context-sensitive right-click menu.
In other words, when you hold down the right mouse button over something in the viewport
you will get a menu that shows the most common tools you'll need.
For example, up at the top is something that says Lattice Point.
If I release the right mouse button over that, I enter Lattice Point mode.
And now I can select one of these Lattice Points and move it.
I’ll hit the W key, move it around,
and you'll see I’m able to change the shape of the ice cream.
I’ll hit Z to undo that.
Let's go to an orthographic view now, I’ll tap the SPACEBAR.
That'll take me to my Front view. I can drag a box around some points.
You’ll notice that I’ve selected four points
by dragging a box in my Front view.
Hit the R key to switch to the Scale tool, and I can scale that out.
Now you can see I'm getting some “interesting” results here -- not very smooth right there,
and that's because of the attributes for the FFD deformer.
So I'm going to access those attributes directly
once again, through the right-click Marking Menu.
I’ll right-click, and up here you'll see something that says FFD Lattice.
What this will do, is this will take me directly to the Attribute Editor.
Here we go, and I've got these different nodes.
This one is the Transform node.
This ffd1 over here is the actual creation node.
And all I have to do is increase the Influence, here on these attributes.
With an Influence of four, or maybe even five, we'll get a smoother result.
Try scaling that again. There we go, that's better.
I’ll select these bottom points and move them with the W key.
Bring those up.
Maybe select these and move those down or perhaps scale them.
Experiment, have fun.
And I do want to move these around a little bit randomly
so that the object won’t look totally regular.
I'll hit the W key and move these around just a little bit.
I can select a bunch of Lattice Points and move them or scale them.
When I finish shaping the ice cream, I want to make this adjustment permanent.
The Lattice deformer can be animated,
but in this case I just want to make this ice cream assume this shape permanently.
To do that I'm going to do something called deleting the Construction History.
The first step is, I'm going to exit out of Lattice Point mode.
I can just right-click once again and go to object mode
And now I’m in object mode. You'll know that you're in object mode
if you select something and it's highlighted in bright green like this.
To delete the Construction History means
to essentially “bake” the object, or complete it.
So usually the final stage of modeling is deleting the Construction History.
To make it clear what's happening, I'm going to go back to the Channel Box,
and I’ll activate that, because when I delete the Construction History
it'll be easiest to see what's going on if the Channel Box is visible.
So right now if I select my sphere, or ice cream object,
if you look in the Inputs you will see that there are several things listed here now.
Previously, we only had a polySphere. But now you'll see ffd1 and tweak1 listed.
These are the different nodes, and if I click polySphere1, for example,
in this case I can actually adjust the number of divisions.
Now, to make this modeling adjustment permanent,
I'm going to delete the Construction History for this ice cream object.
It's currently selected, and I'm going to go to the Edit menu
and choose Delete by Type - History.
When I click this menu, watch what happens in the Channel Box.
Suddenly now there are no Input nodes.
The polySphere node, which stored attributes such as Radius and Subdivisions, is gone.
The FFD Lattice deformer is also gone.
In fact, when you delete the Construction History, you wipe out all Input nodes
and you're left with a basic raw Shape.
And that's what we usually do at the end of a modeling workflow.
Deleting the Construction History is very important, because if you don't do it
sometimes you may have compatibility issues when you open scenes.
Models might appear scrambled or messed up if the Construction History gets corrupted.
So the Construction History is very useful
because it allows us to go in and edit nodes within the object,
but when we're finished modeling the object,
generally we will delete the Construction History,
and again, basically “bake” this object into a raw Shape.
And the metaphor of baking a cake is very apt
because when you delete the Construction History
you bake the object, and you can never un-bake it.
In other words, I’ll never be able to get those polySphere attributes back.
Finally, let's add a material or shader to these objects to change their color.
One way to do that is through the Rendering menu set.
So I'll go over to the menu set pulldown on the status line, and choose Rendering.
With the ice cream selected, I'll go to the Lighting/Shading menu
and assign a new material.
And in this cascading menu you will see lots and lots of different types of materials.
Don't be intimidated by this because you won't be using all these right away,
we’ll learn these over the course of our lessons.
Today we're just going to add a so-called Lambert material, or Lambert shader.
When I click on this, Maya opens the Attribute Editor automatically
to show me the attributes for the newly-created shader.
Here it is: Lambert. And it's called lambert2.
Why don’t I give this a name like VanillaShader.
And I’ll press ENTER on the alpha keyboard.
It's very important, actually, that you remember to hit ENTER on the alpha keyboard
and not the numeric keyboard.
OK, and I can adjust the Color. I can move this slider to make it brighter.
And I've also got this slider here called Diffuse.
I’m going to increase that a little bit too, to make it nice and bright.
Later we'll learn more about all the different attributes within this Lambert shader,
but that's good enough for now.
Now I’ll go over to the ice cream cone, select it, and assign a new shader to it also.
But this time I’ll do it through a different method,
a little bit faster method, which is, once again, the Marking Menu.
I’ll right click and go to Assign New Material within the Marking Menu. Here it is.
And we see that same long list of material shaders available to us.
And I’ll go up to the top and choose Lambert.
Once again, Maya has assigned a new Lambert shader and opened the Attribute Editor
so that we can edit it. The first thing I’ll do is rename it.
I'll call this one SugarConeShader, and press ENTER.
I’ll go down to the color swatch this time, and if I click on it,
Maya opens a color picker. And here I can assign a color to the ice cream cone.
Click Accept, and there you go, I've got an ice cream cone.
I’m going to hide the Attribute Editor, dolly back and admire my work.
Go ahead and save that now. Save Scene As...
and I'll call this one IceCream01.
So now you've created your first 3D model in Maya. I hope you learned a lot,
and enjoyed this series of free video tutorials called Maya Basics.