Maya Modeling Basics: Airplane pt. 5

All right so welcome back. What we need to do now is save out our scene. We’ve made
a lot of changes so I want to make sure that it’s all backed up. I’m going to go to
“File” “Save Scene as” and choose Maya Ascii and let’s save this as airplane
version 02. That way I making sure I’m recording any changes just in case I lose anything.
Now what I want to do is I want to start out modeling my aircraft as soon as I can this
is a process that we’re going to use called box modeling. It’s actually pretty self
explanatory. We’re going to start off with a box cube and we’re going to be building
out from that. Now when I create this cube and move it up roughly in place we’re going
to guess and check this in just a bit. However there is a couple of things I want to examine
here on my aircraft before I begin and I’m going to see this and I think it’s easy
to see this sometimes in the side view. I have sort of a rounded curves profile of this
aircraft that’s going to require , since we’re working with a polygon model, several
different rows of edges along the model to make sure that this is correct If we don’t
have enough edges the airplane is going to look to boxy. However the corresponding part
of that is that if I add to many edges this is going to become very hard to work with.
So finding a good balance between minimal polygon amounts vs. just enough polygons that
you need to define the form is going to be a really tricky task in a lot of this. While
looking along my form I’m going to ignore the nose because I’m going to build that
separately with propellers when I’m done. These sort of vertical lines across the model
actually give me a pretty good heads up on where I’ll need edge splits. So I see 1
edge, 2, here’s a 3rd section , here’s 4,there’s a 5th ,there’s a 6th, 7th, and
8th. At the very least we’re going to need 8 sections. However since there is no lines
in the front or the back of the wing I think we’re going to add in 2 more to create 10
divisions along the length of this aircraft. So let’s go into my attribute editor to
my polygon 1 tab which is my initial polygon attributes and maybe I’ll scale this up
a little but so it’s easier to see on the screen. I’m going to try and create along
my depth actually 10 decisions which we’re going to move in just a second to reference
out this form. Looking along the center of the aircraft I’m going to need at least
2 divisions because I only want to work with half of the model and to cut this in half
I’m going to need at least 2 sections. So I’ll change my “Sub Divisions” width
to a value of 2. Again I’m trying to keep this as simple as I can. I’m not going in
and adding 42 edges but one of the good rules of thumb is you always want an even number
because you’re going to want symmetrical sides on each part. Then since I’m going
to have to calculate the curvature of the side and where the wings come out, I think
maybe it will be good to start off on the height with maybe a value of 3 for this. It’s
going to be a pretty boxy form but it will work for us right now. Here’s what I’m
going to do, I’m going to go and start taking a look at my side view. I hit spacebar and
I go to the side view and I’m going to position my aircraft in place and scale out this very
boxy fuselage and position it so that it’s right on top of the model and so it’s easier
for us to see on the video, I’m going to enter “Shading” “X-ray Mode” Instead
of going into wireframe for a lot of this because I feel it will be easier for you watching
these videos but you can leave this in wireframe mode if you prefer. Well my next step is I
want to right click and select vertex and I want to move my vertices so that they are
scaled in to the correct proportions of my plane. So front row here, well they seem to
big I’m going to hit R for the scale tool and I’m going to grab the green box and
scale them uniformly down until the top vertex and the bottom vertex meet the actual silhouette
of the plane and if I want to move it as well a little bit up and down I can do that. Well
here’s my next row and I sort of see this little intake part along the bottom I’m
going to align this row to that landmark and scale this down and move it until it’s in
the correct position. If the curvature isn’t completely accurate just yet, in fact we can
see here that there is a need for more curvature; we can add that in later on. Through the rest
of the aircraft, the whole aircraft seems to taper and thin out after this so I’m
going to grab all my other vertices actually dragging a selection over these and then getting
the scale tool and start scaling them down at once so I don’t have to keep going back
through the same task. So I’ll scale these, move them, actually the next row I might actually
may be able to move just a couple of these upwards and then I’ll take the bottom row
and move some of these upwards as well. I’m trying to keep these as uniform as possible
and I’m also in this case trying to work around the cockpit. We’re going to add that
back in just a bit. But I want to work underneath the cockpit right now. Just like I’m going
to work underneath the back fin. I see also that this row I probably want to establish
being a little bit closer to the back wing so I’m going to try and get that in place
and I’m going to pull this one down so it’s correctly aligned with this bottom air intake.
I’m going to keep moving my points on the form to I get something that closely matches
what I’m after. It’s not going to be perfect right out of the gate but we’re going to
get it pretty close. I’m also looking here, here’s my tail fin, I trying to get this
somewhat sandwiched between this middle row of vertices that I’ve created. Let’s see
if I can scale each one of these up and I’ll move up this lower row just a bit and very
shortly here we should be pretty close to a conclusion. I’m also going to leave off
this back rounded edge because we’re going to get that edge in just a second as well.
We’re already starting to get a feel for this airplane and I think that’s helping
out quite a bit. Well one of the problems here, well from the top view, this again still
looks a little off. So what I’m going to do before I start editing it from the top
view is I want to create my duplicate instance. This means I’m going to select my model
in the face component mode because faces are the easiest to delete component. I’ll go
to let’s say my top view and drag a selection over all my faces on the left side and hit
backspace or delete. Now what I’m going to do I’ll hit f8 to return to object mode
or right click and choose object mode. I’m going to create a duplicate instance of this.
An active copy. I’m going to do this by going to “Edit” “Duplicate Special”
and go in the options box. Under geometry type I choose “Instance” and to make it
mirror I’m going to choose scale value negative 1 along the X and hit apply. With this now
I should be able to go to my top view and go to wireframe, in my case I’m going to
go to X-Ray, right click on the model and choose vertex and just move your points until
the contour with the form. Now again this is going to leave us with a boxy looking piece.
However it’s going to be a very solid starting place for our project. Here I might be able
to do a couple at once so I’m going to try and bring these together. I’m looking at
just the fuselage I’m ignoring any of the fins and the back little selection to round
this out I’m going to push these out a little bit at the end. Now you can see my somewhat
rounded form which is ready to be detailed even further in the next video. We’re going
to save our scene and we’ll be good. See you in the next video.