Friday, December 9, 2011

Week 2 Research

What is a Boolean?
Booleans in Maya let you take an object, subtract, add or intersect its geometry onto another object (merging). A boolean can only happen between two objects. The first selected object will be booleaned. The other piece will be added.

Booleans are great, but have some drawbacks. 1. The geometry is less than savory, but still usable, and can be re-worked with a little time. Edge loops will be hard to keep. 2. Prone to errors (we'll learn how to fix these later). 3. Due to the geometry that it produces, smoothing a booleaned object can become a pain. 

There are 3 different boolean operations:

Union - This will merge both objects together. It will get rid of geometry between the two pieces.

Difference - Subtracts the last selected geometry from the first selected geometry.

Intersection - The geometry between the two objects will be kept and the rest will be removed.


Beveling Tool


A lego toy block modeling video




What does extrude do?
Extrude creates new geometry from a selected component. This selected component can be vertices, edges, or faces; most commonly used is faces.

After you click extrude, Maya will use the show manipulator tool to let you set the attributes of the extrude visually.



Anatomy of an Extrude
Step one - Repeat the set-up and create another extrusion.

Step two - Open the attributes editor by going to window>attributes editor.

Here's how the extrude tool works: Maya will create a node called polyextrudeface. This node contains all the attributes for the extrusion. These attributes are changed by visually setting them using the manipulator.

To see this, move the manipulator handle and the attributes editor will change.

When you're using the local mode for the move tool, the local translation attributes will change. If you're in world space, the normal transform attributes will change.



The Extrude Tool

Extruding:
Width (Vertices)
Controls the width of the base of the polygons created by the extrusion.
Length (Vertices)
The distance to move the extruded vertex along its normal.
Divisions
Controls number of sections along the length of the extrusion.



The Extract tool



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