Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 5: Side Projects

The rest of chapter five took me through some of the Deformer Tools that maya has to offer.

I didn't take any screen shots due to the fact that I went through the parts pretty quickly and it kind of slipped my mind, but I learned how to use the Bend Deformer so that I can 'bend' object. It would be very useful in creating tubes on a space suit, or pipes in a city, among various other projects.

I also learned about the Flare Deformer which as the name suggests, allows me to flare objects out. Which will come in handy for tweaking objects to get the shape I want.

Next I learned how to use a Lattice Deformer

The book has a model hand ready for me to work with.

So what I did was I created a Lattice which allows me to choose points on the lattice and deform the entire hand with those points.

In this project I was to deform the hand with lattices to create a hand that looked more Alien. In order to do this I created a lattice around the entire hand to elongate it, and then individually placed lattices around the fingers in order to individually shave the fingers to make them look more alien.

This is a great tool if you want to make tweaks to a project without having to go through and individually select vetices, faces, or edges. In addition to being easier, depending on what effect you're trying to achieve, it's also much cleaner. Often when working with individual vertices my project gets a little messy. When using a lattice your model remains clean.

This is what I ended up with. I'm not extremely happy with it, but I wasn't really trying for perfection as much as I was just playing around with the tool to see what it could do. If I did it again I'd put more time into and definitely put a little more effort into the thumb.

Overall I wasn't too impressed with the lattice. I could see how it would be useful later on down the road for editing pre-existing models, or for tweaking them, but it wasn't all that fun to learn.

Until the next section.

In this section I learned about Animating Through a Lattice. 

I was instructed to create the effect of a balloon squeezing through a tube. In order to create this effect I created a lattice for the 'Balloon', a simple poly sphere, and then moved it over to the tube, an open ended cylinder, I had to edit the lattice so that it was flared on the ends and squished down in the middle to form to the tube.

This is the effect it produced. 

Can you tell I had a bit too much fun with this part? It was a blast to make 'swooping' sound effects as I moved the ball through the tube.

 Ah, the simple things in life.

Last but not least I created a starfish. I created a polygonal star and then used subdivisions to create the 'star fish'. I really don't like how mine turned out, and I also didn't really enjoy working with subdivisions. Which leads me to believe I didn't understand them as well as I should have. I'm going to have to go back to them to practice them some more.

Here's my finished product.