Technical Notes: Week 4. Illustrator and Maya

Illustrator

Pen tool = p

Anchor point tool = shift + c

 

The last time I used a pen tool and vectors was maybe a full decade ago, and my curved line making process somehow felt smoother back then, but I can't really remember what I did or what program I was using. 

This time I stuck with the pen tool, blocking out the main shapes, then used the anchor point tool to create curves in my lines. 

I played around a bit with the gradient tool which was fairly intuitive. 

 

 <-- this reverses the gradient.

 

I tried using some halftones but they didn't look very good. Halftones are under: Effect > Pixelate > Color Halftone...

Selecting layers was a little finicky. In the Layers window, clicking the circle "targets" the layer. AFAIK just selecting the layer(s) is for re-ordering them. You want to "target" a layer when changing it's properties or editing it in any way. Directly clicking on an object targets the top "group".

 

Maya

Files and objects within Maya need to be names only with letters, numbers, and underscores. No spaces.

Name by least specific aspect to most specific, i.e. "geo_chair"

 - "geo" = geography

 - then, object description

Never use Maya Binary, always Maya ASCII. Easier to fix ASCII.

Referenced images

 - Files outside of the project

 - Edited and updated outside of the project

Project Folders:

 - "images" folder are for images created in Maya (for export), not for images to import in.

 - Use "sourceimages" for imported images

Custom Shelf is for regularly used tools

 - History

 - Freeze Transform

Display Window

 - Visibility

 - Change view to Template or Reference

Outliner Window

 - Click and drag selects multiple

 - Middle click and drag moves

Hide the View Cube to avoid changing default views.

 

(added these notes to my 2d and 3d master posts)