Technical Notes: Week 8

Custom shelf

    I've made notes on the custom shelf before (including on my master post of Maya tips and notes). The custom shelf is good for keeping all your frequently used tools in one place, making them much quicker to find. ctrl + shift + click to add a tool to the custom shelf. 

    You can also click and drag a menu out to rip the entire menu off and have that easily accessible on the screen.

Things I'm learning as I get started on my character body 3D model:

I'm using the Joan of Arc tutorial as a guide for my character model. I'm gradually memorising the different views through more regular use. I'm still getting used to the shortcuts and movement keys since I'm so used to the shortcuts and object movement in InDesign and similar 2D design programs. I find myself sometimes accidentally creating multiple vertices and needing to select and merge them later on (I think this is from accidentally extruding more than once). Hopefully I get better at avoiding this over time but at the very least, it's getting me more familiar with the 'Merge to Centre" tool. I could find these errors better when switching to the smoothed view (3).

I also placed my reference images in such a way that the character will be facing away in the front view. I would fix this by rotating the character model around and flipping the side view reference image but it's not really bothering me too much at the moment so it's fine. 

ctrl + alt + s to increment and save

To duplicate the leg, I followed my friend Sam's steps on her blogpost:

Duplicating the leg

• Select the leg in outliner
• Go to Edit > Duplicate Special Options
• Inside of Duplicate Special Options go to Edit > Reset Settings
• Scale X (the first Scale box) to -1
• Make Geometry Type to Instance and hit apply, then close the window
• (Instance means that if you adjust the leg, the other leg will be adjusted too)
• Select on the second leg in Outliner and make a new display layer with it then rename the layer lyr_leg2
• Turn the layer to reference

space + click and hold "Maya" to change a specific view - useful for when I accidentally do this and need to switch it back, and for switching between front and back views or the two side views.