Maya Tutorial for Beginners 2016 | 2017

hello there and welcome to my Maya 2016 for beginners video tutorial by completing this tutorial you'll be able to go from a complete novice who knows nothing about either Mayan or 3d modeling and I'll take you through 3d and modeling techniques as well as texturing lighting and rendering and by the time you finish you'll have created the image that you can see on screen the tutorial will take two to three hours to complete and there is a written companion available which can find by clicking the link below the video there are two versions of this tutorial and you're currently in the one that is one long video which contains each step back to back if you're happy with that then just hang on a sec and we'll get underway but if you prefer to go into a playlist where each step is broken down into its own video then click the link on-screen okay let's get stuck in okay so the first step the first thing that we need to do in Maya is to set up a project and what a project is is one folder which contained a lot of other folders that contain all the assets geometry textures etc for the project that you're working on it's really important that you do this properly otherwise once you start rendering later things can go wrong so the first thing you'll need to do is outside of Maya just create a folder somewhere and I'm just going to call this my project and I'm just going to leave it on my desktop for now which will be fine for what we're doing today and then what I'm going to do is go back into Maya and I'm going to click on file and I'm going to go down to the project window and click on that okay this is a project window the first thing we'll need to do you'll notice that you can't click where it says default you need to click on the button that says new and then you can give your project a name now I know that I'm going to create a room so that's what I'm going to call my project r oom and then you need to choose the location so I'm going to click on this folder icon and then I'm going to go to desktop and there's my Maya projects folder and I'm going to select that now here you can see it's given a list of all the folds it's going to create and the names it's going to give to them I'm happy with the defaults I'm very used to the default so I'm leave that as it is and click on accept there we go and that's how you create a project in Maya now just to show you what that's done I'm just going to go into that folder and you can see I've now got a room folder within that which is the project folder and then inside there there are all those folders that have been created so we now have a folder structure set up for the rest of our work the next thing you'll need to know how to do is how to create a new scene what a scene is is it's the single file that contains all of your geometry and then links out to things such as your texture files and it's really important that you know how to make them and how to save them so that's what we'll look at so to create a new scene you can just click on file new scene dead easy it'll ask you if you want to save the current scene there's nothing in it so we don't and that's done so that's really straightforward it's not something we strictly needed to do but it's something that you needed to know how to do the next thing that you need to be able to do is to be able to save a scene and this is really important if you don't save your work in Maya and save your work regularly you will lose it guaranteed Maya is a cruel mistress and sometimes she wants you to fail so let's try and avoid that so to be able to save a scene what you do is you just click on file and save scene as and you should notice that by default because we've taken the time to set up the project and it's gone into the desktop my projects room scenes folder which is where your scenes should go every file that you use should go in the right folder and this one belongs in the scenes one you've got a choice of file types there's Maya binary or Maya ASCII I used to use Maya binary at the time but I now I recommend Maya ASCII because it's more likely to allow you to be backwards compatible so I'm creating this in Maya 2016 and if I wanted to then open that scene in 2014 I'd have a better chance of that working if it's an ASCII file type so I'm going to change that to escape and then I'm going to call it room safe and that's how you save a scene the next thing we're going to look at is the menu sets and the shelves in Maya there are a ridiculous amount of menus and so many tools that they can't all fit on the screen at once so the way they've got around this is they've set up different shelves and different menu sets and you'll change the menu set depending on what you do in and the same goes for shelves for what we're doing we need to make sure that you're on the modeling menu set and the polygon shelf so by default I am already there but let's say we're not for whatever reason the way you change them to your menu sets it's this drop-down box and you'll notice that something like the first six options maybe seven stay the same but after that they change so I'm going to change to modeling and you'll see that after Windows all of these change to become relevant to modeling and then you can see the shelves here everything relates to curds or surfaces but I want polygons you can see I've now got the polygon shelf activated so I've got all the tools I need in one place in this step I'm going to show you three settings that you can turn on that may actually save your life that is infinite undos autosave and incremental saving as I have already said Maya kind of likes letting you lose your work and we need to put measures in place to prevent my from doing that so let's look at how we do it so the first thing we're going to do is enable autosave so in order to do that we're going to click on Windows we're going to go to settings and preferences and then go to preferences and then we'll just erm enlarge this window a little bit and then in this window we need to find the files project section so we'll click on that and then you will see that under the autosave section you can put a tick in the box for enable and then you can set how often you would like that to happen for me 10 minutes is okay I don't want you to save every two minutes because that will interrupt my workflow and I don't want it saving every one hour because then if anything does happen like Maya crashes then I might have to redo 59 minutes worth of work which would make me really sad so that's okay the next thing we're going to look at is undos by default my only lets you undo 50 actions which means if you have made a lot of changes if you've been working on a project for a while and you need to go about you realize that something went wrong at the sort of early stages and you need to undo to get back to that stage you might be 100 200 actions down the line and you're not going to be able to undo so that means you're going to have to start again so the way to give yourself unlimited on do is to scroll down to the undo section and you'll see that undo is turned on it should always be turned on and at the moment the queue says it's finite and we can only have 50 actions that's mental unless you're really low on RAM or something you should never really I think have a queue size or so we're going to go to infinite that means that no matter what we do we can always go back to when we originally opened my press control and said it'll take you right back to the beginning yes the next thing we're going to turn on is incremental saving and this really works in tandem with the autosave feature that we turned on earlier what incremental saving means is that when Maya saves a scene it gives it a new file name so we'll start with room and then the next one will be room one then room two on what that means is if you've made a catastrophic error and it happens a lot believe me and get mapped on that early on and then everything you've done since that's built on that has just been wrong because of that mistake you made if you've just been saving over the same file you can't go back because you've saved the changes in but if you know that you made that error in room four then you can reopen the room for file and then kind of branch off in a different direction so it's a really really useful feature so in order to do that we're going to click on save because we're doing this preferences window now so we'll save those preferences and to turn on incremental saving that lives in a different area we click on file and then you'll see save scene but to the right of it there's a little box whenever you see one of those little boxes in Meijer that means there's some additional settings are available and if you click on that it will open a new window so we'll do that here it is and you can see that there is now a tick for incremental save you can limit the amount that it does I'm not going to do that if you're short on storage space then you might want to do that but I'll go up on your storage space so I'm just going to like to save as many as it needs and then I'm just going to click on save and close that now means that incremental saving is turned on and I'm less likely to make any mistakes that I can't come back from now that my is set up for us in this step we're going to look at actually getting some modeling done we're going to make something and we're going to make a room so what I'm going to do is throughout this tutorial I'm going to show you different ways of doing everything because the thing about Meijer is there are about 20 ways of doing absolutely everything and you'll find your own preferred way or the way that is fastest for you and I'm gonna introduce you to some different ways so the first thing we'll do is create a cube and we're going to do that from the create menu so if we click on create you can see that there are lots of options here we're going to choose polygon primatives and we're going to find cube but there's a setting I want to change before I create it so I'm going to go to the options box for cube and what I want to make sure is that normalization so without tick box Stefan or malaises turned off and it doesn't actually affect the way the cube works but what it does is it alters the texture space and it won't make any difference yet but it will later when we come to texture in the cube so I'm just going to turn that off and then click on create and then you'll see that we have a cube at the center of the grid the center of the grid is called the origin 0 0 0 you'll see over here on the right of the screen that you've got the channel box layer editor and that will tell you that you've created a cube there it is P cube 1 and that will give you all the sort of statistics the the properties of that cube so you see that it is placed at 0 0 0 the scale is 1 by 1 by 1 and there are a few other things that we can change as well when you create a cube it may or may not look like man it's likely to look the same as mine because I've got the default preferences of Maya turned um but there's every chance that it will also be in wireframe view and at this stage I've actually prefer to work in wireframe so at the moment you can see we've got the shaded view 1 so it's like a gray cube but I want it to look see-through so there are two ways of doing that you can either click on this icon here which is wireframe mode there you go or you can press the number 4 on your keyboard like that so that's what we're going to do before we move on to the next step which is resizing the cube so to resize the cube we're actually going to work in the channel box for it and what I'm going to do because I've got a I'm kind of struggling for screen real estate there's not a lot of space here I'm just going to drag this down here just to hide the layers bit and that reveals this input section and you'll see polycube 1 and it's here that I want to change the size and shape of the cube to represent the room I'm creating so I want a width of 25 and then I'll press enter a height of ten and a depth of 25 and that I'll give you the basic dimensions of the room that we want to create the next thing we need to do is rename this cube by the time you've got a full scene full of assets you could have hundreds and hundreds of cubes and if they're all called poly cube number you're never going to be able to find what it is you're looking for so it's much easier to give every object you create a descriptive name as you create it so that down the line if you need to make alterations or find it if it's hidden or maybe there are 500 cubes all close together you'll be able to find it in the outliner so I'm going to scroll up to the top of my channel box and you can see where it says P cube on if I click once on that it then becomes an editable field and I can write in there and give it a name so I'm just going to call it room and press Enter and that now has a new name it's really important that when you rename something that you remember to press Enter because if you click it forget to put a name in and then click somewhere else it'll keep that as the name of it and it just gets really mad at you it won't let you worm and use the object or even delete it so make sure you put a name in and press ENTER and you'll be good promise what we're going to look at now is how you use the virtual camera in my so what I'm talking about is how you navigate the scene and to be able to do that you need a three button Mouse here's my ugly a three button Mouse and you need a keyboard with an Alt key on it and you use your mouse and your Alt key in combination to be able to move around so if you hold alt on your keyboard and click the left mouse button it'll allow you to do this which is known as tumbling around and basically what it does is it makes it look like your objects rotating but it's actually the cameras rotating around the object so there's that one you can also hold alt and the middle mouse button and what this does is it dollies side-to-side so you're now moving side-to-side in 3d space and then the third button the right mouse button if you hold that with the Alt key Bob that will zoom in and out so you're now moving closer or further away from the object you can also use the scroll wheel little Chuck there if you've got one and you can see that we'll also zoom in and out but it kind of does it in fixed increments which is useful I use it quite a lot because it's quickly to zoom in and out than having to reach the keyboard from nowhere near it but it's not as accurate as the right mouse button so that's just another option for you another thing that's really useful for navigating a scene are a couple of keyboard shortcuts which frame up objects so let's say that I've lost myself in 3d space and it does happen when you're still new so let's say I accidentally zoomed out too far and I've moved off to the side as well and now I have no idea where my cube is if you have it selected you can just press the F button on your keyboard like that and that will frame up what you've got selected equally you can also press the a button on your keyboard and that stands for frame all and that'll frame up everything in your scene now because we've only got the cube when I press it you'll have exactly the same effect but if I had 10 cubes in the scene it would frame all of them so I could see all 10 rather than just showing me the one that I had selected what we're going to do now is we're going to move this cube so this in line with this grid to represent float high I'm going to do that using the move tool as you can see Maya has got many tools and the are on screen at once but the the three that we're interested in at the moment well for this one here is just the the selection tool and then you've got this chappie here which is a move tool then there's a rotate tool and the scale tool and right now we want the move tool so I'm going to click on that little bad boy and then you can see this manipulator appears and that shows you you can click on these manipulators and then drag to move the cube around so if I was to drag on this yellow this green sorry arrow that will only move it up and down because I've just clicked on the arrow if I'd do the same with a red one so I'm going to move it on the x-axis and if I move it with this one it's on the movement on the z-axis and to know which axis you are moving it on let me just do that you can see that you've got this in the bottom corner which shows you where your back tees are so I know that that one there represents up and down on the y-axis so you can do that what you can also do is grab this manipulator in the middle and that will allow you to move on all three axes at once and it'll just go all over the place that actually in your perspective you your 3d view is really good idea because you've got no control over the depth what is better is you've got these little squares that have been added I think in my 2016 which if I click on this red one which red usually corresponds to X what it actually does is keeps it still on the x axis and moves it on the other two so if I click on that I'll move that way and it'll move up and down but it's not moving on the x axis and the same goes for here I'll only move those two directions and this one here it won't move off no matter what I do I'll move into the distance on the sideways but it won't move off so they're pretty useful so what I want you to do is try and move this Q up as closely and get it so that the bottom of the cube is in line with the grid and you might want to just rotate your view a little bit to help you with this and maybe zoom out or in so I'm just going to move that up I'm just going to try the bestest to get that in line with the grid and that's not bad that's pretty close in fact that's very close I'm pleased with that I'm now going to introduce you to the orthographic views and what they are are views that don't incorporate perspective so as you move things into the the distance into the background they don't get any smaller which for 3d modeling is really useful so in order to get to those views there are two ways of doing it you can either click on this icon here which will take you to the the for view or you can tap your spacebar assuming that you've got all the default Maya settings and you're not change anything so I'm just going to tap the spacebar once with my mouse pointer making sure it's in this view somewhere and that will take me to this for view and then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put my mouse in each of these dude dude as each of these views and I'm just going to press for to turn on wireframe so that I can see the grid behind a little more clearly and then I'm just going to see if I can line this up any any better so I'm going to choose my front view and once Matt my pointers in this view I'm just going to tap spacebar and that will just make that fullscreen and actually I'm pretty close already oh there's not much closer I can get it so I'm quite happy with that so I'm already pretty much on the ground but the best way to make sure that you've got it exactly on the ground is just with basic maths we know that the cube of created is 10 units high and we created it at 0 0 0 so to make sure that we move it up exactly the right height to be aligned with the floor we just need to move it up 5 units on Y so where this is translate Y you see I'm actually very close what I wanted it should just be 5 exactly and that now is perfectly aligned with the bottom of the grid ok at this stage I also want to turn shading back on so I can get a feel of what the shape actually looks like so making sure that my mouse is in this view somewhere I'm just going to press 5 on the keyboard or you can click on this button here and that will turn the shaded display on what this does though is it shows up an issue that we're going to have and that's that this is a room but we can't see inside it oh we killed if we wanted to zoom in like so you can see we're now inside the room but it's a little bit difficult because the the walls in the foreground just kind of want to get in the way all the time so what we're going to do is turn something on that will hide those whenever they are in the way and what that is is back face culling so in order to do that we're going to click on mesh display at the top of the screen and then we're going to go down to under the normal section reverse and what that does is reverses which way the the face would be facing if it was one-sided and we're about to make it one side so we want it at the moment is facing outwards but we're going to turn it around and make it face inward so click on reverse at that stage it should kind of go a orange and black color that's H that means it's working don't click on it make sure it stays that color and then you're going to go to display polygons and right at the top here you'll see back face culling when you click on that you'll see that those walls in the foreground are hidden so you can now see in the room really nicely ok so I'm now just going to deselect it and if I just move around the room you'll see that the walls reappear once there the far walls so that's going to make it really useful as we're creating this room project what I'm also going to do at this stage is turn off the grid the grid is often very useful but it's equally irritating in the way sometimes as well so what we're going to do is turn it off so that it's not in the way and it's really easy to turn off at the top of what we'll call the panel menu so that's the menu at the top of each panel you'll see that there is an icon for that grid and if you click on it it disappears which is useful and easy in this step we're going to start putting things inside the room I'm going to start by creating a crate which gives us another brilliant excuse to create a cube duel of cubes so as I said earlier I'm going to show you different ways of doing things and this time we're going to create a cube using the hotbox and what the hotbox is it's something that the Maya pros use so that they can turn off all their menus and give themselves more screen space so when you press and hold the spacebar it brings up the the Maya menus for you in this way and you'll see that within this you click on create' and you'll have to click on the whole when you using this and then from the polygon primitives section you can choose cube just like we did earlier but we're getting it from a different place now and there is our cube and what you'll want to do with that cube you just move it up a little bit because it's stuck in the floor and then what I want you to do is we're going to resize it we're going to reshape it a little bit we're going to move it into the corner of the room we're going to rotate it a little bit as well so we're going to use the three main tools all together here so first thing I'll do is I'll turn on the scale tool and this works in the same way that the move tool does you've got your three manipulators here and they will scale it on just one axis at a time like that or you can use squares over here and that will scale it on two axes at once leaving alone the one axis state kind of represents or you can scale from the middle and that will scale on all three axes at once and often when you're scaling it is a good idea to use that middle manipulator so I'm going to do is just scale up slightly like that and I'm also just going to make it slightly kind of oblong just so it's not a perfect cube and then I'm going to move it down just so it's kind of just up above the floor then move it over to one corner of the room and then I'm going to just rotate it now the rotate tool again works similarly to the other two you've got three colored lines representing which which axis using so if I click on this one representing the z axis there it goes it rotates on just the one axis same for this red one representing the x axis and in this case I want to rotate it on Y just so it's not perfectly in line with the the walls of the room what you can do is you can rotate on this circle here which will kind of rotate it based on the camera or even worse you can click somewhere in between those lines and it'll just rotate on all three axes at once which is just awful because you've lost control then you can't really rotate it in one direction it could be it could go all over the place so I don't recommend that you do that so that's that crate in place so we've created it we have resized it moved it and rotated it that leaves the last thing to do is renaming it so we're going to go to PQ one and I'm just going to call this one crate and that's that step complete the next thing we're going to do is create another cube now we could obviously create a new cube like we have done previously but we're actually creating a second crate this time so because we've already got one that's roughly the right size shape and position it makes more sense to duplicate it rather than create another one from scratch so that's what we're going to look at now so I'm just going to turn my rotate tool off and go back to my selection tool and I'm going to make sure that it is selected and then in order to duplicate this cubic I've created I'm going to go to edit and down to duplicate so when I click on that it won't look like anything's happened but you'll see the name of the object is now create one instead of crate so what Mira's done is created a new create a copy of the first one it's named it for us create one and it's selected it for us so we don't have create select anymore we have the new one selector so if I switch to my move tool which is this little chappie here and then I can just move that and you'll see that I have the original crate and the the copy the duplicate so now I'm going to do with that duplicate is I'm just going to and the scale it a little bit and what I'm using by the way if the keyboard shortcuts for switching between these three main tools the keyboard shortcut for the move tool is W the keyboard shortcut for the rotate tool is e and the keyboard shortcut for the scale tool is R if you can get into the habit of using those it'll make your life a little bit quicker which is good so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to change the shape of this one a little bit so I don't want everything to look to see me and I'm just going to rotate it ever so slightly and then I'm gonna just make sure that that is positioned next to the cube Ivo minutes the crates re on the ground like that okay so this step is complete but the next step is up to you so what I want you to do is create a stack of five of these crates that look like they're obeying the laws of physics and gravity so just create different sizes shapes stacking them up create five of them and once you've done that I will see you in the next step okay so there you can see that I've made a stack of boxes hopefully yours looks as beautiful as this hopefully it looks even better actually I bet it looks better and but what I'm going to do now because it's getting hard to see these crates against the background the shades of grave a little bit too similar and the reason that is I'm not sure why officer desk have done this but they've started previewing different levels of gamma for some reason on the way to turn that up and it'll just make things a little easier for you to see is just what it says on here click on it and it'll turn it off and it just makes everything a little bit darker and the contrasts a little bit higher as well so it's easy to see what you can also do to make it easy to see objects is this little fellow here will show wireframe on top of shaded objects so if we click on that it gives you like a blue outline and it just makes things a lot easier to see so for the time being we'll work with those on just to make things as visible as possible so what we're going to do now is we're going to create some architectural pillars so we're going to try and make the geometry of the room look a little bit more interesting by creating sort of supporting structures along one of the walls so this time we're going to create a cube in a third different way and we're going to do that from the shelf so I'm gonna click on here and the new cube is created at the origin I'm going to rename that and I'm going to call it pillar and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to resize that so I'm just going to change my view a little bit somewhere I want to place the pillar along this wall and then I'm just going to move it up out of the ground and in fact just to make it positioned where I want it to be I'm going to move up 5 units exactly then I'm just going to make it a little taller and I want it to just almost intersect the floor like that and that should then mean almost intersects the ceiling as well and then I'm going to make it a little bit longer in this direction and I'm just going to make it a bit thinner on that axis okay so I'm happy with that that's beautiful now I want to do is form a bevel on some of the edges of this shape and what that will do is make it look a little bit more visually interesting and appealing so in order to do that I'm going to introduce you to this little button here which opens the modeling toolkit which is something that Autodesk about a Tamiya 2016 to put a lot of the polygon modeling tools together in one place which works quite well actually so if you click on that the first thing we're going to want to do is change it from object selection mode which allows you to select the whole object I'm going to change it to edge selection mode which is going to allow us to select just the edges there as you can see now if we mouse over the pillar the edges go red when we can select them so I'm going to click on this one and then I'm going to shift hold shift and click on the second one and that will select two of them I'm going to go back to my selection tool which is Q on the keyboard so I've now got those twos left and then I can scroll down in the modeling toolkit and you'll see there are lots of different tools and operations that you can do but in this case I just want to do a bevel so I'm going to click on bevel and you'll notice that it opens up a little properties box so you can change what the bevel looks like so I'm just going to zoom in a little bit so I can see what the bevel is and I'm just going to open the fraction by clicking and dragging on the word fraction I'm going to up it slightly I think I'm going to go for not point seven I think looks pretty good like that yeah it's pretty nice and then once I'm happy with that the next thing I'm going to do is I just want to select these edges at the bottom so there are three edges here that I want to select that one I'm going to hold shift and select that one my hold shift and select that one I'm just going to put it back into wireframe view pressing four just to make sure I've actually got them because it's intersecting the floor a little bit which is making it difficult to see and with those three edges selected I'm just going to move to my move tool and change our move tool and I'm going to move on this axis here and you can see that sudden a bit of a slope to the shape and again I'm just doing that make it look a little bit more interesting really now when I press five to go back into shaded view and then in my modeling toolkit and scroll back up and put the pillar back into object selection mode and then I can move this up against the back wall I'm just going to enter sup intersect the back wall slightly now I'm going to move towards the back wall not completely up against the back wall I want a little gap that's okay and I'm just final step so I'm just going to make it a little bit taller just so it does intersect the floor and the ceiling just so that you can't see where it joins really so from inside the room you should now look like that which just adds a little bit more detail to the the way the room looks what I want to do now now that I've created one pillar I want to duplicate these pillars along the one wall now I could do that one at a time and position one at a time but there's actually a built-in duplicate option that allows you to create multiple copies and have them at a set interval apart so we have a look at that now so I'm going to click on this pillar make sure that it's selected and then I'm going to click on edit and I'm going to go down to duplicate special which means I can duplicate something with additional properties and click on the options box for that and what I want to do is I want to translate it along one of the axes translate is another way of saying move and I'm moving it along this axis along that one more and I can see from here that that's telling me that's going to be the x axis so I'm going to put a value in the X Box in it's really easy to know which boxes which because it follows the alphabet so this one here is X that's why and that's Zed so under the translate X I'm going to put a value of five in so each one's going to move five units along and then the number of copies I want four copies meaning that I'll get five in total and then I'm going to click on duplicate special and it's done you can now see that in one step created a row of these pillars along the back wall which looks pretty cool in this step we're going to get on to doing some proper 3d modeling so we're going to create a primitive shape and then we're really going to manipulate that to create a new shape out of it and the shape I want to create is kind of a futuristic 3d holographic projector e-type thing it looks bad then it sounds once it's all finished trust me so what I'm going to do is we're going to create a new cone so I'm just going to click once on the cone box there I'm just going to drag it out of the ground like so and then I'm going to go into the channel box and hopefully she'll be able to see you've got an option for the channel box down this side of your screen here so I'm going to click on that and I want to change a few settings so I want the radius to be to the height to be 4 whoops that's 24 try again 2 and 4 I just want to make sure that that again is not in the ground that's okay and then I want the subdivisions access to be 18 so I don't really need too many and I want the subdivisions height to be 5 and you can see what happens when I'm changing the subdivisions is that changes a number of edges that are there the more edges you've got the more detail you can put into a shape and in this case because I want to change in quite a specific way I know the number of edges that need so that's a well that's all about now what we're going to do is we're going to manipulate the vertices of this shape on what vertices are are they're the the points that intersect all the edges I'm going to move those around to create a very specific shape so in order to do that we're going to open the modeling toolkit again and what I'm also going to do is I'm going to move into one of the orthographic views so I'm going to move into my front view but I'm going to use my side view it's a little bit cleaner if not you see there's a behind it in this view so click on that and while I've got it select I'm going to press F so that it fills my screen which makes sense and then I'm going to click on this one here which will put it into vertex selection mode which will allow me to select just the verbs there we go now in order to do this to keep it neat I'm going to work on this shape in rows you can work on single vertices at a time and that would be one vertex at a time but I'm going to work in rows because I know exactly what I'm going for so I'm going to click and drag on this row here which is the second row opps it's not the real right on the floor so second row up and all I want to do with this row is move it up to about there so you see it goes up and then this line comes in slightly and then the next row up which would be this rail I'm happy with the position and the size of that so I'm going to leave that one alone but the next row up again you can see I'm dragging a box to select all of them continue I'm going to move this row down to about the same you can see that line is now consistent but what I'm then going to do is using my scale tool and this is important as well I'm going to use this middle manipulator to bring that back out you can see the edge here is now somewhere in between these two what I do want to show you though and I'll just do it with the four view one is that if I drag from the middle everything stays nice and circular which is what I want but if I was dragging from this axis here it's only it's going the wrong shape it's not same circular or cylindrical circular so you need to be really careful when you're doing this to just drag from the middle manipulator when you want to do that so I'm just going to get that to be the shape that I want and then going to set the next row up I'm going to use my move tool to just pull that down again and I'm going to try and keep about the same distance as I've been using and I'm going to open this out a little bit so actually trying to create a bit of a hollow inside this shape and then in order to make it Hollow the last step I need to do is select this one point at the top this one vertex at the top I'm going to move that down so that is six in the middle of the shape and you should be creating something that looks like that and then when you look at it in your perspective view you'll have this kind of shape which is exactly what we're looking for so well don't you about some proper 3d modeling there you really have come on quite a long way before we finished with this projector for the time being I just want to do one more thing to it and that's to create some new faces that we'll use to be a control panel for it later so in order to do this what we're going to do is put the projector in to face selection mode so we've done vertex selection and edge selection we're now going to do face selection which allows you can see to select particular faces and what I might do is just select any two faces that are together so click on one then shift select to click on another and this time we're going to create an extrude and while extrusion does is it creates new faces so in this case it's going to create some new faces around the face we've got so we're going to end up with I think an additional six faces to accommodate what we're going to do or maybe just an additional four matters not my strong suit okay so once we've got those selected we're going to scroll down we're going to click on extrude and you won't actually see that anything's happened but click and drag on thickness and we'll make that not point one and then click and drag on offset and make that not point one as well and you'll see let's now create a kind of a raised area with two new faces and those two faces are going to represent a control panel when we teach to that later so that is even more proper 3d and I mean that's extrusion modeling there dude so you argue are learning fast I'm so impressed with you so before we move on we're going to scroll back up in the modeling toolkit we're going to pop that projector back into object selection mode and then we're going to rename it and call it row jacket off press Enter okay well then okay so what we're going to do in this next step is we're going to create something that is being projected by the projector that we've created but I know what to do with that to make life a little bit easier what we're going to do is hide what we've created so far so that it's not in the way there are many different ways of doing this but the way we're going to go with is to put it into a layout and hide the layer for two reasons one is quite neat until it's a good way to show you what layers are so the first thing we're going to do is select everything in sync again through multiple ways of doing this you could just shift-click everything - one two three four etc or you can go to select and select all or you can press control shift in a and that will select all so you just need to make sure you've got all the geometry in your scene selected and then if you can't see if you did what I did and you dragged down early we're just going to drag off but we need to bring the layers the layers thing back layers bucks yeah and what we're going to do is when click on layers and we're going to create a layer from selected and everything with selected then goes into a new layer I'm going to click twice on that and that will let me rename it I'm going to call it room layer you can't put spaces in this you can put an underscore in but for some reason when you're making a layer you can't boss spacing and I'm going to click on save and now there's a little V here and whenever you click on that that will hide it so that's the room out of the way for the time being and what I'm also going to do now is turn the grid back on because we're going to use that to position a solar system that is going to be projected by the projector so we'll turn the grid back on and then we're ready for the next step okay so now we need to start creating this solar system so I'm going to with some Sears now going to represent the Sun in some planets and then we're going to add a moon and a ring so first we're going to do is create a new sphere like so and you may notice this box comes up because my is currently gone to the last tool selected so I'm just going to get rid of that by clicking on that little chappy there and I'm going to rename this son and then I'm going to scale this down to be in not 0.5 on every axis now there again lots of different ways you can do this but what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on scale X and I'm going to drag click and drag down to scale Zed and it'll select all three of those attributes at once so if I do it on the actual number click and drag down so you can see now they're all selected if I put 0.5 in which is the size that I want this today it's actually made all three of those 0.5 which is a another way of just scaling something in a uniform way so I've done that what I also want to do I'm just going to hide my layers thing in for a minute I've got subdivisions axes and subdivisions height now this is actually going to be a really small part of the scene so at the moment I've got a lot of polygons for this I don't really need that many so I'm going to just knock this down to 12 by 12 I'll just put that back so if it's 20 by 20 you can see it's quite a high-resolution shape and if I make it 12 by 12 it drops the number of faces but it'll still serve alanine 3 well well I'm also going to do at this stage is just turn off the wireframe on shaded the cars aren't to be able to demonstrate that this actually now looks quite blocky and we're going to look at how you make it look smoother in the next step okay so as I've already established the edges on this shape that represents a sum now that we've lowered the resolution of the shape look very very harsh so there's actually something we can do to adjust how Maya treats the shading of these faces and not make a lot much smoother so making sure that it's selected would go to go to a mesh display and if you look for soften edge and give that a click when you deselect you'll now see that it's much much smoother it looks very smooth the only place that you can now see that it might not be perfect let's move these around the edges but as I said this shape is going to be so small that you won't even be able to see that so that's the Sun ready to go what we'll do now is create some planets from the Sun so the Sun is already roughly in the right place is the right size and shape ish so we're going to duplicate from the Sun to create some planets so I'm gonna click on the Sun I'm going to press ctrl + D which is the keyboard shock of the duplicate I'm going to just move it out of the Sun I'm going to rename it planet make sure I press ENTER and then I'm going to scale this down to not point one I'm just going to move it so it's about two units away from the Sun so you see the Sun is much bigger than the planet which is as it should be what you need to do now is create three more planets by duplicating the first planet make them different sizes and move them along on the x axis don't move them on any other X's just the x axis so they're all in a perfect line because what we're actually doing is setting these up for animation later as well so it's important that it stays that they're they're positioned correctly so that's what you need to do now make sure you've got fewer planets using duplicate and scale okay we're now going to create a moon for one of the planets and we're going to create a ring for another so I'm going to start by working on this first planet and I'm going to just press F to frame that up I'm going to duplicate it and then I'm going to move the new one out I'm going to call it moon and then I'm going to scale that down so that it's really small it should be something like not point not to like that I'm just going to make that look like it's in orbit of that light there okay so that's the moon done nice and straightforward the ring is so you're going to start off as a Taurus which is this little chap here that looks an awful lot like a donut so I'm going to click on that there it is and then we need to make some changes so the section radius needs to be not point two so we're working on under the inputs here like so and what that does is just makes it kind of like a thinner tube the height on the y-axis so scale Y needs to also be zero point two and you can see if we were making a ring for the Sun that would already be perfect but we're not gonna make it if one of the planets so I'm learning to do now is position it around other planets and I'm going to choose this one and the there are lots of different ways that you could position this but I want to make sure that this ring is exactly positioned around this planet so the way to do that it's a lot what the values are for translate X I can see they're four point nine five five so I'm going to click on that and I'm going to copy it in fact I'll just remember it for point nine five five and I'm going to click on the ring I'm going to put in for point nine five five and then press ENTER and now I know that that is perfectly positioned around the planet that you should be all I need to do then is scale it uniformly until it looks like it is the right scale which I'm happy with that that's beautiful and then I'll rename that ring okay in the next step we're going to put this into a hierarchy so that it's ready for animation okay so in this step what we're now going to do is we're going to create a hierarchy so we're going to make all of these planets belong to the Sun so that whenever we move the Sun everything else will go with it and it will also be set up perfectly for animation when we get to that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Windows and outliner and what the outliner is is it's a little window that lists everything in your scene so you can see all the geometry we've quick created so far is listed if you've forgotten to name anything name it now but there you can see there's my son there's the planets except and what I need to do is make this planet so the first planet belong to the Sun so again there are multiple ways of doing this the first way is by using the middle mouse button that one and I'm going to click and drag with that the planet onto the Sun and then let go and you can see a little plus symbol appears and when I click on that you can see that there is now a relationship there the planet belongs to the Sun so whenever I now click on the Sun it also selects the planet which is very useful okay I'm now going to parent planet 1 to the Sun so I'm going to click on it so I'm just showing you a different way of doing it out and now I'm going to control click note shift click so the Sun and now I'm going to press p on the keyboard and P is the keyboard shot of a parent then you can see that now planet and planet 1 both belong to the Sun and now what I want you to do is parent all the planets to the Sun and then parent the ring to the planet of that belongs to and the moon to the planet that that belongs to so that your hierarchy is set up so that looks like mine will in a second okay so when you finished this here is what your hierarchy should look like and again like I said whenever your now select your son it should select everything else which makes moving this solar system as a whole so much easier and the reason that happens is through something called inheritance on what that means is that the child objects will always do what the parent object does in relation to the parent object so you don't need to follow this but I'll show you what I mean so if I was to scale the Sun you'll see that all the planets scale to but they don't just scale on the spot they actually scale in relation to the Sun so the gap the distance between the planets is shrinking as well so it's almost like they're one object which is really useful the same happens if you rotate you can see that they all rotate but they're rotating around the parent object so they're rotating around with the Sun and the same happens with moving as well which is going to be useful for when we move those planets next ok all those supposed to do with this solar system now is to select it and position it over the projector to make it look like it is being projected out in a holographic beautiful way so and close the outliner for the time being I'm then going to bring back my layers thingy now this stage make sure your solar system is already selected because when we bring back the room the solar system's just going to be kind of right in the middle of everything and it'll be difficult to select so make sure it's already selected click here which is where the view will go to bring back the room in the projector I'm going to switch to my move tool and I'm just going to pull that solar system up out of the floor and what I also need to do is just scale it down because I want it to be kind of believable that from the cone of light that's going to be predicted by this projector that they're kind of creating these planets so they need to be small enough to kind of believably fit within that so in my case I've just sort of gone for that kind of size so they are very small but if you're getting as close up to this one you render it it'll look much beautiful okay so that for the time being is the modeling done what we're going to do next is move on to crane textures and shaders and really starting to make this room look like a badass sexy mofo oh yeah now would also be a very good time to save your work if you've been following what I've been doing properly you will have incremental saves turned on and you can check in your save folder of your project to check that but it's still always a good idea to save the project yourself just in case so you should do that okay so things are starting to get a little bit interesting and exciting now we're going to move on to texturing now in order to create textures we need to use another tool within Maya which is called the hypershade and we need to open that up so and the hypeeeee shades been revamped a little bit so if you are an older myuser it'll look a little bit different it Fried's me I when I first used it but I feel I'm alright with it now now there are two ways of opening this up obviously so you can click on this little chapter here which is just the the quick way of getting to Orion click on Windows and rendering editors and have a Shady's in there so I'm going to open that up and hopefully because I've reset the defaults in Maya it should just show me a default perhaps you would you have so I'm just going to maximize this and as with anything in my it's good idea to get it set up so that is how you want it to be before you start working in it and what I want is a little viewport so I can actually see my scene within the hypershade because it's a bit of a pain in the bottom if you can't see what you actually takes trim so in order to do that you can click on window and I would like to open up a viewport and you can see it opens up a very very small viewport but as you can see that view part axis shows you your scene ASIS what you can also do with that is you can drop it into your UI somewhere you can see as I'm moving it around he's saying oh you stick it yeah no put it here yep which is really good I like it to be here so I'm just going to click and drag in then I'm going to release when it's going to go there which is lovely and then I'm just going to drag some of the windows around a touch just to make that a viewport a little bit bigger and manageable ok and then just whilst your mouse is in that window press v to turn on Hardware shading and now you've got a good idea of what you're applying textures to okay so this is your hypershade you can see that we've got the viewport in there there's a material viewer here and what this is it's a shape that previews what materials gonna look like when you apply it so it starts with this weird shader bar thing which is actually quite good because it shows you lots of different surfaces on one shape but it could also look what its gonna look like on cloth you cannot always gonna look like a teapot if you're into tea pups and you might also look what it looks like if it was on a water type splash but I'm always quite happy with the shader ball you've got the property editor here which once you've created a new material that's where you change the appearance of it this is your workspace so this is where all the sort of advanced linking of materials happens this is kind of we'll just use this tab at the moment which shows all your completed materials this is a create area where you create new materials so we are going to create a material on the first material that we are going to make is for the projector so I'm going to have look in my create panel I'm going to go to surface and what I would like is a new bling and what a Blin is is it contains properties such as shine well let me make it shiny reflective etc and the kind of opposite to that is a Lambert we have a Lambert one assigned to everything already and that is like a mattock so if you think of a painted wall that would be like number one one thing to keep in mind as well is never ever edit Lambert one because if I was to make screen everything in the scene would now go green because that is the default texture that has already applied so you should try and leave that alone if you can so I'm going to create a new bling like so and what I'm going to do with this bling is I'm going to rename it and I'm going to call it project or M and the reason I put the M on is just so that I know that that represents a material right there what I'm then going to do is I'm going to change the color of this material so in my property editor you can see that there's color here now there's the slider so I could just make it either black or white or I can click on the actual color rectangle here which I'm told is called a swatch and I can choose a color now I quite like a really deep blue I think it was quite nice yeah so I'm going to choose that kind of color and again you can preview what that looks like on different materials just to get an idea of the how that's going to come out but I'll keep it on the shader ball the next thing I'm going to do is change how this reacts to light what I want this to look like when it's assigned is kind of a glossy plastic look the apples seem to favor in the late 90s the early 2000 so I'm going to try and replicate out of sort of really shiny plastic so the first thing I'm going to do is change the specular color I'm going to make that a much lighter gray and that should make if you can only just really see it changing it makes the highlights a little bit brighter so I'm going to go quite towards the right-hand side on that I'm also going to change the exit eccentricity to not point one and you should notice when you press ENTER that the the highlights the weight loss that the lights we move like sir gets a lot more focus there you go so it's now a lot more sort of shiny looking it looks more polished I'm also going to change the specular roll-off to 0.85 and that will just make those highlights become a little bit stronger when I press ENTER there we go and the last thing I'm going to do is change the reflectivity to 0.3 now you won't actually see an effect of this in your material preview but when we start rendering later it will just mean that this will reflect objects of it but the reflections won't be too strong because we don't it to like a mirror so I'm going to change that to 0.3 okay now that that material is complete we're going to assign it to the projector geometry now of course there are multiple ways of doing this but the first way we're going to do is just by dragging it on so here you can see there is our projector material and here is our projector so in order to assign that material to it I'm going to using my middle mouse button click on the projector and then I'm going to drag over the projector here and I'm going to release and then you will see that that material is now assigned and if we move around we can see how that works where all those sort of reflections of I are going to go so yeah really nice I'm happy with that what we're going to do next is create a material for the Sun so the first thing we're going to do you'll may have noticed if I just press a with my mouse in here we've noticed that something was created in here when we created the projected material and this actually represents how that materials being made when we create the Sun material it will also put something in here and I'll just put it on top of the projector stuff so it's always a good idea before you make a new material to just clear your work area and to do that it's just this icon here give it a click oh it won't ask you to save that's just that timing give it a click and now you've got a clean work area it doesn't really matter what we're doing at the moment but as your materials get more complex it can get quite messy so go ahead start with a clean one I'm also going to create a new material so this time onto Lambert because I don't want meson to reflect anything I'm going to create a new Lambert and I'm going to call it some M press ENTER and the color of this I would like to be a nice bright yellow so I'm just going to click on that yellow there and I'm going to add incandescent to this which is kind of the lowlights of it among we sort of do this so it's going to create a really nice Club so you want a dark yellowy orange sort of color so I'm going to bring in some nice orange there and I'm just going to make it a little bit more kind of a burnt orange sort of look maybe a bit more into the red spectrum yeah so that is now my son material and I'm going to assign that to the son so I'm just going to frame up the son in the work area and I'm going to assign the material in a different way this time so I'm making sure that I've got the son selected then I'm going over to the son material I'm going to right click and hold on that you'll see a radial menu appears and at the top of that is a sign material to selection so I'm going to release and you'll see that that texture is now applied it will also apply that to all the planets don't worry about that that supposed happened because of the hierarchy we set up and we will take sure over that later okay we're now going to create a material for the pillar but this is going to be a little bit more complex than the two materials were made so far because we're going to fade quite a text should look down at the bottom of the pillar into a flat color at the top so it's going to take a little bit more work so for that reason it's very important that we clear the work area first we're going to create a new Lambert so create a new Lambert material I'm going to call it pillar M making sure that I rename things very carefully and instead of just changing the color we're actually going to create a connection to a different type of node so if I click on this little checker box here it will open up the create render node window there it is and what I would like to connect to this is a ramp so I'm gonna click on ramp there and in my property editor I will get the properties for this ramp that I've set up and you can see at the moment is creating a shader that fades from black through to white ok so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this duct here which allows me to select the white color in this ramp and I just want to change that color I'm gonna use the slider down to quite a dark grey like that so I'm happy with that and that dark gray and then because I want this dark gray to take up most of the texture on the pillar I'm just going to move this DUP about 3/4 of the way along maybe about two-thirds of the way you can see now most of this texture is going to be this gray color with a little bit of the other color at the other side ok so as it stands we've got a texture that fades from black to dark gray which is OK and it's more complicated than the texture that we previously created but we can do a little bit more with it so I'm going to click on this black duct you can see now I'm working on the black color of this ramp and instead of just choosing a color I'm going to add a little bit more of a texturing effect to it so I'm going to click on the checker here so I'm going to make another connection it's going to give me a lot of options that I can choose from I'm gonna scroll down in here and the one I'm looking for is rock so I'm going to click on that and now I have some options for this rock and I can change those to suit my purposes the look I'm going for so I'm going to change color one to a very dark brown so it's already fairly brown but I think I want it a little bit more into the orange side of brown I'm going to bring this that's a nice dark brown this is going to represent kind of dirt at the bottom and then I want to change color to to a very dark gray I actually want this to be almost black like that and you'll see this is an example of how this is going to lock the bottom of architecture that we're creating and what we're going to do then is we're going to apply this to one of the pillars so I'm just going to move around in my room I'm going to find the pillar this one here will do it's important when we apply this that we we look at the bottom because that's where that texture II sort of looks going to be and I'm going to right-click on it and choose assign material to selection you may notice that you can't really see the effect of this and that's because the current renderer so the software that my is using to creep you the scene in this window and doesn't show this particular type of texture very well so we're going to change the renderer to another one that will show up a little bit better so I'm going to click on renderer and the moment is set to viewport 2.0 which is out so the the best of the three available but sometimes you want one a different one so I'm going to choose legacy default viewport which is actually the worst of the three but it does show this particular type of texture really well but you still can't really see what's happening to the texture and that's because there's one more thing we need to change at the moment the texture view that we've got only really shows colors and not textures that connected to the color node in order to show that we need to move on to Hardware texturing mode instead of Hardware shading mode with Auto Conte now so in order to change that we're going to press number six on the keyboard and now if we zoom in on the bottom of the texture of craters you'll be able to see that looks a little bit texturing and dirty and a little bit more interesting than the gray that was on the other ones so you can now apply that material to the rest of your pillars and then we'll be ready for the next step lovely okay we're going to look up next is using image files as the color rather than just a flat collar which is the sort of texturing that you see in most games and films etc so these are the textures a lot really high-end in much better before you can do that though you'll actually need to download the texture files that will be using this exercise so the link can be found underneath the video and you need to make sure that you download each of the images and that you put them in this source images folder of your project because that's where my expect your textures to be so I've already downloaded them so you can see here there they are so that's all the images there and what I need to do is just copy them into the source images folder of my project there we go so now Maya will know where to look for these okay so we're going to create a new material for the crate now it's a wooden crate and would generally does not reflect so we're going to create a Lambert for this before I do that I'm obviously going to clear my work area I'm going to create a new Lambert and it's going to be called crate M crate M lovely and again for the column instead of just choosing a color I'm going to connect a new render node and this time I'm going to scroll back up to the top I'm going to choose file awesome and then I'll take you through to the properties for the file you don't really need to change anything but the one thing that you must change is the image thing and that is where you tell it which image you're going to use so I'm going to click on that and you'll see that it takes me straight into my source images folder because that's where my expects you takes a faster day and the one we're going to use is called crate diffuse and diffuse maps are what the pros called the color texture Maps really so it's create diffuse and then you can see onion shader ball you've got a preview of how that would look if it was applied to a shape that wasn't really suitable for it but have got a crate material so again as we've done in previous steps you can assign this create material to each of the crates like so and at that stage things will start to look much much sexier which is of course all the one so one two three nice what we're going to do next is we're going to look at how you assign textures to specific phases so at the moment we've just been assigning textures to shapes as a whole so it's adds it to all the phases at once but you may need to just assign two specific phases some times as we need to do if we're going to take to the floor we're going to have to have just that one based on we don't want to take to the walls with the same texture so in order to do that we shall be creating a new material so I'm going to clear my graph I don't want my floor to be reflective so I'm going to have a new Lambert I'm going to name that floor m and I'm going to in the same way that we've just done for the crate I'm going to click on this checker pattern button I'm going to choose file and then for the image name I'm going to choose floor diffuse over this so it's just a kind of metallic panel looking thing I'm gonna click on open there and then it's all about how we apply this okay so we need to put this into a face such a mode now we could complicate things by going back into the modeling toolkit for this but there is an easy enough way to do it if we just right click and hold on it you'll see that a context menu pops up and we can put it into face mode from here and then I'm going to choose this face just represents the floor and I can now find the floor material right click and choose assign material to selection and then when I deselect you should be able to see if I can do object mode that that is now assigned to the floor turn off the grid dissing sealer the better there you go so that is how you assign a texture to just one base or I could have selected two phases or twelve faces and the sanity just doses about essential specific bases really okay so the floor actually looks okay but as I'm sure you probably have already guessed it's actually a tileable texture so it's meant to be tiled multiple times so what we're going to look at is how you tile textures within my are one of the ways that you can do that so I'm assuming that you can still see your floor material within your work area and you can see there are lots of nodes now oddly Maya puts these on top of each other to begin with which is a bit of a pain in the ass but you're looking for this out UV and this actually deals with there it is you can see place 2d texture 3 it's the placement node that we're looking for if you click on that it will bring up the placement properties for the material we're actually looking for a repeat UV and that's how many times it repeats in each direction so if we just make this 2 by 2 for instance you can see that's now been tiled twice this direction so we've got four tiles in total and I think what I'm looking for in this scene is I'm going to tile it ten times in each direction and that will kind of make it look quite high-resolution like that so that's how you go about a tiling textures so once you've done that we'll move onto the next step which is adding the control panel texture to the two faces on the projector so the next step is to take to the control panel on the projector so the first thing we need to do is create the material for it so it's the same process we've been working through time and time again so it's clear the work area this time I'm going to create a new bling because I want the control panel to look like it's kind of a shiny glass monitor so I'm going to leave reflectivity alone on this one so I'm going to click on the checkbox next to color choose file and then on the image name I'm going to choose control panel defuse like so and then that's the material made then what I've got to do is just find those two faces that I created earlier so again I'll have to put the projector into face mode and I'm going to click on one face and then shift-click the other so they're both selected and then I can right-click hang on before I do that let me rename it so I'm just going to call this call it monitor em okay so I've got to set my faces again now and then I'm going to assign this material to selection okay so what you're going to notice at this stage is that the texture has been assigned but that it doesn't fit now with Maya there are again a multitude of ways that you could fix that but I'm just going to choose the simplest for this stage because the this is a beginners course really so making sure that you've still got those two faces selected we're just going to minimize the hypershade for a moment if you can't see your texture in this view just press number six there this and then what I'm going to do is whilst those two faces of sides I'm gonna click on UV and I'm going to use contour stretch which is a new you can see it's got the green right and it's a new option for this year but what it does it tries to fit the material exactly as possible based on the face you've got selected so I'll give that a click and then go back into object mode you can see that that actually now fits really nicely which is what we're looking for so we've now got that completed lovely all that's left to do now on the texturing is to complete the scene you've no doubt noticed that there are a lot of other texture files within the source images folder that you downloaded so what you need to do now is just create those materials and assign them to the right materials and you will need to tile the material for the wall but you'll only need to do that I think it's on the U direction not on the V or vice versa so give that a go and then once you've completed that step we will move on to lighting and putting some nice render effects in the scene once you've got everything textured you can close the hypershade window because in the next step we won't be using it okay so once you've got all the objects in your room textured it should look something like this so if we just have a quick look around man I'll just pop the lighting a little bit taking a good look because of the way that cubes laid out one of your faces will be upside down that is fixable we're not going to cover it in this tutorial but it is dead easy to fix and everything else looks quite nice and what we're going to cover now is putting some lights into the room and making it look super sexy so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to make sure that this gamma preview is off because it makes a big difference with lighting this that the darkness of the room now looks a lot more like what the rendered will look like them when you turn gamma on so we're going to leave it off and then what we're going to do is going to add a light to the scene we're going to add a point light which if you imagine sort of like a an old-school light bulb or something like the Sun so it's a light and then light is emitted in every direction so we're going to create one of those and that's going to be the the main source of light in the room really so to create a light you click on create lights and go to point light okay I'm Dave it is and so you may or may not see two manipulators I'm just going to go to the move tool though because I only really want to see one manipulator and then what I want you to do is move it up out of the floor and then you want to be able to see the effect that this light is having so I'm going to press number seven on my keyboard and then as I move that around up and up and down you'll see how that's affecting the room it'll be having an effect on it which is really nice okay so I'm just going to move that up a little bit I might just turn the gamma on just for now just this is too bright but it does allow you to see kind of what's on it so I'm just going to raise it up a little bit and I'm happy with that what I'm now going to do is I'm going to change a couple of the attributes of this light to get it to look how I want it to look to fit the mood that I'm going for now in order to do that we need to open the attribute editor we've not used that yet but it's a big part of my own of using it a lot as you get into the software to open that up if you press ctrl + a on your keyboard you should immediately pop up if it doesn't press ctrl + a again sometimes it's cycle so if I keep uh some controller name it'll cycle between the channel box and the attribute editor like that but I want the attribute editor and you can see here I can change the color and I can change the intensity now I want to take the intensity down intensity just like the brightness of the light I'm going to turn that down to not point three because I want the room to look quite Moody and then I'm also going to go down to the shadow section and we'll leave the shadow close it is and I'm going to use depth map shadows and I'm going to use a resolution of 1024 and that just makes them a little higher quality than they would be at 512 okay so now we're going to work on setting the viewport up to give us the best preview of the light so that we can see what we're doing so make sure that you are using viewport 2.0 and we're going to turn off the gamma correction again because we do want it to look as close to the the way the real lights looking as possible so it is quite dark but remember that as you preview in your scene if you need to turn it back on at any point you can just click on that and allow you to see a little bit better but trust me the darker one is a more accurate representation of the room we're creating so we'll leave it off for the time being but we'll turn it on as and when we need it okay so you might have noticed that even though you turn the shadows on in the previous step you can't see any shadows and you see now that's something for two reasons the first reason being that we've not turned shadow previewing arm which is this button here but the second reason the more important reason that kind of a variety is that Maya doesn't preview shadows on point lights for some reason I'm sure there's a really good explanation but all I know is it just doesn't do it so the only way to see what the shadows look like is to do a test render have you seen so I want to do is just make sure that I can see um my seen quite clearly and what I want to do is just frame up so I can kind of see behind the praise because that's where the shadows are going to be cast and this is very important at the moment I know that there's a wall in the foreground being hidden and I need to make sure that I am inside the boundaries of the wall because if I do a test render on the outside of the wall I won't be able to see anything because although we can see through the walls in the preview it doesn't want like that when you're rendering it will pop them back so you need to make sure you within the room if everything renders completely black it just means that you need to move your camera a little bit closer in that's all okay so to perform a test render you need to click on this clapper board here which is the second one along which will render the current frame before you set up the test render what you need to do so that you know exactly what's going to be in frame and what's not because this rectangle here can change shape very easily I could do that and you see it's not always going to render everything you can see in shock so to make sure that you know exactly what's going to render you need to click on View and camera settings and then you've got these gate options and resolution gate will put a rectangle on your screen anything you put within this rectangle is exactly what's going to render when we click on the render bond so in order to perform a test render what you need to do is just click on this clapper board here and there you can see the lights hitting the crates and behind that we have some rather beautiful looking shadows which is exactly what we're looking for so so far things are going beautifully one of the thing to remember is that gamma correction is also on in your preview render so if you're not if you want to see an accurate representation like a raw version of the image because the gamma Christians are post effect is post-processing effect it's not actually what the image looks like you have to open it in Photoshop every much darker for instance so you can turn that off and this is what it really looks like and again it probably does look very dark but we are going to be adding a lot more well we're going to add in some more lights to this scene and we need it to be dark so that those lights really show up it's going to be using glow effects and things like that so that's how the image should look that looks beautiful and I'm also just going to turn off the resolution gate for the time being and now I'm going to do is I'm going to place another lighting this is where it really starts to get sexy I'm going to put a spotlight in the projector and we're going to be able to see that light kind of hitting the particles in the air or we're going to give that effect and that's what a lot very very cool so the first thing you need to do to do this is create a new spotlight so we're going to go to create lights spotlight now if like me you've left your projector in the center of the room it makes it quite easy to position the spotlight so we need it to be within this projector into the bit that we hollowed out earlier so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to change to a different view I'm going to use the side view and I'm going to rotate the light so that it's facing off and I'm just going to rotate it part of the way I'm not going to do it all of the way because I can then move into the channel box and I can see that I've rotated it 68 degrees on X so if I can just type 19 there I'll know that I'll be pointing straight up which is what I want I also want to move the light up slightly so it's just kind of protruding from the shape and now I'm going to go back into the attribute editor the next thing we're going to do is we're just going to change the cone angle so at the moment you can see this green cone represents the angle that the light is going to shine it and we want it to look like it's coming out of this cone that we've created within the projector so I'm just going to scroll down a little bit you can see there's a cone angle there and if I just move this slider you'll see that the cone angle changes on the light I can match that up with the projector like that so that's beautiful well I'm also going to change there's something called the penumbra angle and that affects the softness on the edge of the light if you want to see that in action just create a spotlight in a new scene shinier something and change the penumbra angle and you'll see what it does but what I want to do is just type 30 in that box and it'll stop the edge of the light being like a perfectly drawn line it'll kind of fade which is what we're looking for as things stand with this light though it wouldn't be visible in the air it would just if you looked up at the ceiling you can see a circle light but you wouldn't be able to see in the end to do that we need to create a light fog before we do that though we're going to set the color of the light and we're going to check chains up to being kind of a pale blue so I'm just going to mmm where am i want to choose that kind of color so my light wants to be a nice pale blue which is a beautiful I'm also going to add a decay rate to the light because I don't want this to necessarily like this you know I want it to only go so far and decay rate means that the light dies off over distance so I'm going to add a quadratic decay rate which is perfect for what I need here and it will just mean that the further away from the project of the light gets the more it dies off which works really well with the fog that we're going to create so now we'll add the fog you need to scroll down a little bit to the light effects section we're going to open that and you can see that there is a light fog option before we change anything though before we create the fog we're going to make sure that the intensity of it's up a little bit so we're going to turn that to five and press Enter and then we're going to click on the button to add a light fog to the light and then I'm going to add a slightly darker blue color to the fog like that and that is the light fog complete so the preview in Maya doesn't really show the light off so what we're going to do is going to go back into my perspective view I'm just going to frame up a shot with the projector in view so something like that I think and then what I'm going to do is just test render the frame to see what this glow looks like so here we go so there you go that's the the effect we've created so you can see that there is now a blue light and the idea is that that light is part of the the holographic projection has been created again I'm just going to turn this off so you can now get a better feeling of why the room so dark because as a projection happening that's quite bright in the scene which is what we wanted so that is another light place and we're making some damn fine progress yes okay I'm gonna close that window so now that we've made that beautiful light shine at the projector the solar system itself looks a bit crap so we're going to add some effects to that to make that look better as well so the first one I do is just click on the song and then we're going to open the hypershade any second now come on hypershade you speedy mofo there we go right I'm just going to clean my work area and then this little icon here graphs the materials on the selected object if I click it it will show me the material and it's currently on the song and here you can see the options for the Sun material now at the moment in your property editor you're currently using something that's called the look depth preview which comes with a lot of the most common options but not all of them so we're going to change that by changing to which one is it that one so toggle between lock dev view and attribute editor views if I give that a click basically this window change little bit we've got some more options if we scroll down we're now going to get a special effects section when I expand that and there's a glow intensity and I'm going to turn the glow intensity up to 0.5 okay now this is a post-processing effect that's going to make the Sun look supay so if I do another test render of that particular scene you'll now see that the Sun itself is looking much better because it now looks like it's emitting its own light which gives them much nicer effect okay so we've now got a very cool looking Sun but there is one small issue with it and that is because this glow effect is post-processing it doesn't actually emit any light so it looks like it is but we should be able to see on the sides of the planets that light from that that's only sitting it but it's not it's only being created by that point light that we created earlier so what we're going to do is create a new light and add it to the center of the Sun and we're going to use that to make it look like the sun's creating some light okay so what we're going to do to do that is going to create a new point light so create lights point light now we've created that and it's selected by default and what we're going to do is with that selector we're going to shift select the Sun and I'm going to press P and that parents the light to the Sun you may get this error here and I don't know what that's all about but ignore it because it doesn't really hurt anything so now that light is parented to the Sun and we've still got the light selected so if we go into the channel box you'll see that it's at a position of minus 24 on translate Y and that's because it's taking its position from the Sun so if we set that back to 0 I make if you've moved things at all set them all all three of these back to 0 that moves the light to the center of the Sun which is where we wanted it to be which is very handy okay so that's ok we can now go into the attribute editor menu and just change some of the attributes of this Sun so the color needs to be kind of yellow we need an intensity of about 2.5 which will seem very bright but that's because there's no decay rate on it yep ladder quadratic decay rate and now if you zoom in on the planets you can see that that light is just hitting the size of the planets which is really good and you look really nice when you render it and if you go further through my exercises and when you start animating and rendering that that looks superb ok there's one final thing we need to do to this light to make it look really sexy we're going to add a lens flare which kind of makes a lot there's a mark on the lens of a camera which is a subtle effect but it makes everything look a bit more sexy and expensive so we'll make sure that the light is still selected if it's not still selected you can always go into wireframe and select it ok but I've got it selected and then what we need to do is if you scroll down a little bit there's a light effects section and we're looking for the light glow we're going to click on the check box next to light glow and that will create a new node an optical FX node and it's dead easy to sell this you just going to put a tick in the box for lens flare and make sure the glow type and the halo type set to none and that will create a really nice lines where to be able to see it well you might have to zoom in quite far quite close on your song but if we render that now come on son there you go and you can see these little spots here are the lens flare and again these look nice when they render but even better when the animator them in because they kind of move around the bits well so that's the song complete and I think it looks damn sexy close that okay now that the scenes started to come together we're going to take a look at the render settings and that means that when we're rendering everything is going to be a little bit higher quality because women change some settings so let's get to the render settings window it's this icon here which is the display render settings window we'll give that a click and there are a few things that we want to change what we're going to do first we're going to go into the Maya Maya software tab we're going to change something in here so by default the overall quality is set to custom which i think is maya code for crap so we're going to change custom to intermediate which is not the best but it's a good trade-off between quality and render time and then we're just going to scroll down a little bit further and we're going to turn on ray tracing ray tracing handles things like reflections high-end shadows where the light reflects back refract bounces things like that so it's really good to have that turned up and yeah that's the thing that in a second is going to make the projector look really sexy because that's now going to start reflecting then we're going to go into the common tab and we're going to scroll down until we find the presets by default is set HD 540 which is okay but it would be a little bit better if it was at HD 720 you can go higher if you want but for my purposes 720 is enough and then click on close now frame up a beautiful shot of your room I want to get my crates and chuffing so I'll try something like that do a test render and see what it looks like so you should notice straight away that the window is a lot bigger but also that it's taking much longer to render and that's because it's doing a lot more complicated stuff with it it's working a lot more out straightaway you can see that the reflection on D the projector is working it's actually a little bit over the top I think that's more to do with the placement of my light than the reflect the reflectivity being too high but I could turn that down or I can reposition the light you can see everything is looking much nicer now as well so I think what I will do so I'm just going to move this light if I can select light so I want that light and I'm just going to try and move it off-center like that I'm just going to render again now just to see if the reflections on the projector a little bit less ridiculous any second now yes oh that's nicer so it's still very shiny but the colors coming through and it's got that polished plastic lock that was going for and don't forget to get a real idea of having scenes going to lock darker to turn the gamma correction off and that give you a nice overall look so very moody very gritty but very sexy okay so what we're going to start doing now is adding some final details to this room so we're going to make it look a little bit more beautiful for rendering and we're going to learn a few more skills along the way so the first I'm going to do is put in like a giant window so the idea behind this room is this for some reason in orbit of Earth I don't know why just look cool and we're going to put a window in one wall so that we can see out and we can see earth in the background so in order to do that we're going to select and the room we're going to open up the good old modeling toolkit again I'm going to put it into face selection mode and we're going to make sure that we select that face yeah so this one here is going to represent our window the next thing we're going to do because once create a window frame is we're going to scroll down and we're going to choose to bevel and you'll see it's not worked our particular webs is going too far but it is now put a frame around the edges like that which is what we wanted to do but it's a little bit over the top so we're just going to take the fraction down to about noir point to leather so that now gives us a frame the only other issue with it really is they set back you see so I'm just going to select that one face there and then with my move tool I'm just going to pull that back so it's level right now and what that's done is put a frame on and it means that we can set this bit back a little bit to create kind of an indented window in fact what I'm going to do is I'm just going to move it slightly inside the room just to really exaggerate what's happening with doing this you can see that I've kind of done the reverse of what was just happening so it's now slightly inside the room okay the next step is to create an extrude so that we can push that face back and create the window itself now you can either click on the extrude button here or if you're a keyboard shortcut lover you can press ctrl + E and that will create an extrude it will create this Universal manipulator tool and you can see that there are scale options there are move options and you can click on this to rotate but what I always like to do after I've done an extruded just switch to the tool I want which in this case is the move tool and I'm going to move that face back a little bit to create kind of a indented window like that and then once you finished putting it back into object selection mode and the next step we're going to have a look at creating a transparent material to represent or window main okay so we're going to create the glass we're obviously back into text in here so we need the hypershade open again I'm going to create a new material so clear the work area and we're going to create a blend because this is going to be reflective in shining I'm going to call it glass M and then I am going to give it a color I'm going to give it a tinge of kind of blue so kind of a a cartoony feel to window what you're not going to be able to see because I'm gonna take the transparency almost down to the right so you can see this is the effect that it gives so it's quite quite see-through and then we just need to apply that material in the same way that we want any other material so I'm going to put this into face mode so I'm right-clicking here choosing face and choosing the face that I want to apply it to then I'm right-clicking on my glass material and I'm going to assign that material to selection like so now that creates a really cool glass material so for the time being we can close the hypershade again and if you want to you can create a quick test render I'll be seen with the glass in place to see what sort of affair that's having you won't be able to see much because there's nothing outside of the window yet to see but you should be able to see that it's black and that there are reflections on it so there you go that's my glass and at the moment it just looks canned like a mirror but once we put something outside the window that is lit it will look very cool okay so now we've got the window we need to have something outside of the window so we can look at it so we're going to create kind of a bigger earth so in order to do this we're going to create a sphere we're going to move it outside the room we're going to make it super big a bit further away from the room like that and that's kind of it for this step I might just move it slightly over so we can see just one side of it like that maybe move it down a little bit as well so I'm just thinking about when I'm looking through the window what am I going to be able to see what's going to look interesting so I'm quite happy with that so the next step we need to think about texturing this so we're going to texture the earth now we've already created a new texture which is on the projection of the earth which is they're very small and we could just reuse that but you're actually going to do something a little bit more high-end to this one so that kind of means that we can't use the original shader that we've created but we don't want to start from scratch so what we'll do is we'll create a duplicate of the original Earth shader and we will and make changes to that one so we'll leave the original alone before I do that though I have got to do something I need to rename then the spheric reads I'm going to call it big planet like that and then I need my hypershade open okay so the first thing you need to do is locate your earth tech so I'm just going to select that for now don't click on edit duplicate and I'm going to choose shading Network so you can see now I've got earth n and earth m1 so earth M one is the copy I'm just going to rename that to Big Planet M right now so I'm not change anything about this material yet but I'm going to come back to it later and I'm just going to assign a big planet M to the earth there it is so that's looking kinda cool now we need to do is light the planet so if we look in this scene at the moment you can see that the planet is it looks like it's lit but once we render it you can't really see it because our lights have got decay rates on them so what we're going to do is we're going to create a new light just to light the the earth from one side to look like it's kind of the being lit by the Sun so it's create lights spotlight and now I've got my move tool um I'm gonna move this light out here so it's lighting the side of the planet okay what I want to do is I'm just going to rotate this around slightly but I'm going to have to increase the cone angle so I'm into the attribute editor now so that kind of covers the whole planet well you want to be careful here to make sure you only get the plan if you go too far it's going to start hitting your room you see that's now hitting my room so I need to make sure I don't go too far just trying to hit only the planet and I'm going to turn up the pin number angle as well just to keep it soft if I can so now when we go inside the room and we look through that window we should be able to say that the planet is being lit from one side so hopefully kinda looks like it's maybe just becoming morning somewhere in the world so when this family finishes rendering there we go that's the effect we're going for so you can see the earth is being lit from one side and it looks quite nice so I'm happy with that we'll move on to the next step so the next step is to add a little bit more detail to the shader for the big planet and that's really going to make this look really really cool it's also gonna introduce you to poor Maps so because we were working on the shading we're going to go back into the hypershade and we're going to select what will click a view first I'm going to select the big planet material now what we're going to do first of all is we're just going to add a glow to the planet and that's going to give the effect that it's got like an atmosphere like our own client house so we're going to scroll down we're going to click on special effects I'm going to put a glow intensity of Northpoint 5 we're going to test render this in a minute if it's too bright we're going to turn it down it's not bright enough we'll turn it back up what we also need to do now is make a new connection so we're going to add a bump map to this so in order to do that we're going to find where it says under the common material attributes home mapping and we're going to click on the checkered box that's going to ask us what we want to connect we're going to choose file and then that's going to take us through to this file no so here you can see bump depth now we're going to need to come back here in a minute and I'm not to show you how to do that but before we can change the bond depth we need to attach an image to be the bump map and all the bump map is is a black and white image well it's grayscale image anything that's black doesn't appear to be raised up anything that's white appears to be very reasonable and anything in between the berries so I'm just going to click on this little arrow chappie here which will take me through to the connection which is the final node and from within the textures folder I'm gonna choose earth bump you can see that's the type of image I'm talking about and as soon as I assign that you can see straight it away that this preview here is now showing a little bit of um penis which is what I wanted to happen okay so now what I need to do is just within this PB I'm going to change the vendor to make sure it's on viewport 2.0 because the legacy default viewport doesn't support both apps I'm just going to make sure I can see the planet there it is you can see straight away what the bumpiness has done it probably looks too bumpy though so now we need to look at how we refine them um within your work area you're looking for a bump to d1 node you should already be there because we've just created a connection but let's say for some reason it isn't so we'll clear the work area the way to make sure you can find it is click on your big planet material and I'm going to right click and hold and choose graph Network and that then will show up all the different nodes that make up this shader and from there I can click them up on to d1 though and then I can mess around with the bump that thing see as I change the slider it affects how bumpy disappears I'll try something like you're not point three five and now I'm just going to do a test render to see how that's looking and there's the result so I can see that the glow intensity is probably a little bit too high so I think I'm gonna knock that down to not point to but you can see the bumpiness does not look too bad it possibly a little bit strong so I might just not now slightly and I'll knock the glow down and then I'll render we're going to see how that looks okay so the glows possibly still a little bit strong but I'm happy enough with it and I'm happy enough with the the way the bomb map looks as well so that brings us to the end of my introduction to Maya 2016 tutorial following on from this there will be my introduction to animation in Maya 2016 tutorial so if you click the link or follow the link below to move on to that it uses this exact same project so it takes where you are now and we move on to animating cameras within the room animating the planets so it very much builds on this but it is also its own thing so keep that in mind if you have found this particular tutorial useful then I highly recommend subscribing to my youtube channel and the link is on screen you will also notice that there are some other bomb maps and different texture files within the source images folder that you've downloaded so if you want to apply those for instance the bump map on the crate looks quite nice then you should do that as well to continue building on your skills thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Game Dev Academy

Views: 939,368

Rating: 4.9587007 out of 5

Keywords: Maya tutorial, maya tutorial for beginners, maya beginners tutorial, maya 2016 beginners tutorial, maya 2016 tutorial for beginners, learn maya 2016, maya 2016 free tutorial, learn maya 2016 for free, how to use maya 2016, maya 2016 free online course, basics, beginners guide, training, 2017, maya 2017, maya 2017 beginners tutorial, maya 2017 tutorial for beginners

Id: tElsku3aKQI

Length: 108min 16sec (6496 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 23 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/onlinemediatutor]

Hi all. Here is my new Maya 2016 for beginners tutorial. I few weeks ago I posted the written version of this and after such a good response I have also decided to share the video version I have created. I really think that it rivals the paid tutorials (such as Digital Tutors or Lynda) in terms of quality. Your feedback on my work is very welcome - I'm probably done with this tutorial (it's been a mammoth job) but I'll take all suggestions for improvements on board for the next version I create.

I really hope this helps people out in learning the basics of what can be a very daunting piece of software. Good luck!