Create polygonal objects

- [Instructor] When you model in Maya, typically you'll start off with a very simple object and then add detail and refine that object into the shape you want. So when we work with polygonal objects we usually start with what's called a primitive. And that's just a simple object such as a cube or a sphere. Now we can create these in one of two places. We have a create menu which allows us to create just about any type of object but we do have one for polygonal primitives. And we also have those mirrored in the polygonal modeling shelf.

So here I have a lot of my polygonal primitives that we can use for modeling. Now I'm going to work with the menus and in fact, I'm going to go ahead and tear off this menu. So if you press on the little dotted line at the top then you can tear that off and we can take a look at that. Now one of the most important options on this menu are the ones down here and interactive creation is probably the most important. Now this allows us to either create it interactively or just have Maya create it by scratch.

So if I turn this off and say press sphere. It'll just create a sphere based upon the parameters that you give it. So, if I were to say click here on my options you'll see that by default this sphere has a radius of one and this number of divisions along the axis and the height. So if I wanted to, I could create say a sphere with the radius of three and hit create. And that will create that particular sphere.

Now if you want to be a little bit more interactive and maybe a little bit more precise, we can use interactive creation. So I'm going to go ahead and hit delete here and let's turn on interactive creation. So I'm going to go ahead and select sphere and then it'll ask me to drag on the grid. So I can drag anywhere on the grid and drag out that particular sphere. Now once this sphere is created we can go back and change any one of our creation parameters. So I can leave this selected and go over to my attribute editor.

And if we dig down into our little tabs here we should have one called polySphere. And this gives me all the same attributes that we had here. So if I were to click on this, you'll see that I've got a radius, I've got divisions and so on and all of that is right here. So if I want to, I can change the radius after it's been created. I can change the number of divisions along the axis as well as the height and then I can also change where the main axis of the object is.

I'm going to go ahead and select this object and delete it and let's go ahead and took a look at some more objects. So, I've got my cube which is another very important polygonal object. And we can certainly create it by itself or we can do interactives. So when we do an interactive creation of a cube we left click on the option and then we drag out the base by left clicking and dragging. And then we let go and then we left click and drag again to bring up the height.

Now once we do that we can still go over into our attribute editor, find the node for that, which in this case is called polyCube1. And then we can again change our creation parameters and we can also change our subdivisions as well. Now another way to do this is to go into the channel box and if we scroll down here, you'll see that we have under inputs, the same node. It's called polyCube1 and this is all those same values. So if I want to, I can change those here without having to go into the attribute editor.

And so I could say select subdivision's depth and either type in a number, say two, or I can use my virtual slider by highlighting the name and middle clicking and dragging left to right to add in more subdivisions. In fact, if I wanted to, I could left click and drag, highlight all these and then I can add or subtract detail as needed. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this and let's take a look at some more of these. So we have a cylinder, very similar to the cube in that we drag out the base and then the height.

Now one of the nice things about the cylinder is that we have a number subdivisions in caps and if we increase this above a certain amount we could create what's called a round cap. So if I click this on, then we get something that looks a little bit like a capsule or a vitamin pill or something like that. And then in addition to all this we have a cone and again the cone also has a round cap that we can create. So you can create basically an upside down ice cream cone.

We have a torus which is basically, you drag it out to set the radius and then the second drag is that diameter. And we can create a very nice donut shape and there are a lot more of these. We have what's called a disk which is actually new in Maya 2018 and we have a bunch of others. Platonic solids, pyramids, prisms, pipe and so on. Actually pipe is very useful. So let's take one more look at that.

So I'm going to go ahead and select pipe, left click and drag to set the radius. Then we pull up the height just like we do with the cylinder and then we can drag the thickness of that pipe. And this is really great for creating all sorts of different types of objects. So now that we have a polygonal object created we can then modify that into what we want. But remember, when you create a polygonal object you can create it on first click or you can create it interactively which gives you a little bit more control over how the object looks.