A part of my job is to model the first half of our clip: the bedroom, stairs and downstairs corridor. The thing about Maya Modeling is that there is no right or wrong way to model an object. You spend most of your time deforming the basic Maya models provided in order to make the models you want. In this web page, I'll explain how I made my models. All the models below are polygon objects.
The House Walls, Ceilings and Floors
The upstairs and downstairs of the house are both modeled with a cube that has been extruded in some areas. The walls in between the rooms are stretched out cubes. The walls' openings were created by negatively extruding and deleting the cubes' faces. The window and door openings in the exterior of the house were created in the same fashion.
During modeling it was a pain to keep going into the cubes, to see what was in the house. In order to overcome this annoyance, back face culling was implemented and then the normals of the house were reversed. Thus you can now see into the house without having to go into the house.
Bed
The mattress, boxsprings and wireframe are cubes. The wheels are cylinders and the wheel supports are deformed cubes. The headboard is a cube that has been extruded at the bottom to create legs and negatively extruded in the front to create a border. The pillow is a stretched out sphere. The blanket is a plane with one section rotated to create the fold over. The remaining sections were rotated around the bed.Lamp
The lamp base and pillar are both cylinders. The lamp shade is a cone that has its top section deleted. The bulb is a sphere and a cylinder that have been combined.
Table
The table top and table legs are all cylinders.
Cellphone
The cellphone is a cube that was subdivided and extruded to make the buttons and negatively extruded to make the screen. The edges of the cellphone base, buttons and screen were then beveled to create rounded edges. Text objects were created to make the button labels and then were combined with the cube object to make the final cellphone object.
Scissors
The rings are toruses and the blades are prisms with the back face extruded. A ring and a blade were combined to make one scissor handle. The handle was then duplicated to make a second handle. The pivot point of each handle was put in the middle of the blade area, so that the scissors can close about the pivot point.
Balloon
This was actually procedurally generated. In order to make a balloon: 1) A NURBS curve is made via control vertices. 2) Rotate the NURBS curve to produce the balloon but set the rotate options to create a polygon object instead of a NURBS object. This was becoming a bit tedious to do, since every time I wanted to change the balloons shape, I had to repeat the above process again and again. So my group member By George made a MEL script to do the work for me. It took locators (as a substitute for the control vertices) as the inputs. So if I needed to change the balloon shape, I would just change the position of the locators and run the program to make a new balloon.
Ball & Paper
The ball is a sphere and the paper is a plane.
Funnel, Pipe & Supports
To make the funnel and pipe: 1) Make a NURBs curve following the path you want the pipe to cover. 2) Extrude a circle along it and set the options so that the resulting object is a polygon. 3) Pull and expand the top edge of the pipe to make a funnel shape. To make the supports: 1) Take a Maya polygon pipe and change the shape so that the above pipe can go through it without collision. 2) Take a bottom face of the Maya pipe and extrude it down and then extrude it sideways to make it's base.
Stairs
A cube was subdivided and then extruded incrementally to make the stairs. Each step had its top portion extruded and beveled so it could get a nose. The banister is a cube that was extruded and beveled. The banister pillars are stretched out cubes.
Doors
The basic shape is a cube, the wood work was made by negatively extruding the cubes' faces and then positively translated the middle faces of the negatively extruded faces. The door handle is a sphere and a cylinder combined together. The keyhole was made by first subtracting a tiny sphere and tiny cylinder from the door. Then the keyhole faces were negatively extruded and deleted.
Closet
To make a closet panel, take a cube and subtract it with a smaller cube to make a cube with a hole in it. Inside the hole put cubes on top of cubes. Select those cubes and rotate them simultaneously to get the slotted effect. Duplicate the panel three times and put the panels side by side. The handles are again just spheres combined with cylinders.
Picture Frames
All the frames are just hollowed out cubes like the closet panels. The picture is just a smaller cube placed inside the frame. The stand for the first picture frame is cube with one of its edge translated. The top of the stand was then deleted.
Mirror
The mirror was made the same way as the picture frames.
Book
It is a cylinder combined with a cube. It sides are then negatively extruded to create a book shape.
Shelves & Books
The books are just different scaled versions of the previous book model described. The shelves are just cubes.
Windows
Two cubes with the middle faces negatively extruded.
Here are links that show my previous models: Initial Models Finished Models for Project Presentation 1 Finished Models for Project Presentation 2
Another part of my job is to animate some of the downstairs objects.
The mousetraps needed to set each other off like dominoes. In order to do this I key framed each mouse trap so that first the pin and bar would release. Then the mousetraps would flip over and hit the next mousetrap in the path. In the end the last mousetrap flips over and hits the power strip connected to the computer.
The rocket animation was procedurally generated, By George wrote the MEL script for this. The rocket needs to first hit the string on the catapult and thus release it. The rocket then randomly flies around the kitchen and then hits the study floor. The input for the MEL script was the object to be moved (in this case the rocket), the starting frame of the animation, the ending frame and how many nodes to make the rocket path. The starting and ending positions were hard-coded in the script. The restrictions on the rocket path were also hard-coded in the script. The link to the animation above only shows the rocket animation in the scene.
The catapult needed to be released when the rocket hit its string. The ball needed to hit the car and then disappear. The catapult arm and ball were first key framed together when the arm is released. Afterwards the ball pivot point was changed. So in order to hit the car it just needed to be rotated. This part of the animation was also key framed.