Lemon Slice Tutorial: Part 1 - Making The Basic Model 

For my first tutorial I will be teaching you how to make a basic lemon model in Maya. It may seem like a boring enough first project for starters but I eventually hope to give it an animation that makes it appear as it has just been cut in half. So, fire up your Maya programs and lets get started! For the first part of the tutorial I will show you how to create the basic shape of the lemon. 

First things first, download this image of a lemon. This image will be used as the basic template of the shape of our lemon. 

Next up why want to add the image of the lemon as a reference image, to do this select the front plane firstly (circled in blue) and then click on "View" (circled in red). Once that is done, scroll down to the tab called "Image plane" and import the image of the lemon I posted above. 

Here is an image of the reference lemon in place on the plane, if the image is far too big compared to mine you can always re size it. 

For the next step you want to add a sphere shaped polygon to the project by getting one from the the polygons tab. A sphere is the most easy to shape and mold into the lemon shape as seen in the image. 

Using the view plane again you can get a better look at how you can mold the lemon into the image shape. You should also click on the "X-Ray Box" (which would be circled in red but I unfortunately circled the wrong icon, my apologies, the x-ray box is a bit further down.) as this will allow you to see the object in a better view compared to the image. 

Using the horizontal and vertical planes (or arrows as I call them) you can mold the object to better fit the shape of the lemon. Please remember that the image of the lemon is only there for reference and the object itself does not have to be 1:1 to the image. 

Once you have a size that you think is close enough to the shape of the lemon, right click the object (hold right click) and select the section called "Vertex" This will allow you to fine tune the shape of the object by highlighting and dragging certain vertexes you have selected. This can be a very strange and quite frankly annoying thing to get good with but after a little bit of practise your lemon should be very close to the shape of the source image. 

Another useful tip when using the Vertex Tool, once you have selected the vertexes you wish to tune, pressing "W" on your keyboard will allow you to fine tune them in a different way while pressing the "R" key will allow you to go back to the default way of doing them. 

And we are done! It really wasn't that hard was it? Maya take a bit of getting used to but after some practise of messing around with the vertexes it shouldn't be that hard. That about wraps things up for this tutorial, for the next one I will show you how to apply a texture to the object and how we can split it in half. Until next time. 

Maya's U.I.

Before I begin my first tutorial via Maya, I thought I would take you through a brief walk through on some of the features of the U.I. (User Interface). 

Say hello to your new best friend! So, I'm not exactly sure on how to take you through this tour, I'm still getting to grips with the program after a few basic tutorials but I think that if I use red circles in some pictures it might help us explain the various features of the U.I. 

What you can see circled in this picture is known as "The Shelf". The shelf is the back done of Maya as it contains all the useful tools needed to use the program such as placing polygons and sculpting.  The real power of shelves, however, is that you can create custom shelves, and then make tools or command shortcuts that are quickly accessed from there with a single click. You can see I have the "Polygons" section opened which I will now use to place a basic sphere. 

See? It's that easy. The shelf is the backbone of Maya and will most likely be used the most if your new to the program. 

The next section is circled are called "The Quick Layout Buttons". The Quick Layout Buttons let you switch between useful panel layouts in a single click. This comes in handy if you want a more technical view of the object you are rendering such as a view from the sides, front, bottom and top. Another helpful to access a quick view of one of the buttons is to press the space bar, doing so will grant you a view like this,

Pressing the space bar again will reset the view back to normal. The Quick Layout Button's are another essential part of Maya. They allow the user to see if an object is asymmetrical in appearance and also allow them to fine tune there objects more accurately in terms of detail. Now I would like to talk about camera controls for a bit. When I first started Maya I struggled to get to grips with the programs camera, it just wouldn't work how I wanted it. But, after a view tutorials on the Internet I learned that its as easy as holding ALT on your keyboard. When alt is held and the left mouse button is clicked, it allows you to rotate the camera. With alt is held and the right mouse clicked, it lets you zoom the camera in and out on your object. When alt is held and the middle mouse button (scroll wheel) is clicked it allows the camera to be moved side to side and up and down on a plane. For now this will conclude a brief intro the programs U.I. The reason why I haven't went into detail on other parts of the U.I is because I haven't started using them yet. Once I use them I will cover there function and feature on any more tutorial posts. I would also give advice on practising your camera work as it can be a bit funky to control at first glance.For my next blog post I will cover how to make a basic lemon in Maya. It may not seem like an exciting project at first but I will eventually show you how to apply an animation to the lemon making it look like it cuts in half. 

A Short History Of Maya

Firstly, I would like to say sorry for not keeping to the schedule of my posts that I promised in my last blog post. Due to some college circumstances I had to miss my promised time and will have to change my schedule from posts on the days I said to "Two Posts A Week At Random Times". I hope you understand. But alas, welcome to my second post where I will give you a some what short but detailed history Of Maya. Autodesk's new Maya program had its first stable release in July 26 2016. Maya was originally a next-generation animation product based on code from The Advanced Visualiser by Wavefront Technologies, The code was ported to IRIX and animation features were added, the porting project codename was Maya. Walt Disney Studios took up an interest in Maya back when they began production on a new  project called "Dinosaur". Disney requested that the User Interface of the application be customisable so that a personalised work flow could be created. This was a particular influence in the open architecture of Maya, and partly responsible for it becoming so popular in the industry. The tool is mostly used for  generation of 3D assets for use in film, television, game development and architecture. As well as generating objects it can also animate them and add realistic particle effects such as dynamic hair and fur for example.

Maya is also equipped with its own cross-platform scripting language, called Maya Embedded Language (Or, MEL for short.)  A lot of you may be asking for pricing on Maya which I will now inform you of. Firstly if any of you are considering trying before buying, Maya comes with a one month free trial. After entering your email address, Autodesk will then send you a product activation code along with a link to the download of the software. Once your free month is up, the software will no longer function and instead give you prices for buying of the software. Some students in different courses across the world can also access a three year free subscription to Maya 2017 (the newest version). After these three years are up the same thing occurs with the free product. As for prices, a monthly subscription to Maya will cost 200 euros per month. 1 year 1600 euros, 2 years 3040 euros and finally for 3 years 4320 euros, it really makes you think that those students who get it for free for three years sure are lucky. The price of Maya may be a scary thing for some people but at the end of the day Maya is probably the best tool for 3-D objects. Here is a list of some of the films that use Maya: 

• Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 
• Hugo 
• Real Steel 
• Rise Of The Planet Of The apes

As you can see most of these films are award winning and well praised for there special effects. It really goes to show that the price may be steep but it's worth it in the end. That about wraps things up for this blog post, for the next one I will take you through a brief tutorial on how to create a lemon being cut in half via Maya.

Post 1: An Introduction And What I hope To Achieve.

First of all I would like to welcome you to my blog. I am a college student attending GMIT in Galway and have recently gained an interest in modelling and animating objects via autodesk's new program, Maya. To briefly sum up Maya in simple terms, it is a piece of software used to model, render and animate 3-D objects. These objects can then be used in many different forms of media (such as movies), but I will talk more in more detail about Maya's function in my next post. I'm using this post to serve as a intro too what I hope too achieve in this blog. The main point of this blog serves as a way I can express on how someone who is new to autodesk Maya, like me, finds the program. I shall be posting my work on projects I do onto this blog as well, beginning with the projects I done for a presentation I did on Maya (which got me interested in it in the first place). In terms of schedule, I am hoping to post twice per week with a new blog entry on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My next blog entry will be a lot more long and have much more detailed information on Maya, including pictures and videos of the software in use. By the end of the sixth week I hope I will have enough experience in Maya to show my viewers how much you can progress in such little time.