Week 5 - Autodesk Maya - Introductions to Blueprints and Destructive Workflow

 

Week 5 - Introduction to Blueprints and Destructive Workflow

In Maya this week, we learned the importance of deleting history when we're done with a particular tool. If the history isn't deleted, it can cause several issues down the line, with the biggest (in my opinion) being laggy software. I've had this experience myself where I've used a Boolean operation several times in a row and forgotten to delete the history and Maya because slow and hard to work with, no matter how good the hardware is that's running it. This is what's known as "Destructive Workflow", so you need to prevent this to prevent the issues.

You can also add image references to Maya and use these as blueprints for a model, this is done by changing your view, in the mode where you see all of your view ports, then selecting view>image plane>import image on the viewport you want it to show up on. You can also freeze this by adding a layer to the image and ticking the last box in the assigned layer until it displays the letter "R", now the image cannot be selected or moved, you can turn it invisible by ticking the same box until it displays the letter "T".

Using what I have learned, I was tasked with modelling a PSP console using blueprints and avoiding a destructive workflow. I have included an image of the wireframe view and the finished model with materials (not rendered):

One note I have made is that whilst it does have materials applied to it, none of the buttons are actually part of the console itself, however, I did this because it's just a showcase model and not actually going to part of anything. It would also make the topology even harder to fix and potentially cause so many NGONs that fixing them would be a nightmare. 

Overall, I think the design looked good and I think it definitely looks like it has good edge-flow. I think it turned out well, but like I said previously, I could've just spent that extra time combining the buttons to the actual console and creating an edge-flow that catered to this, and I think this would've made it look much better and more professional.