Fuckin' Chairs, How Do They Work?!?!

So, I made a chair in Maya.



I've been using tutorials on Youtube to re-learn how to use a 3D modeling program, and it's weird how many things are coming back to me. Like at on point, the dude I was listening to/watching said "don't forget to set the group to center pivot!" and I had a flashback of one of my teachers from a few years ago saying the same thing in her distinctive, high-pitched voice and accent.

I'm also remembering the things that screwed me up last time around: Things like how important it is to work in the center of the ground plane. Objects being in the center mean that you can scale and duplicate them easily. If you work all messy like I tend to, duplication is a matter of guesswork and frustration. The really kickass thing about 3D modeling as opposed to digital painting is duplication. You spend hours working on a spaceship engine, for instance, and you spend two seconds duplicating it a half-dozen times when it's done.

This chair is made of stretched cubes, and none of the edges are trimmed to fit properly; they're all just mushed together, so I still have a ways to go. On the plus side, getting to patio chair level skill took me a few weeks last time around, so I guess I'm ahead of the game.

Teaching Myself Maya....

I've been doing some research, and it appears that a certain facility in Autodesk Maya is important in the entertainment design field. So I downloaded a trial version and have been watching tutorial videos on Youtube narrated by a delightful British fellow. That's Stephanie's computer on the left, running the tutorials, and mine on the right, running Maya. In between is a huge container of black pepper, because my "office" is also our dining room table.

I took a 3D modeling class way back when I was still an Industrial Design major, and it while it wasn't Maya, the interface was pretty similar. So the experience so far has been sort of like returning to the home of someone I wasn't really friends with and seeing that they've bought all new furniture.

I'm tagging this "3D Modeling", and in the coming days and weeks I'll be posting the sad, mangled models I can scrounge together, hopefully followed by some models that look at least a little better.